This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to Holy Smoke with Damien Thompson.

Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson.

Britain could be about to acquire a new ethnicity, Sikhs. Perhaps you thought that was a religion?

Well, it looks like the 2021 census could include a Sikh ethnic tick box. Now, the last census quite properly included

Sikh as a religious identity. So why make it an ethnicity when, although most Sikhs are

Indians, there are converts of every colour and it's a religion that seeks to appeal to all of humanity.

Is it a function of our bureaucrats' obsession with ethnicity and their legendary ignorance of religion?

The Sikh community is divided on this one. It's a bitterly fought dispute.

I'm joined by the Sikh journalist Hardeeb Singh.

Hardy, supporters of this change point out that in the most recent census in 2011, more than 83,000

Sikhs refused to tick any of the boxes on ethnicity. They wouldn't say they were Indian,

and they wrote Sikh in the space for any other ethnic group. So that shows that there is a certain demand and yet I understand

that this is a change that you oppose. Yeah, you're right about those figures. The 83,000 felt they didn't want to

tick Indian and instead wrote in Sikh. Now, I think this stems from a feeling of

objection towards the then Indian government in 1984 and the persecution of Sikhs along with the subsequent Delhi pogroms.

Which is something that I suspect most people, including me, don't know very much about.

If you could just quickly remind us what happened.

So in 1984, there was the storming of the Golden Temple.

Yeah, that's what I remember.

And subsequently to that, there was the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards,

which then led to pogroms by the then Indian government,

which resulted in huge persecution of the community for a long time afterwards.

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