For the Australian who thinks they don't want them here. For the person who calls them Indians. And for every Sikh Australian who already knows they belong.
First, Let's Be Clear About Who We're Talking About
Sikhs are not Hindus. Sikhs are not "Indians." These are not matters of opinion they are matters of documented theology, history, and political identity, and conflating them is either ignorance or agenda.
Sikhi the faith of the Sikhs was founded by Guru Nanak Dev Ji in 1469 in the PANJAB region. It is a distinct, monotheistic faith. It has its own scripture the Guru Granth Sahib its own language written in Gurmukhi script, its own code of conduct, its own places of worship, and its own sovereign political tradition. Sikhi was founded 500 years ago when Guru Nanak walked the South Asian subcontinent teaching that all paths lead to one God, all people are equal, and each of us can experience freedom through loving and serving others.
Sikhi explicitly and categorically rejects the Hindu caste system. Guru Nanak rejected Brahminical authority. The Guru Granth Sahib the living scripture contains the writings of Muslim and Hindu saints alongside the Sikh Gurus precisely because Sikhi recognises truth across all traditions, but belongs to none of them. It is not a branch of Hinduism. It never was. Calling a Sikh a Hindu is the equivalent of calling a Catholic a Jew because both traditions trace roots to the same geographic region.
The Khalsa the sovereign body of initiated Sikhs was declared by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, firing the Sikh imagination with the belief that it was their God-given right to rule PANJAB. In 1801, Maharaja Ranjit Singh was crowned king of a Sikh kingdom in PANJAB one of the most formidable independent kingdoms on earth before British conquest.
That kingdom was real. That sovereignty was real. It did not end because Sikhs ceased to be a distinct people. It ended because the British Empire had tricks where guns failed.
When Partition divided PANJAB in 1947, no Sikh state was created. The land was split between the new nations of Pakistan and India without meaningful Sikh consent. “This was important because it led to questions concerning the Sikh identity, the Sikhs themselves not having a homeland,” said Indira Prahst, an instructor in anthropology and sociology at Langara College.
Sikhs globally now live as what scholars describe as a 'nation without a state' navigating a de-territorialised existence while the claim to a PANJABI homeland remains very much alive and unresolved.
So when someone says "Sikhs are Indians" they are repeating the political position of the state that suppressed Sikh sovereignty. They are doing the work of erasure, whether they know it or not.
Two Sets of Values That Were Made for Each Other
Now here is something that might surprise the Australians who has been told Sikhs are foreign, different, incompatible with Australian culture.
They are not. The values at the core of Sikhi and the values at the core of Australian identity are not just compatible they are in many ways identical. And that is not a coincidence. Both traditions were forged by people who worked hard land, who rejected the idea that birth determines your worth, who believed in standing up for the person next to you regardless of who they are, and who understood that the measure of a community is how it treats the people at the bottom of the pile.
Let us lay them side by side.
A Fair Go. The foundational Australian value, the idea that every person deserves an equal chance regardless of where they came from or what family they were born into. In Sikhi, this is Ik Onkar one God, one creation, one humanity. Guru Gobind Singh taught: “manas ki jat sabhe eke paihcanbo, recognise all of mankind as a single caste of humanity.” Guru Nanak abolished the priestly class. He said no person stands closer to God by birth. The langar the free community kitchen was invented specifically to make Brahmin and untouchable sit on the same floor and eat the same food. A fair go, codified in faith 500 years before Australia was a country.
Hard Work. The Australian identity was built on the myth and often the reality of the worker who earns their keep, who doesn't take handouts, who builds with their hands. In Sikhi this is Kirat Karni honest earnings, labour with dignity. To work and earn by the "sweat of the brow," to live a family way of life, and practice truthfulness and honesty in all dealings is a fundamental part of Sikhi. In Sikhi, all forms of honest labour are respected, whether one works in the fields, the marketplace, or intellectual pursuits. The focus is on putting in effort without expecting personal benefit, while maintaining fairness and equality. Sikhs are encouraged to avoid laziness and exploitation, upholding a strong work ethic that ensures dignity for all. Sikh hawkers rode thousands of kilometres through the Australian outback on horseback selling goods on credit to farmers who had nothing. They did not ask for charity. They worked.
Mateship. Australia's most sacred social value, the idea that you show up for people, that you don't leave someone behind, that the bloke next to you is your responsibility. In Sikhi this is Sewa selfless service combined with Vand Chakna, the obligation to share with those in need. A Sikh is expected to contribute at least 10% of their income Dasvandh to people in need. Not suggested. Expected. And beyond that 10%, Sikh volunteers drive through the night to flood zones, set up mobile kitchens in disaster areas, load trucks and drive to remote communities cut off by rain. That is not charity as performance. That is mateship as spiritual obligation.
Standing Up for the Underdog. Australians love a battler and despise a bully. The ANZAC legend is built on men who stood up even when the odds were impossible. In Sikhi, this is encoded in the concept of the Sant-Sipahi the saint-soldier and the Khalsa's founding mission to protect the persecuted regardless of their faith. Guru Gobind Singh set the mission clearly, the Khalsa exists to protect and serve all the peoples of the world. When the Khalsa starts serving only the needs of a few, it has failed its duty. The ninth Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji, gave his life not for Sikh rights but for the right of Kashmiri Hindus to practice their own faith freely. He died defending people of a different religion because the principle was more important than the community. That is not foreign to Australians. That is exactly what Australians claim to believe.
No Time for Hierarchy. Australians have a deep cultural suspicion of people who think they're better than everyone else the tall poppy instinct, the refusal to bow to class. Sikhi built this into its architecture. Sikhs do not depend on a priest class for any religious functions. There is no priestly hierarchy. Everyone is equal. The Guru Granth Sahib itself compiled by the Gurus includes the writings of Muslim saints, Hindu poets, and so-called untouchables. Their words sit alongside those of the Gurus without distinction. No one is closer to God by birth. No one's prayer is worth more by title. If that doesn't sound Australian, nothing does.
Women as Equals. Australia has fought for this. It is still fighting for it. Sikhi arrived here already. From 1499, women in Sikhi have been regarded as equal with men in every sphere religious, cultural, social, political, and secular. There is no function within Sikhi from which women are excluded. When the first gurdwara in Australia opened in Woolgoolga in June 1968, a Sikh woman was appointed as Granthi reader of the Guru Granth Sahib. This was 1968 in rural New South Wales, where a woman of colour was the spiritual leader of the congregation. Australia was still seven years away from legislating equal pay for women in most industries.
These are not coincidences of compatibility. This is two traditions one built on the PANJAB plain, one built in the bush that arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about what makes a person, and what makes a community worth belonging to.
Two Peoples Who Understand Dispossession
There is a conversation that rarely gets written down, but anyone paying attention in this country can feel it a quiet recognition between two peoples who know what it means to have their sovereignty denied, their identity erased by administrative convenience, and their homeland divided by lines drawn by someone else.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have occupied this continent for at least 65,000 years. Australian Indigenous sovereignty encompasses rights derived from occupation and ownership prior to colonisation and through continuing spiritual connection to land. Indigenous peoples have never ceded their sovereignty. As Wiradjuri woman Jenny Munro has said: "It means we have a right to this land. It is our land. We never ceded the right to the land, the sea and the air. We have never given that right away."
Sikhs carry a parallel wound. Their homeland in PANJAB was partitioned without consent. Their holiest site was stormed by a government military in 1984. The pogrom that followed claimed 20,000+ lives. The civil war that Sikhs waged in response a struggle for self-determination against the central government cost an estimated 30,000 lives.
Both peoples know what it means to be told their sovereignty is historical, settled, and no longer relevant. Both know it is none of those things.
The Sikh concept of sarbat da bhala welfare for all of humanity and the Aboriginal understanding of Country as a living relationship of obligation and care are not identical traditions, but they rhyme in ways that matter. Both place collective wellbeing above individual accumulation. Both root spiritual life in land. Both have been misrepresented by states as primitive or extremist when asserting rights that are simply theirs.
This shared understanding has found expression on the ground. Sovereign Sikhs Sydney (@SSSORGAU), personally led a mission to load a truck with food and essential supplies and drive it to Kintore in 2024 a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, over 2,500 kilometres from Sydney, reachable only by unsealed road after flooding had cut the community off from any government supply. No announcement. No grant application. No waiting for official channels that weren't coming. Just a truck, a Sikh group who understood what it meant to be a people the state forgets, and seva as action rather than aspiration. The mission is documented on Sovereign Sikhs' social media at @SSSORGAU.
Two peoples fighting for sovereignty, separated by oceans of history, finding each other in a flooded desert. That is Australia at its most real.
They Were Here Before Most of You
Here is the fact that should stop the loudest voices in the immigration debate cold, many of the Sikh families being told to “go back where they came from” have been in Australia longer than the grandparents of the people telling them to leave.
One documented early arrival was Dabee Singh, who arrived in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1844, working as a shepherd and hut keeper. The first mention of Sikhs in South Australia is Croppo Sing, credited with opening the first bank account with the Bank of South Australia in 1847.
That is 1844 and 1847. The mass migration from Britain that created the dominant demographic story of white Australia was still decades away. The gold rushes were not yet over. The free selection land grants that turned "Crown land" into "family farms" for European settlers across New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland happening simultaneously, on the same soil.
A census from 1861 records around 200 people from PANJAB in Victoria, 20 of them in Ballarat at the epicentre of the gold rush. The Victorian gold rush that funded Melbourne's grand public architecture, its tram networks, its universities Sikhs were there too. Working the same earth. Breathing the same dust.
From the 1860s, Sikh cameleers helped explore and settle Australia's vast arid interior, setting up camel-breeding stations and rest-house outposts throughout inland Australia, creating the permanent supply lines between coastal cities and remote cattle and sheep stations that existed until the 1930s. The interior of this continent the part Australians romanticise as the "real Australia" was mapped and made accessible in part by Sikh labour. The routes those camel trains walked became the roads that trucks now drive.
“Many of the Sikh families living in Woolgoolga today have been here for five or six generations,” a gurudawara volunteer told a visiting journalist. Five or six generations. That is not migration. That is ancestry. That is more generations on Australian soil than most of the people currently running for parliament.
When someone tells a turbaned Sikh to go home, they are telling someone whose family has been Australian longer than theirs to leave a country their family helped build. Let that land.
What Australia Did to Them Anyway And What They Did Next
None of this heritage protected the Sikh community from institutional racism, and the full accounting must be honest.
The White Australia Policy halted family reunification and chain migration that had sustained Sikh enclaves across the country. Sikhs faced denial of naturalisation and certificates of domicile permitting travel were frequently revoked on return, leading to community decline through attrition, aging, and unreturned migrations.
Men built farms and businesses for decades, unable to bring their wives and children. In 1961 there were six Sikh women in Woolgoolga. Six. Creating the first Sikh households, the first Australian-born Sikh children.
For many years RSL clubs denied entry to Sikhs because of their turbans. Not until 1993 did the RSL club at Woolgoolga change its rules to permit headgear worn "by people with genuine religious, racial or cultural conviction." Nineteen ninety-three. These men had been in Australia for generations. They had fought in Australian wars. They still could not walk into a club.
Because at least seven Sikh soldiers left Australian shores to fight in the 1914-1919 war under Australian command. The contingent at Gallipoli included one Sikh infantry battalion and thousands of Sikh mule drivers (who often Indian claims as. their own), who according to historian Peter Stanley “basically kept the forces alive for the eight months of the Gallipoli campaign.”
They fought for the flag that excluded them. They bled in the same mud as the ANZACs. They came home to the same pubs they still weren't allowed into.
What does a community do with that kind of contradiction? If you're a Sikh, apparently, you keep farming, keep cooking for your neighbours, keep showing up, and sixty years later you drive a truck to Kintore in the middle of a flood.
The Foreign Interference Nobody Told You About
Here is where Australians need the full picture, because it directly concerns their national security and the integrity of their own democracy.
The Republic of India has been running active intelligence operations targeting the Sikh community in Australia. This is not speculation. It is documented, confirmed by Australia's own intelligence agencies, and serious.
In 2021, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess announced that the organisation had disrupted a "nest of spies" operating in Australia a group that had "developed targeted relationships with current and former politicians, a foreign embassy and a state police service," and "monitored their country's diaspora community." He declined to name the country at the time.
In 2020, at least four Indian intelligence officers were asked to leave Australia after being caught attempting to gain access to sensitive defence technology and airport security protocols. The number of expulsions put India at par with countries like Russia and China, notorious for breaking protocols overseas.
ABC TV's Four Corners documentary, Infiltrating Australia, India's Secret War, brought forward accounts from Sikh Australians who had been targeted by Indian spy agents. Some reported Indian authorities visiting their families in PANJAB to threaten them over their activism in Australia. One man was slapped with criminal charges in India when he did not stop his Sikh activism here. He was granted a personal protection visa because the Australian Government assessed his life would be in danger if he returned.
The documentary also illuminated the strategy of the Overseas Friends of the BJP (OFBJP) "to infiltrate politics by first getting elected to local government, then state and ultimately federal parliament." The OFBJP operates in Australia but is not registered as a foreign agent, unlike in the United States where such registration is mandatory.
This foreign political interference became physically visible on Australian streets. In February 2021, NSW police stopped a convoy of cars draped in Indian flags attempting to drive past a Gurdwara in the Sydney suburb of Glenwood in an apparent act of intimidation. Shortly after, a group of Sikh men were attacked. The working assumption of police was that the Sikh men were targeted because of their support for the Punjab farmers' protests with their alleged attackers believed to strongly identify with the ruling BJP government.
Canada has named India as the second-most active perpetrator of foreign interference after China using proxies to target the Sikh community with violence, spread disinformation through ethnic media, and support pro-Indian government candidates in democratic elections. Australia has been identified as a target of the same campaign.
The fear within Sikh communities is that gurdwaras their places of worship are being infiltrated by actors aligned with New Delhi. As one community member put it simply: "Anyone can grow a beard and pretend to be a Sikh."
This is the manufactured division. It is real. It is documented. ASIO knows about it. What it requires from Australians is not paranoia but clarity, some of the anti-Sikh sentiment appearing in the broader diaspora community is not organic friction between cultures. It has authors. Some of those authors report to a foreign intelligence service that Australia has already expelled from the country once.
The Sikh community is not the threat. It has never been the threat. The threat is the foreign state using the cover of a large migration wave to pursue sovereignty activists on Australian soil and using the label "Indian community" to hide in plain sight.
Australia's Real Character: The Quiet Majority
But the other truth demands equal space because the loudest voices are never the most numerous.
Documented stories of Sikh hawkers cooking curries with local women and playing cricket with the men stretch across the rural historical record not as exceptional moments of tolerance but as ordinary daily life. When the first gurdwara in Woolgoolga was being built in the 1960s, three non-Sikh Australians joined the committee and helped bring it to completion. Nobody asked them to. They just thought it was right.
When Sikh Volunteers Australia drove nearly 1,200 kilometres to Kintore during the NSW floods to set up a mobile kitchen, after serving, head Singh said: “In times of disasters, I've seen the spirit of the Australians come even better.”
After Sikhs helped a Lismore flood victim, she wrote: “I want to thank you for all the support given to our community. This is the first time in my life that I need help. I usually am the volunteer and giver. I will be forever grateful of your generosity.”
An Australian official describing Sikhs said: “Every time there's an issue, an emergency, and we turn on the television, I see gentlemen with long beards and turbans running around, trying their best to do something. In an increasingly divided world, the work of Sikh’s inspires us to be tolerant and inclusive.”
That is mainstream Australia speaking. Not the fringe. The quiet majority who opens the door, offers the meal, shows up with the hay bale, says thank you, and means it.
The noise of resentment is loud because noise is always loud. Most Australians are capable of recognising a good neighbour when they meet one. And the Sikh community has been exactly that, in every suburb and every flood zone and every drought-stricken paddock, for nearly two centuries.
What They Built In Numbers
Despite exclusion, mislabelling, the White Australia Policy, RSL bans, temple vandalism, and a foreign intelligence service targeting them on Australian soil, Sikhs built this.
Sikh families acquired approximately 60% of banana farms in the Coffs Harbour-Woolgoolga region, spanning 1,255 hectares, producing approximately 20% of Australia's bananas by the late twentieth century.
According to the 2021 census, the Sikh population numbered 210,400 the majority, 91,745, living in Victoria, followed by 47,165 in New South Wales. They are Australia's fastest-growing and fifth-largest religious group.
In 2023 alone, Sikh Volunteers Australia distributed more than 28,000 free meals, prompting the Victorian Government to invest $500,000 in two new food vans and $250,000 for a new kitchen, with a further $700,000 from the federal government.
Sikhs, distributed grocery hampers, heaters, clothing, and 200,000 tonnes of food during 2015 floods. They delivered over 250 pallets of essential goods to those impacted by the devastating Northern NSW floods of March 2022. They stocked a helicopter to reach Kurrajong when roads were gone. They took hay bales to Dubbo and Coonamble when farmers were in drought. When catastrophic bushfires swept Victoria in January 2026, Sikh organisations mobilised immediately, delivering food hampers, water and emergency goods to residents and firefighters across Albury, Shepparton and surrounding regions.
The Gurdwara in Perth serves 4,000 to 5,000 people every Sunday through the langar not Sikh people, all people without government funding, without publicity, since the day it opened its doors.
The descendants of the earliest Sikh settlers in Woolgoolga today include solicitors, teachers, doctors, engineers, town planners, accountants and police officers. The first Sikh woman chaplain now serves in the Australian Defence Forces.
Punjabi is now the thirteenth most spoken language in Australia, with over 130,000 speakers the third most common language spoken at home among recent migrants.
For Every Sikh Australian Reading This
You have been here since before this was a Federation. Your great-great-grandfathers drove camels across the desert that European settlers were still calling unmappable. Your ancestors hawked goods on horseback to farm wives whose husbands would later vote to ban your community from entering the country. You grew the bananas. You fought in the wars. You fed the flood victims. You drove through the night to reach communities the government couldn't reach.
You did all of this while carrying the weight of a sovereignty denied, a homeland divided, a Golden Temple stormed, and a foreign state running operatives through your gurdwaras trying to silence the ones who spoke up.
And you are still here. Still cooking. Still driving. Still building. Still arriving at disasters before the official response does.
The Khalsa was built on Chardi Kala the eternal optimism that rises above circumstances and keeps serving regardless. There is no more Australian disposition than that. The bush has a name for it. It is called mateship. The Guru Granth Sahib has a name for it too. Both mean the same thing: you do not leave people behind.
Guru Nanak put it simply: "I am a stranger to no one and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to all."
That sentence has been the operating principle of the Sikh community in Australia for nearly 200 years.
Be proud of that. It was earned the hard way, on this specific soil, through everything this country threw at you.
And it is yours.
A Closing Word For Everyone
Australia is, at its best, a country of remarkable warmth. Generous in ways that shame its political class. Kind in ways its tabloid press refuses to document.
The anti-immigration noise is generated by a small, loud minority whose understanding of Australian history begins somewhere around 1950 and ignores everything that came before including the people who were already here before their own ancestors arrived.
The foreign interference is real, documented, and being run by a state that has its own reasons for wanting Sikhs to be invisible, assimilated, or afraid.
And the Sikh community, the actual Sikh community, the one with 185 years of Australian roots, the one in the trucks, the kitchens, the flood zones, the banana fields, the courtrooms, the hospitals, the defence force chapels is none of those things. It is not invisible. It is not assimilated. And it is not afraid.
"We are grateful to our forefathers who chose to make their home in this country. We are proud and honoured to be Australians. We are thankful for the privileges that we have enjoyed as Australians and we will fulfil our obligations with great enthusiasm."
They already have. For nearly two centuries. On this land on Country that was never empty, shared now by First Peoples who never ceded it, Sikhs who built it alongside everyone else, and the many others who came after all of them navigating, imperfectly and genuinely, what it means to belong somewhere that is still becoming itself.
Principal sources: Wikipedia Sikhism in Australia, Britannica Khalistan; CBC News; The Lowy Institute; The Diplomat; SBS News; ABC News / Four Corners ‘Infiltrating Australia: India's Secret War'; ASIO Annual Threat Assessment 2021; The Washington Post; Al Jazeera; Turbans 4 Australia; Sikh Volunteers Australia; Victorian Premier's Office; Australian Sikh Support; SBS Punjabi; The Tribune India; WeareSikhs.org; SikhiWiki Important Values in Sikhi; American Humanist Association Sikhi Common Ground; Creative Spirits Aboriginal Sovereignty; ATNS Understanding Sovereignty; The First Gurudwara of Australia; HTAWA/Sikh Association of WA Sikh Anzacs; The Nation; The Diplomat BJP identity politics in Australia; First-person account: President, Sovereign Sikhs Sydney (@SSSORGAU).