MESA – Twenty-five years after Sikh businessman Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered, his family and members of the community who knew him say more needs to be done to change people’s misconceptions about religions from other parts of the world, especially the Middle East and South Asian countries. 

On Sept. 15, 2001, in one of the first post-9/11 hate crimes, Frank Roque mistakenly identified Balbir Singh Sodhi as an Arab Muslim because of his beard and turban, and shot him five times, then drove off. 

“I thought I was living in a very well-educated society, but I was wrong,” said Rana Singh Sodhi, Balbir’s younger brother. “I learned how people are uneducated … They don’t know anything about outside America.”

He related how his nephew recently told him that while on his way to a Sikh temple, a man followed him, pointed an imaginary gun at him, then dragged a hand across his throat in an attempt to intimidate him. 

“People still misunderstand,” said Rana Singh Sodhi. “After 9/11, people saw the turban and beard of Osama bin Laden on the TV, and they thought we were associated with those terrorists. They don't have enough education. They don't know about (the) Sikh (religion).”

As community and family members prepare to commemorate the 25-year anniversary of Balbir Singh Sodhi’s murder on Sept. 15, they say misconceptions about Sikhs endure. A vigil honoring the memory of Balbir Singh Sodhi will begin at 6:30 pm on Sept. 15 at the Mesa Star Chevron Gas Station, 7956 E. University Drive, Mesa. 

A research study from 2015 commissioned by the National Sikh Campaign revealed that a majority of Americans don’t know what Sikhism is, let alone what a Sikh looks like.

 According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation analyzed by the Sikh Coalition and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, anti-Sikh hate crimes in the United States have risen. The data, which includes hate crimes known to the FBI nationwide for the previous calendar year, reflects an increase from 142 incidents in 2024 to 177 incidents in 2025, a 24.65% rise.

Aasees Kaur, community development director for the Sikh Coalition, said while the data show an increase in hate crimes against Sikhs, the numbers underrepresent the true extent of anti-Sikh attitudes. 

“We know the data is severely underreported because no one is mandated to share that with the federal government, it’s an opt‑in system,” she said. “We’ve definitely seen situations where we know there was a hate crime that happened in this jurisdiction, and later, when we look at the FBI report, it’s nowhere to be found.”

Sikh community members like Rana Singh Sodhi believe one key to reducing anti-Sikh hate crimes is in including Sikh education in schools.

He said America’s schools should allow for educating students about “different cultures, different people, starting from kindergarten. Then they (will learn to) understand and respect other people,” he said.  

Since 2010, the Sikh Coalition has partnered with schools and members of sangats, or local Sikh congregations, to integrate education about the Sikh religion into state social studies standards from grades K-12. Today, Sikhism is included in school standards in 21 states, including Washington, D.C. The coalition is pursuing a state-by-state strategy to get all 50 states to include Sikhism education in their curricula, Aasees Kaur said.

“Education is one of the best ways to prevent and reduce hate violence, because schools that tend to be less inclusive also tend to be less safe for Sikh children,” she said.

Balbir Singh Sodhi and his brothers Harjit Singh Sodhi and Rana Singh Sodhi pose for a photo before Balbir’s death on Sept. 15, 2001.

Photo courtesy of Rana Singh Sodhi

Arizona State University assistant teaching professor Harleen Kaur, who has a doctorate in sociology and specializes in subjectivity formation of the U.S. Sikh Punjabi diaspora, said she believes the lack of education about the Sikh religion combined with fears after the 9/11 attacks contributed to Balbir Singh Sodhi’s murder. 

She said those attitudes were based on fear of “losing the safety, belonging, protection that being in the U.S. had offered.”

“That fear of losing safety gets transformed into hatred directed at people who have sort of been made to be different in the country,” she said.

Harleen Kaur explained that post-9/11 fear mongering led to Sikhs being blamed out of a need for clear identification of a threat.

Sonny Singh, a Sikh musician and long-time family friend of the Sodhi family, said he sees similarities with the anti-Middle Eastern backlash post-9/11 and today’s anti-Sikh, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-South Asian rhetoric in America.

"On a policy level, it was really bad then, and it continues to be pretty bad now,” he said, adding that rhetoric by politicians targeting anyone who doesn’t look “American” is even worse now. 

Despite those attitudes, the Sikh community continues to combat the hate. Along with advocating for integration of Sikh education into schools’ curricula, the Sikh Coalition is urging community members to send a message to their elected officials in Congress asking them to show leadership on five critical policies. 

“Anyone that’s coming of age today knows a very different world than before 9/11,” Aasees Kaur said. “A lot of our agencies and some of these programs just didn’t exist, so we should take a look and see where improvements need to be made, where things need to be course‑corrected.”

The policies the coalition is advocating for include calling on the U.S. government to “acknowledge the wrongdoing against our communities in the post-9/11 environment” and repeal harmful policies, passing a No Ban Act to curb discriminatory travel bans, passing a law that would require police to report all hate crime data to the FBI, and to repeal the 2001 and 2002 authorization for the use of military force to block warrantless mass surveillance. 

The Sikh community does see hope in some progress that has happened. 

“As a New Yorker, I have to mention that we have our first South Asian immigrant Muslim Democratic Socialist mayor of the largest city in the country,” Sonny Singh said, referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Organizations have been created, bridges have been built. We see more and more of these kinds of folks getting elected, and that's a testament to the work of the last 25 years.”

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.