Kirpan

The kirpan is the article of faith that most often ends up before a judge, for a simple structural reason: it is a blade that an initiated Sikh is obliged to wear at all times, and a great many rules about blades were written by people who assumed nobody had to.

The pattern across jurisdictions is not a single settled principle. It is a series of separate accommodations, won or lost one at a time, and reversed in some places after being won.

Where accommodation has held

• India. The Constitution addresses it directly. The explanation to Article 25 states that wearing and carrying kirpans is included in the profession of the Sikh religion, which forecloses the question at the highest level.
• Canada. In Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, decided by the Supreme Court in 2006, a school board's absolute ban on a student wearing a kirpan was held to infringe freedom of religion and not to be justified. The Court took seriously that no kirpan had ever been used as a weapon in a Canadian school, and that a total ban sent the message that some religious practices do not merit protection.
• United Kingdom. The Criminal Justice Act 1988 makes it an offence to carry a bladed article in a public place but provides a defence of religious reasons, which covers the kirpan.

Where it has not

Airports are the hardest case, because aviation security rules are near-absolute and internationally coordinated, and no general religious exemption exists. Courthouses vary by jurisdiction and often by individual judge. Quebec's National Assembly voted in 2011 to bar kirpans from the legislature, four Sikh visitors having been turned away, which was a political reversal in the same province where Multani had been won five years earlier.

What the object is

None of this is intelligible without the object's own meaning. The kirpan was mandated for the Khalsa at its founding in 1699 and signifies an obligation to defend those who cannot defend themselves and to stand against injustice, explicitly including on behalf of people who are not Sikh. It is not carried for self-defence and it is not to be drawn in anger. A court hearing a kirpan case is not weighing security against a preference. It is weighing security against a duty, and the two sides of that argument are frequently talking past each other because only one of them has understood that.

A kirpan is a real forged steel blade, single edged or double edged, ranging from a few inches to a full sword, and it is made by a blacksmith or bladesmith rather than a jeweler, the same trade that produces any working knife.

Wearing it

The blade sits in a sheath, usually worn under clothing on a strap called a gatra or fixed to a belt, and its size is a matter of personal and community practice rather than fixed doctrine, some Sikhs wear a small symbolic blade only a few centimeters long, others a functional short sword. This is one of the Five Ks required of a baptized, Khalsa Sikh, and it is worn continuously rather than reserved for ceremony, which is precisely why its legal status as a weapon has been contested in schools, airports and courts in many countries.

What happens to it over a lifetime

A kirpan is generally kept for life once a Sikh is baptized, replaced only if lost, broken or outgrown, and there is no requirement to discard an old one as ordinary scrap, many are kept as family objects or passed down. When a Sikh dies, the kirpan is commonly left on the body for cremation along with the other articles of faith rather than removed and reused, treating it as inseparable from the person who carried it rather than as reusable equipment.