Power Struggle Led to Melee at Sikh Center in Queens

A bloody melee among worshipers at a Sikh temple in Queens over the weekend was only the most public and violent episode in a roiling power struggle marked by frequent confrontations, death threats and a lawsuit, members of New York’s Sikh community said on Tuesday.

The brawl on Sunday at the temple, the Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center, led to the arrests of eight people on riot and assault charges, the authorities said, and shook the city’s Sikh population, which is concentrated in Queens.

“It’s a big disgrace because this is a place of peace,” said one witness, Paul Singh, 16, who prays at the center, in the Richmond Hill neighborhood. “It would be like a riot in a big church like St. Patrick’s.”

As alarming as the fight was, however, it was not unusual. Armed violence has plagued other temples, known as gurdwaras, around the world in recent years. Suketu Mehta, a journalism professor at New York University and the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,” said violence had “become endemic to many Sikh gurdwaras.”

“The community really needs to come to grips with the issue of temple management, and learn to fight out their disputes in the courts instead of in the house of God,” he said.

The Baba Makhan Shah Lubana Sikh Center, in fact, was born out of conflict. It was founded by a splinter group in 1998, amid a power struggle marked by fights at another Sikh gurdwara in Richmond Hill.

The founders agreed to take turns serving as president in two-year terms, said Mohinder Singh, the organization’s first president. In 2007, the leadership decided to shorten the terms to one year, and for about three years the organization appeared to run smoothly.

“It was the most efficient religious organization,” said Gurpal Singh, the executive director of Seva, an organization that works with immigrants in Richmond Hill. “It had a history of very peaceful governance.”

But last December, as the 2010 presidential term was coming to an end, the sitting president and others filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Queens against other members of the center. The suit sought to change the center’s governing structure and allow more worshipers a role in electing officers, said the president, Jarnail Singh.

Justice Augustus C. Agate issued a temporary restraining order that kept Jarnail Singh and other executive officers in power while the case was reviewed.

In the ensuing weeks, Sunday prayer services were often interrupted by arguments that sometimes devolved into pushing and shoving, several worshipers said. Mohinder Singh said he was recently ambushed on the doorstep of his house in Ozone Park, Queens, by two unidentified men who hit him in the face with a baseball bat and fled.

On April 18, Justice Agate issued a decision that denied the lawsuit’s motion but also denied the defendants’ countermotion to dismiss the lawsuit, thereby leaving the matter unresolved. The defendants’ lawyer, David L. Smith, said he planned to continue fighting the matter in court but believed that the judge’s decision had lifted the restraining order, allowing for a succession in the presidency.

The brawl on Sunday began shortly after 11 a.m. Witnesses said Jarnail Singh and several dozen allies were praying in the gurdwara; outside, more than 100 members of the opposing faction gathered on the sidewalk, fearful of entering because they had heard rumors that those inside had stockpiled weapons.

Eventually the crowd, assured by the presence of police officers who had been sent there, began to surge into the center, witnesses said.

Jarnail Singh said he saw several of them carrying bats, sticks and knives.

The building erupted in shouting and invective. A shaky video taken from inside the center and posted on YouTube showed what happened next: Worshipers, their heads covered in turbans or orange head scarves, leapt up from the floor where they had been sitting cross-legged, grabbed sword-shaped metal ceremonial percussion instruments called chimtas and turned on the arriving group. The video captured people waving the chimtas and at least one person swinging a microphone stand.

Witnesses said combatants also used baseball and cricket bats; some people were taken to the hospital for treatment of wounds. Paramjit Singh, one of the founding members, said he hoped the matter would be settled by the center’s board of directors. But others said they did not expect the center to move so quickly beyond the violence.

Gurmej Singh, who was scheduled to assume the presidency this year, said he had received three anonymous telephone calls warning him that he would be killed if he tried to take the post.

“There are possibilities,” Mohinder Singh said, “that this fight will be repeated next Sunday.”