CHANDIGARH: Demand of action against love jihad as one of the top election agendas in the ‘manifesto’ issued by a Sikh group in the UK has upset the liberal-minded community members there. Speaking to TOI, they termed its inclusion in the list of community’s top concerns to be raised during the UK general polls “an exaggeration”.Listed at number four as ‘grooming and forced conversion’, the issue is one of the 10 mentioned in the ‘Sikh Manifesto’ prepared by organizations like Sikh Federation UK and The Sikh Network. The issue of justice for 1984 Sikh carnage is listed at number eight. “We prepared the manifesto after several rounds of consultations with community members. Even though the issues are not listed in any priority order, they are all important,” Jas Singh of Sikh Federation UK told TOI over phone. “It has been seen that guys of Pakistani origin or Muslims pose as Sikhs or Hindus and try to get into relationships with Sikh girls. These matters are not reported to authorities by the families of girls out of shame,” he added.Jas Singh said that they held six big consulting meetings with community members, each attended by a few hundred people and received over thousand responses over email. Over 1,100 volunteers, including professionals, teachers and lawyers, connected to The Sikh Network gave the manifesto a final shape after the consultations.Unimpressed, director of development studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK, Prof Pritam Singh said that it may have been an issue a decade ago, but did not deserve to be on the community’s agenda in the upcoming national elections. “It has become fashionable to use the term ‘grooming’. Moreover, these issues cannot be sorted out by creating ghettoes.”Educationist and former president of a gurdwara in Southall, Dilbagh Singh Chana, said that promoting the idea of Sikh ethos schools—another demand on the manifesto—and talking of grooming in the same breath was counterproductive. “Faith schools encourage separation. And if you think there are forced conversions happening, you should allow more mingling because these things can happen only in an isolated environment.”Author Mahender Singh Dhaliwal said, “Don’t blame Muslims. In a country like the UK, people are not normally hardcore religious. If parents are worried about their children marrying into other religion, they should talk to the kids about it. It is not an election issue.”The Sikh Network website demands that the UK government issues guidance to have accurate reporting systems that identifies the ethnicities of victims and perpetrators of grooming and forced conversions to develop and deliver culturally sensitive strategies. The UK government should provide funding to Sikh community organizations specializing in tackling child sexual exploitation and forced conversions.Explaining the rationale behind the demand of accurate reporting, Lord Indarjit Singh of Wimbledon said, “Grooming and forced conversion is an issue. When we approach the government, they ask for statistics. However, it not an issue confined to Sikhs. We are a non-complaining community and our organizations are not as well funded as Jewish or Muslim bodies.” However, Lord Singh too reiterated, “It’s a bit of exaggeration to bring it to the manifesto.”Sikh Federation UKThe Sikh Federation (UK) was launched in September 2003 as non-governmental organization. The website claims that to discharge its duties as an effective pressure group, it was registered with the electoral commission as the first-ever Sikh political party in the United Kingdom. However, it is not reported to have contested polls. The organization works to raise Sikh issues and concerns and facilitate consultations by the government and main political parties on the same. Though it claims support of over 150 different organizations, there are no numbers available about its total membership.Forced conversion reportsOver a decade ago, there were reports on forced conversion of white, Sikh and Hindu girls in the UK. Last main report on the issue was, BBC’s “Inside Out” programme in September 2013, where the reporter travelled to a remote part of the US to meet a 16-year-old British Sikh girl who was “groomed” and sexually abused over a period of time. She is said to be one of a dozen British Sikh girls living abroad to hide their secret. The Sikh Awareness Society UK (SAS), a charity that focuses on family welfare, had claimed to have investigated over 200 reports of child sexual grooming in Britain over the past five years. However, there were no official statistics. In the same month, six men—including two of Indian origin—were jailed at Leicester Crown Court for offences, including facilitating child prostitution of a Sikh girl.