The World Sikh News ex­presses sol­i­dar­ity with the #Bring­Back­Our­Girls cam­paign to save 276 Niger­ian girls ab­ducted by Boko Haram three years ago.

Iwrite with an­guish, with pain, with em­pa­thy and with a lit­tle hope and prayer that some brave and bold Sikh woman or man or a group will take up cud­gels on be­half of the 276 girls ab­ducted by the Boko Haram (lit­er­ally mean­ing Against west­ern ed­u­ca­tion) in Nige­ria three years ago. I see that as an ex­ten­sion of the spirit of Sar­bat da Bhala -Wel­fare of all Hu­man­ity prayer of all Sikhs, every­day.

The World Sikh News joins the world­wide #Bring­Back­Our­Girls cam­paign and ex­presses sol­i­dar­ity with the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies and un­equiv­o­cally con­demns the role of the Boko Haram mili­tia.

Sikhs have a his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence point. Nearly three cen­turies back, Mughal ruler Ahmed Shah Ab­dali ab­ducted Hindu girls from the then Hin­dus­tan to be traf­ficked to La­hore. Sikh in­sur­gents chased them, en­coun­tered them, fought them, ex­hib­ited ex­em­plary char­ac­ter, brought back ‘our’ girls and re­stored each one of them to their fam­i­lies. Leg­end has it that they used to strike at the mid­night hour when the Mughal forces were in deep slum­ber. 

It has been three long years when on 14 April 2017, these young girls from small town Chi­bok in poverty-stricken Nige­ria were ab­ducted from their school dor­mi­tory and taken to an un­known des­ti­na­tion. The gov­ern­ment, the UN agen­cies, hu­man rights or­gan­i­sa­tions -every­body has failed. Some girls es­caped and some were later freed, but still 200 of them are in cap­tiv­ity.

Three years on…the par­ents can­not sleep. The par­ents do not know whether they are dead or alive. “Our Chi­bok girls went to get ed­u­cated. Ed­u­ca­tion is the life­line to great op­por­tu­ni­ties. We can­not de­prive them of that op­por­tu­nity by leav­ing them with Boko Haram. They must be back,” Oby Ezek­we­sili of the #Bring­Back­Our­Girls move­ment said in an in­ter­view with BBC News.

This ab­duc­tion of the Chi­bok girls is a slur on hu­man­ity. Not to say that traf­fick­ing is not hap­pen­ing else­where. This is a dif­fer­ent kind with the ex­press pur­pose of us­ing them as “war ma­te­r­ial”.

Satel­lite im­ages can iden­tify ad­ver­saries and en­e­mies in the nook and cor­ner of the world and drones can be set on them, pro­grammed to hit tar­gets. I would like to know why is tech­nol­ogy not help­ing us to know the lo­ca­tion of the girls? Has some­one at­tempted this? Where are the in­tel­li­gent drones?

While the Niger­ian gov­ern­ment pre­sides over draught, death and de­struc­tion, the lack of po­lit­i­cal will at all lev­els is all too trans­par­ent. Un­doubt­edly, the UN agen­cies, the US and many other gov­ern­ments are “seized with the mat­ter”. Where are the re­sults?

In the last decade, the Sikh com­mu­nity has seen a plethora of hu­man­i­tar­ian ser­vice or­gan­i­sa­tions work­ing in dif­fi­cult ter­rain world­wide. Sikhs are spend­ing mil­lions on self-pro­mo­tion fear­ing ha­rass­ment and hate. It is time to be more ex­tro­vert and at­tain recog­ni­tion through work and ex­am­ple, not by pub­lic­ity alone. Bha­gat Kabir Ji, in Guru Granth Sahib, makes it clear, “Jo paa­dosi ke hua, so apne bhi jaan.” – “Be­ware! What hap­pens unto your neigh­bour can hap­pen to you as well.”

Some­thing in­side me tells me that it is time the Sikhs take on this. His­tory is beck­on­ing us to lis­ten to the poor­est of the poor, the weak un­der at­tack and to fight back the per­pe­tra­tors. 

Come on, #Bring­Back­Our­Girls.

Re­al­is­ing that there are no easy so­lu­tions, let there be an ini­tia­tive by vol­un­teers of the Sikh na­tion to go out there in search of the girls -those ab­ducted by the Boko Haram and stop traf­fick­ing of girls and women world­wide. 

It is high time the clock strikes 12 again.