Naples, Italy: According to local sources, since the last couple of months, a steady stream of Sikh asylum seekers have been arriving every day at the local offices. They arrive mainly by boat, in most cases already carrying a petition written by a local lawyer. And all of them declare to be ‘persecuted in India’, being members of the ‘Khalistan Movement’.

According to the same local sources, it is a totally new phenomenon. Earlier, Sikhs would mainly come as economic migrants or to join their families already working and living in Italy. The stream of asylum seekers in the past few months is big enough to have been noticed by the people working every day at the refugee offices, and to puzzle them. There are no official datas yet about the number of requests being actually accepted by the Italian authorities, but most likely, they will accept almost all requests – mainly because in Italy, the concept of ‘Sikh militancy’ is widely unknown.