An inspection was carried out by Wolverhampton City Council on Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara regarding the access for disabled members of the congregation. Paula Lewis (Access Officer) has voiced her concerns after the inspection and has recommended improvements to be made to facilitate the needs of disabled members of the congregation. She strongly feels that the current layout of the Gurdwara Sahib segregates the disabled from the rest of the congregation, which is a key issue that the Sikh Forum have been trying to address with the management committee but to no avail, so the local council has had to step in, to safeguard the rights of the disabled. This is a sad state of affairs for the Sikh Panth who are supposed to be the protectors and cherisher's of the weak and frail (Gareeb Nivaaj) but we ourselves have become quite the opposite it would seem.

This whole sad state of affairs has come about because of the ego and pride of a few old, bigoted men who feel being apart of a Gurdwara's management committee gives them some kind of divine authority over the congregation. When in fact all they are there to do is run the day to day administration of the Gurdwara Sahib. Unfortunately due to the fact that a group of retired far more educated women came and had audacity to give them some advice about what they should be doing for the disabled members of the congregation was insulting to them. But to add insult to injury these ladies were not so easily fobbed off as they would have hoped and started encouraging the elderly and disabled to sit in Darbar Sahib rather than outside and made them feel human again, apart of the congregation again.

These few old bigoted men felt as if they would lose control if they let this small revolution amongst the disabled elderly go on, which is why when their own committee voted to have seating in the Darbar Sahib for the disabled and elderly they felt they had lost face. So they decided to put up screens in front of the seating out of spite ( to save face ) as there is no logic or reasoning behind having them there otherwise.

Please read the Councils Report from the link below:

Note:

The Sikh Forum Wolverhampton would like to point out and apologise to our readers if they have been in any way mis-lead by the use of the Wolverhampton City Councils logo on the original article. We would like to clarify that the views expressed on this website are the views of Sikh Forum Wolverhampton and its members and are not in anyway endorsed by Wolverhampton City Council. The use of WCC's logo was merely to highlight to readers that a report had been received from the Councils Access Officer in regards to access for the disabled members of the congregation and nothing more, it was in no way intended to mis-lead any body into thinking that WCC was in any way endorsing the SFW website or it's views.