THE ASIAN INDEPENDENT UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
A kirpan is a small, curved ceremonial dagger. It is one of the Five Ks — five articles of faith that initiated Sikhs are required to wear at all times. The word “initiated” is important here. Not every Sikh carries a kirpan. Only those who have gone through a baptism ceremony called Amrit are obliged to wear one.
The kirpan is not a weapon in the everyday sense of the word. It is a symbol. It represents the duty to stand up for justice and to protect the weak. It is usually small, kept in a sheath, and worn under clothing, often on a cord around the neck.
A Century of Legal Struggle
The story of the kirpan and British law goes back much further than most people realise. It does not begin in modern Britain. It begins in colonial India.
In 1878, the British colonial government introduced the Indian Arms Act. This law restricted who could carry weapons across India. But the British knew they could not simply ban the kirpan. Sikhs had a proud and fierce history of resistance, and the kirpan was central to their religious identity. So the law included an exemption — Sikhs were allowed to carry it.
This did not mean the matter was settled peacefully. In the years that followed, there were periods when British authorities tried to restrict the kirpan anyway. One of the most significant moments came in the early 1920s, known as the Kirpan Morcha, a campaign of protest and civil disobedience by Sikhs who refused to surrender their right to carry it. Sikh activists were arrested. There was considerable public protest. It ended in January 1922 with a compromise: Sikh prisoners were released, and the kirpan exemption was formally reinstated.
The Law in Modern Britain
When large numbers of Sikhs settled in Britain after the Second World War, the question of the kirpan naturally came with them.
A key moment came in 1983 with a House of Lords case called Mandla v Dowell Lee. This case decided that Sikhs counted as an ethnic group under British law, and that their religious and cultural practices, including wearing the kirpan , were entitled to legal protection. It did not solve everything, but it was a crucial foundation.
The law that currently governs the kirpan in England and Wales is the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Section 139 of that Act makes it a criminal offence to carry a bladed article in a public place. However, the same law provides a defence if the blade is carried for religious reasons. This is the legal basis for the kirpan exemption.
The law gives a defence for anyone carrying a blade for genuine religious or ceremonial reasons. Sikhs are the most obvious example, but the defence is not written in their name. It is a general principle of religious freedom expressed in law.
In 2019, the Offensive Weapons Act updated and strengthened this protection, extending it to larger ceremonial blades. The All Party Parliamentary Group for British Sikhs had lobbied hard for this, meeting with the Home Secretary to ensure Sikh religious practice would not be accidentally criminalised by new knife legislation.
The Death of Henry Nowak
On the night of 3 December 2025, an 18-year-old student called Henry Nowak was walking back to his university halls in Southampton after a night out. He was a first-year accountancy student at the University of Southampton, originally from Chafford Hundred in Essex. He was alone, unarmed, and had not had enough to drink to be over the legal driving limit. By every measure, he was an ordinary young man walking home.
He passed a 23-year-old man called Vickrum Digwa on Belmont Road. A verbal altercation broke out. Within minutes, Digwa had stabbed Henry Nowak five times. Henry sat down on the pavement. When police arrived, Digwa told them that Nowak had attacked him racially and physically. The police handcuffed Nowak — the dying teenager — rather than Digwa. Henry Nowak died shortly after.
Digwa was convicted of murder on 28 May 2026. His mother, Kiran Kaur, was also convicted of assisting an offender. The judge rejected Digwa’s claims that Nowak had abused or attacked him, describing those claims as false. Digwa was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 21 years.
The Knife That Killed Henry Nowak Was Not a Kirpan
This is the crucial point that much of the media and political debate has either missed or obscured.
Vickrum Digwa was, on the night of the murder, carrying two blades. One was a small ceremonial kirpan, worn under his clothing around his neck. The other was a much larger, 21-centimetre blade that was carried openly. It was this second blade that was used to kill Henry Nowak.
That second knife has been identified as a pesh-kabz — also known in Punjabi tradition as a “choora”. This is a very different object from a kirpan.
The pesh-kabz is an Indo-Persian dagger with a long history. It was originally designed in Persia, possibly as far back as the 17th century, specifically to punch through chain-mail armour worn by soldiers in battle. Its blade is straight, heavy, and reinforced along the back, tapering to an extremely fine, narrow point.
This design has a distinctive and, in this case, tragically relevant consequence: it pierces deeply but causes very little external bleeding. The blade enters the body through a small wound, the blood pools internally rather than visibly, and from the outside, the injury can look minor — even to trained first responders. This is likely one reason why police, when they arrived, did not immediately recognise that Nowak had been fatally stabbed.
The pesh-kabz is not one of the Five Ks. It is not part of the standard articles of faith that initiated Sikhs are required to wear. It belongs to a separate tradition, the martial arts tradition of the Nihang Sikhs, known as Shastar Vidya, which involves reverence for a wide range of historical weapons. Digwa was associated with this tradition. But carrying a 21-centimetre weapon in public at night is very far from religious devotion.
The kirpan exemption exists for small, sheathed devotional blades carried quietly under clothing as an act of faith.
Why the Distinction Matters
In the aftermath of the murder and conviction, politicians from Reform UK and, to a lesser extent, the Conservative Party called for the kirpan exemption to be abolished. Their argument was straightforward: if a Sikh can carry a blade and a non-Sikh cannot, that is one rule for some and a different rule for others.
The argument has public traction. In a country already anxious about knife crime, it is an understandable reaction.
But the argument does not hold up under scrutiny, for two reasons.
First, the weapon used to kill Henry Nowak was not the kind of blade protected by the kirpan exemption. The exemption covers small, religious blades worn as acts of faith. It does not and did not cover the large combat knife that Digwa chose to carry. Digwa did not exploit a legal loophole. He broke the law.
Second, the kirpan exemption has existed in British law for nearly forty years. In that time, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Sikhs have carried their kirpans without incident. Removing the exemption because of one man’s crime would punish an entire community for something they did not do and do not support.
Conclusion
The history of the kirpan in British law is a long one. It stretches back through colonial India, through campaigns and protests in the 1920s, through landmark court cases in the 1980s, and through parliamentary debates in the modern era. At every stage, the right to carry the kirpan was not given — it was earned through persistent, peaceful effort by the Sikh community.
The death of Henry Nowak is a genuine tragedy. He was eighteen years old. He was walking home. He had done nothing wrong. His killer has been convicted and rightly sentenced to a long prison term.
But the weapon that killed Henry Nowak was a pesh-kabz, a large, armour-piercing Persian dagger carried for reasons that had nothing to do with sincere religious devotion. It was not a kirpan. The law that protects kirpan-carrying Sikhs did not cause his death, and abolishing that law would not have saved him.
To respond to this tragedy by stripping hundreds of thousands of peaceful, law-abiding Sikhs of a right their community spent a century defending would not be justice. It would simply be a different kind of wrong.
References
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak
2.https://spectator.com/article/vickrum-digwa-is-no-sikh/
3.https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/video/knife-used-in-apple-river-stabbings-shown-during-nicolae-mius-trial/
4.https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/02/conviction-sparks-debate-on-ceremonial-blades-carried-by-some-sikhs
5.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpan
