“I have no response as the legal case is still pending,” Guruchander writes in an email to SFR.
Kirin, Guruchander and others in the office that day either ignored SFR’s messages or declined comment for this story. Then, he allegedly tried to have the locks changed.Ī legal complaint filed later says Guruchander, who also co-directs the Yoga Santa Fe studio on Llano Street and serves on the state Board of Chiropractic Examiners, “behaved in a manner that was more akin to a violent criminal than a supposedly peaceful Sikh.” Later, she claims, he used her Social Security number to convince a Santa Fe Wells Fargo employee to put SDI’s bank accounts under his control. Guruchander then barged inside, she claims, making off with computers full of confidential information. Hearing her colleagues enter the hall, Kirin opened her door. “The next thing I knew he was kicking at my door so hard the building shook,” she writes. Kirin claims Guruchander followed her upstairs, where she locked herself in her office. When another employee tried to call the police, Guruchander allegedly said, “Hang up if you want to keep your job.” “He was extremely hostile, escalating into a violent rage, and frankly, very scary.” “He started to verbally assault me, accusing me of stealing and yelling that I would be going to jail,” she writes in an email posted to an online Sikh forum.
There in the gravel parking lot, she claims, she met Guruchander. Kirin parked her car outside a long, white building at Sikh Dharma’s picturesque Española campus. The demand came from Guruchander Singh, the sect’s chief numerologist and manager of the administrative nonprofit, Sikh Dharma Stewardship. Over 14 years-most of her adult life-Kirin had worked her way up to become chief financial officer of Sikh Dharma International, the sect’s religious nonprofit organization now she, her coworkers, her boss and the SDI board could either sign a new loyalty oath, or find new jobs. It was on that day that Guru Kirin Kaur learned that she and her colleagues had been given an ultimatum. 3, 2009, the divided loyalties could no longer be ignored. Soon after, his inner circle began to splinter. The sect’s founder, the late Yogi Bhajan, inspired thousands of mostly white, middle-class men and women to stop cutting their hair, put on turbans and adopt a common surname: Khalsa.īhajan died in 2004. The modesty of the setting belies the stakes: control of a large private army that has won more than $3.5 billion in government contracts, ownership of a trans-Atlantic natural foods empire and, not least, the fate of an influential decades-old religious sect called Sikh Dharma. The siege on the second floor was the most dramatic moment of a coup, years in the making, that went down seven months ago in dusty Española. She knew who it was, and she knew what he wanted. The young woman locked the door to her office.
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