Dispatches from NYC Mayoral Election Trail: Turbans, Kirpans and Vaisakhi Celebrations at the NYPD Police Academy
Second part of the series on reports from New York's South Asian neighborhoods
As I have teased in my previous posts, I’m working on an extensive piece on the NYC Mayoral Election. While it’s a departure from keeping an exclusive focus on caste, this reporting is crucial because it sheds a spotlight on the often overlooked South Asian communities in New York City that are frequently depicted through erroneous and mythical ideas around caste, class, regional and religious identities perpetuated in mainstream media narratives.
Even as I continue reporting on the larger piece, there are too many important stories that might not fit there but still need to be told. So in the absence of a dedicated local South Asian media space, this series is an attempt to understand the fragmented yet culturally cohesive South Asian community, and their political engagement, especially in the lead up to Democratic Mayoral Primary on June 24. Read along and follow.
If the title is a jump scare, it’s because I really went there.
As a visibly brown woman in the US, no one needed to tell me to keep my interactions with the local police department limited; zero if it was possible. Moving into New York after the summer of 2014 — when Black New Yorker Eric Garner died in a police choke hold in Staten Island for the suspicion of selling unlicensed cigarettes; in yet another incident of police brutality against Black Americans, which eventually spurred the Black Lives Matter protests nationwide — I assimilated into the city by embracing its more than earned distrust and outrage against the NYPD.
Continuing the theme from my last post of reporting from spaces I don’t feel entirely comfortable in, this round of interviews took me into a remote part of Flushing, barely accessible by a bus, let alone the subway, to the NYPD Police Academy. Instead of walking into stores and up to people on the street to ask them about the upcoming Mayoral election — an approach that had elicited surprising if somewhat mixed results — I decided to reach out to someone with deeper roots in the community. Harpreet Singh Toor had run for the New York State Assembly as a Democrat in the general election last year, and has been a key figure in the Sikh community in New York for some decades. In response to my request for an interview in late April, he got back to me almost immediately, and when I offered to meet him at his office in Richmond Hill, he invited me to a Vaisakhi celebration at the NYPD Police Academy, which he was attending later that evening.
Not entirely sure of the connection between the Spring harvest festival that is celebrated across many parts of South Asia, which holds particular significance for the Sikh and Punjabi communities, and the NYPD, I decided to attend anyway. Arriving at the imposing campus that almost stands isolated in an area close to LaGuardia, I had to double check if I was at the right place, since there was no one to be seen for miles — a relatively rare sight in a city with over 8.4 million residents. Last September, Mayor Eric Adams had announced that the city will spend $225 million on building a centralized training facility on this 32-acre campus, which cost $950 million when it was built in 2016, and rivals Google or Facebook’s sprawling campuses on the West Coast.
Inside, the uniformed ‘officer (?)’ at the reception couldn’t tell me where the celebration was taking place or confirm if it was even happening. But she had likely seen several other South Asian people come in that day, and gave me some vague directions to enter anyway. After 20 minutes of labyrinthian attempts to find the venue, encountering unnerving signs to stay out of certain areas, and bumping into some trainees who responded to my request for directions by saluting me instead (uncomfortable), I arrived at the hall where the celebrations were planned, just in time for them to begin.
The event turned out to be the Annual Sikh Heritage and Vaisakhi Celebration that involved an award ceremony for the members of the NYPD Sikh Officers’ Association and their affiliates. And the venue looked the part. The decor had the twin theme of orange (a crucial Spring color in India) and NYPD blue, with a seemingly popular turban tying station on to the side. Several officers were lined up to try the ceremonial headgear that takes several minutes of intricate folds to get right. After a brief Sikh prayer ceremony (ardās), the presentation started with a slickly produced, high budget video highlighting the ‘spirit’ of the NYPD, and its Sikh contingent, which was allowed to wear turbans and maintain facial hair (keeping in tradition with the Sikh faith) starting only in 2016. Even though Sikh police officers have been part of the NYPD for decades, their religious markers were often contested by the department, which required the male officers to shave their beards and hide their turbans under the NYPD hats. Sikh officers in NYPD faced discrimination for years, which would simply not hire them, and many had to sue the Police Department to win their right to wear these crucial markers of their religious identity.
But you wouldn’t know that from attending the event, which mostly focused on the presentation of a genial relationship between the NYPD and Sikh New Yorkers, many of whom were in attendance with their families at the celebration. As the award ceremony wrapped up and the cultural programming began (a martial arts and bhangra performance by Sikh teenage boys), Harpreet Singh Toor who was seated a few rows beside me, motioned me to join him outside for the interview. Outside the massive dining hall where the police trainees had gathered for dinner, was a buffet style selection of Indian food that was strictly reserved for the attendees and denied to any officers in training who expressed a desire to sample the selection (many came to check but were turned away disappointed). So far I did not regret my decision to attend, but I was also eager to speak to Toor about the Mayoral election, the subject I had come to report.
As we set our plates down to eat, Toor mentioned that he was surprised I had reached out to him. Zohran Mamdani had attended the Sikh Parade in Times Square the past weekend, and I was curious to hear what he thought of the appearance. “He came to the Sikh Parade because his team asked him to… He hasn’t reached out to us or other members”, he told me. Toor, who described himself as a capitalist (he grew up and finished college in India, a country famously founded on the principles of Socialism), did not seem to take a shine to Mamdani’s campaign, which he called out for being socialist. He wondered about how Mamdani’s freeze the rent policy would affect the landlords and asked the money for the ‘free’ proposals in his campaign would come from. “No one knows him here”, he said.
Toor also seemed perturbed that Mamdani (a practicing Muslim) had declined to wear the ceremonial turban for the appearance — unlike former Mayor Bill de Blasio who was photographed with a turban in 2021. Notably Mayor Eric Adams, who is also known for his close relationship with the Sikh community, has been seen without a turban at his appearances. At an event in 2023, Adams wore the traditional head covering similar to what Mamdani was seen wearing at the parade in April. Toor, did however concede to Mamdani’s advocacy for the taxi drivers in 2021, when he went on a 15 day hunger fast to demand for debt relief and better conditions for the drivers, many of whom belong to the Sikh community.
Our conversation between mouthfuls of Palak Paneer, Naan and Samosas was repeatedly stalled as attendees and officers alike came to greet Toor, who was well connected in the New York political scene and boasted a significant influence in his community. His talk show on JusPunjabi, a US-based Punjabi language news channel, covers local news, where he routinely highlights community issues and his takes on the global Sikh community. We were still talking when Toor called out to Baljinder Singh, a member of the World Sikh Parliament, who sat next to us with his plate and mentioned that he had met Zohran Mamdani in Albany. “He feels our pain. He talked about the Sikh issue when many politicians don’t… When he came to the parade or he comes to the Gurudwara, he talked about the international [targeting of the Sikh Community] by the Indian government, and the farmers’ protests,” Singh told me, to which Toor ‘respectfully disagreed’ and added that ‘making a statement at the parade was different than working to make sure those issues were taken care of’.
As the attendees finished dinner and began to leave, Toor introduced me to several other Sikh New Yorkers, including a few officers who were awarded at the event. None of them seem to have heard of the NYC Mayoral race or Zohran Mamdani, a South Asian candidate, who has been polling second in the Democratic Primaries. But one of them, a young girl in her early 20s, whose father, a cab driver was attacked in Midtown last month, mentioned the consistently high rates of hate crimes against Sikh New Yorkers.
The event, which was in its fourth year, was billed as a way to build connections between the NYPD and the Sikh Community and introduce them to one another, highlighted the hate crimes experienced by Sikh New Yorkers. Yet what remained unsaid was that the New York Police Department had repeatedly failed to protect the Sikh community that has repeatedly called on them for assistance and discussed creating a citizen patrol group to provide protection that the police has failed to give. Whether diversity events like these can help move the needle on their plight, however, remains to be seen.
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