The gentleman Rawail Singh lived and died for Afghanistan
Pritpal Singh painfully shares personal memories of the Sikh leadership who were all killed in the recent suicide bomb attack in Jalalabad. This is the first of of his tributes to the suave and gentle Rawail Singh. The text is brief but the videos provide a peep into the lives of these gentlemen Sikh Afghans, who had the huge potential to change the destiny of the Sikhs in a land which was once a part of the Sikh empire.
Rawail Singh Singh was one of the Sikh Afghan leaders who was killed in a bomb explosion on 1 July in Jalalabad. Rawail Singh had lived handsomely in tolerant Afghanistan. He was always hopeful that things could change.
He believed in a peaceful future for Sikhs like him in his homeland -and died for it.
The accompanying YouTube video is a compilation of his short interviews which I took in Afghanistan a few years ago. They have English subtitles.
Journalist Ruchi Kumar writing in Foreign Policy says that, “Rawail Singh was one of the kindest and most recognizable faces in Kabul’s nascent civil society and one of the most active members of his community. He’d had many offers to help him and his family leave Afghanistan, but he insisted that he was a son of the Afghan soil and refused to depart a country where he still saw tremendous potential.”