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Prelude
to Larger Litigation Dec
19 Rockville, MD -- One of the three cases involving the Guru Nanak Foundation of America (GNFA), the second largest Gurdwara in the Washington D.C. area, went to court on December 19, 2002. This was a "Petition for Contempt" against the Chairman of GNFA, Kashmir Singh, brought by five members of GNFA. The alleged incident of contempt occurred in the early Sunday morning of April 28, 2002, when Kashmir Singh stood by the entrance of the Gurdwara with four hired police officers and gestured to the officers as to which person could come in and which could not. He allegedly also had a few members of the sangat who were already inside removed from the Gurdwara. These actions by Kashmir Singh, if found guilty, would be in contempt of a January 25, 2002 court order in another on-going litigation which stated, "…all parties…are hereby enjoined from threatening, intimidating, assaulting or battering any other party or any member of the GNFA, Inc. and from disrupting or interfering with the right of any member of the Foundation to assemble, worship, and/or participate in the lawful activities of the Foundation…" The lawsuit was filed by five members of GNFA: Joginder Singh, Kamlesh Sardana, Hardev Singh, Amarjeet Kaur, and Jagjeet Kaur. Each of five plaintiffs testified including four other witnesses from that day. All had been members for ten to thirty years. All said the same thing. That Kashmir Singh prevented some people from entering the Gurdwara while allowing others in by using a yes or no gesture to the police, and some persons were thrown out of the Gurdwara. Later that morning, everyone was allowed back into the Gurdwara once Kashmir Singh's lawyer, Richard Walsh, arrived. The strongest testimony for the plaintiffs came from the first plaintiff, Joginder Singh, an elderly man who said he was sitting at a table in the large foyer area of the Gurdwara talking to the second plaintiff Kamlesh Sardana when he saw Kashmir Singh point to the police officers to take them outside. Kamlesh Sardana left, but when Joginder Singh refused, they picked him up by the shoulders and forcefully pushed him out the door. While being forced out, he hit his head severely enough to call for an ambulance. Joginder Singh, who was recovering from a triple-by-pass surgery, also complained of chest pain. He was treated for the head wound and the chest pain and released from the hospital after three weeks and recovered at his son's house for another few weeks. Unlike the rest of the witnesses, Joginder Singh denied any knowledge of the problems at the Gurdwara or the dismissal of the GNFA Raagi Jathaa the previous Friday which led to a sit-in protest by the sangat and ended in the Montgomery County Police Department shutting down the Gurdwara and ejecting everyone from the premises. And unlike the rest of the witnesses, he was not at the Gurdwara that Friday night. When the judge ordered a five minute recess and everyone went outside the courtroom, a small drama unfolded in the waiting area. Jagjit Singh, a defense witness, started talking loudly to the Kashmir Singh group, voicing caste slurs at the plaintiffs and their supporters. Later, during his testimony on the witness stand, Jagjit Singh lovingly referred to one of those plaintiffs as "bhenji." "She is just like my own sister," he said. The last and most dramatic witness for the plaintiffs was Kashmir Singh himself. On the testimony of Joginder Singh, he said that Joginder Singh was abusive to the officer which resulted in his being forcefully thrown out. Kashmir Singh demonstrated by jumping out of the witness chair and throwing his hands into the air to show how Joginder Singh jumped up and yelled at the officer "Arrest me! Arrest me! Arrest me!" He said that he has a lot of "respect" for Joginder Singh who is like an "older brother." Joginder Singh, who seemed to have trouble standing up without a cane, sat quietly and listened. As to the charge of contempt by not allowing worshipers to enter freely, Kashmir Singh denied everything outright. "It never happened," he said. The officers, he said, were removing disruptive people on their own. Another defense witness, Jagjit Singh, testified that the disruption was caused by persons either yelling or pacing the foyer, which led the officers to remove them. Kashmir Singh said that it was the decision of the Management Committee to hire the police officers for the safety of the congregation, in light of the events of the previous Friday night. His smart and shrewd lawyer, Richard Walsh, used the presence of the former GNFA Raagi Jathaa in the court room and pointed to them when questioning witnesses as to how they felt when the Raagis were dismissed. The court room was clearly divided with the supporters of the plaintiffs (including the Raagis) on one side and supporters of Kashmir Singh on the other. The biggest surprise came when the defense produced a video of the sit-in protest of the previous Friday night. It showed children sitting and holding signs surrounded by adults, both singing a shabad. And in front of the group were a few men and women arguing with the police officers that they had a right to protest. It looked like utter chaos when Tejbir Singh, a member of GNFA, yelled that the Gurdwara was going to be shut down. Kashmir Singh and party were not in the video, they were all in the back yard at the time. And then came another big surprise. Walsh asked Kashmir Singh if it was a tenet of Sikhism that only one service can be held in a Gurdwara at one time. Kashmir Singh agreed, "no one else can do the services" when services are held in the main hall. The point they were trying to make was that on Friday night while visiting Raagis were doing keertan in the divaan hall, the protesters should not have been singing shabads in the foyer. That was against a tenet of Sikhism. There may be some validity to that statement if one considers a vague passage in the Rehat Maryada which states: In the course of the congregational sessions, only one thing should be done at a time: performing of kirtan, delivering of discourse, interpretative elaboration of the scriptures, or reading of the scriptures. Walsh's strategy was clear. He painted a picture of a disruptive group of people who were upset about the dismissal of the GNFA Raagi Jathaa and conducted a "wild" sit-in protest which led to the shutdown of the Gurdwara. This was cause enough for Kashmir Singh and the Gurdwara Committee to be concerned and hire off-duty police officers to prevent this from happening again on Sunday morning. Walsh said that the plaintiffs were "trouble maker surrogates of the minority trustees" who have two other court cases pending against GNFA management for mishandling fiduciary duties and arbitration for election fraud, and "if they don't like the way the church is run, they can go somewhere else." The strategy of the plaintiffs' was to rely mostly on the testimony of the nine witnesses. Their lawyer, Jay Shuster, seemed to have been caught off guard by the Friday night video evidence, however. Although both sides had a right to request the other to disclose all evidence and witnesses before the case went to trial, neither seemed to have done that. The onslaught of Walsh's presentation of the events of Friday night left Shuster clamoring for an explanation. He finally consented that "something" happened Friday night and went on to focus on Sunday, the day of the alleged contempt. Interestingly, neither side called on any of the police officers who were guarding the entrance of GNFA on Sunday morning. At the end of the trial, Shuster recalled one of the witnesses and managed to submit the only photographs of the events of Sunday morning which showed police officers standing in the glass doorway entrance of GNFA, Kashmir Singh standing just inside the entrance, and a group of people standing outside the entrance, in the rain. If convicted, the plaintiffs are expected to only request that the court order Kashmir Singh to not be on the Gurdwara premises during Wednesday night, Friday night, and Sunday divaans. The court's decision is due January 24, 2003. |