THE thickly bearded and turbaned Afridis were praying for their recently departed brother at the Gurdwara Bhai Joga Singh in Peshawar.

Their brother, Babajee Pramjeet Singh, was killed by hit men in Charsadda — the second Sikh hakim to be shot dead in two months.

Hakim Pramjeet Singh, an Afridi from Khyber, belonged to a family of hakims.

His father moved to Peshawar city in 1992.

Most of the roughly 6,000 Sikhs in Peshawar city live around the Gurdwara Bhai Joga Singh, Mohalla Jogan Shah, Dabgari Peshawar, where the community even runs a religious school.

“For us this [the killing of Pramjeet] is strange — it is generally said that Sikhs and Pathans are almost the same,” said Hakim Narender Singh, elder brother of the deceased hakim.

“Then who is killing us?”

His words ring true as one moves around Mohalla Dabgiri.

One cannot tell apart the Sikh woman from the others — till she climbs the steps into the Gurdwara.

Similarly, only the attire sets apart the Sikh boys from their Muslim counterparts as they run through the narrow lanes of the neighbourhood. Aside from the turban, they look the same — fair-skinned, clad in shalwar kameez, shouting at one another in Pushto.

The children simply reflect the relations between the Sikhs and the Pathans in the mohalla — so integrated are the two communities that the latter attend the ‘langar’ (community feast) at the Gurdwara.

It was this community that the father of the deceased hakim decided to live among when he moved to Peshawar. And Pramjeet also continued to live here though he commuted to Charsadda daily for work.

And here, too, he was welcomed.

The local residents of Shabqadar Bazaar, Charsadda, still have not come to terms with his death. They explain that Pramjeet and his assistant were shot dead while they were in the clinic.

“The sight of the closed dawakhana pains me. Baba jee treated us for 14 years — they took our hakim but we cannot even speak against the killers,” said a grief-stricken shopkeeper.

Most of the others in the bazaar also refuse to identify the killers or even hint at their identity.

But the manner in which both the killings were carried out are similar. In fact, some go so far as to argue that only targeted killings are carried out this way.

The two men came on a motorcycle. One of them went inside the clinic to carry out the killings and the second one rushed in, only to help when needed.

The other Sikh hakim, Bhagwan Singh, who was shot dead on Jan 24, was also killed by two men who came on motorcycles. They were waiting for him as he came out of his clinic in Tangi area in Charsadda district.

“I do not know who the killers are but finding them is the responsibility of the police and the administration,” said Dr Jitendar Singh, who runs a small clinic and a medical store in Yakatoot area in Peshawar.

“I am a Pakistani and I want to live here,” he added, “I recently took my mother to India to meet our relatives. Every one asked my mother to stay back but she didn’t — Buner is her motherland.”

His resentment and fear is palpable as well as understandable.

Consider the recent attacks on minorities in Peshawar: a gruesome attack on a church, two Sikh hakims killed, and sectarian killings are reported to be on the rise.

Recently, a businessman from the Bohra community was also shot dead outside his factory in Peshawar.

Before the last decade, there was little history of religious violence against non-Muslims in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in Peshawar. However, the rise of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and its supporters changed this.

For the Sikhs as well as other minorities, 2010 was the proverbial annus horribilis when militants told them to either convert to Islam or pay jizya or leave Orakzai and Khyber agencies.

This led to the migration of Sikhs and Hindus to Peshawar, while some even moved to Sindh and Punjab.

“We have been confined to a city in KP and our ancestral land is now a no-go area,” said Sangtok Singh, a student of computer sciences, Peshawar University.

But now some of them are wondering if even Peshawar will have to be left behind.