May 10, 2008	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 4, 1429

NEW DELHI: Hindu parents at an Indian school are protesting after the school’s Sikh authorities asked all students to wear traditional Sikh headgear to school. School authorities in the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab says they were merely enforcing a stipulation in its prospectus that students of all faiths have to wear the traditional Sikh headgear called the “patka” or “dastaar”.

But parents of other faiths say this is an affront to their religion, and have drawn parallels to Sikh protests in France in 2004 after the government there banned religious symbols such as Sikh turbans and Muslim headscarves in state schools.

About 150 parents sat in front of the Akal Academy in protest on Thursday, and reports said they had blocked roads, chanted slogans at the school gates and written to the local education minister saying the school be asked to withdraw its diktat.

“This is unfair to Hindu students,” Sanjeev Kumar Jindal, one of the parents, told Reuters. “Schools should stay clear of religious dogma.”

Hindus said the Sikh school authorities had imposed their religious values on followers of another religion’—Reuters