| Malaysia | 4 June 2017 | Asia Samachar |
Seasoned criminal lawyer Rajpal Singh has been elected to head the Sentul gurdwara management committee (GMC) while former president Sathwan Singh will assume the vice president post.
Rajpal, who has been active for many years in the Bar Council, and the newly elected team at Gurdwara Sahib Sentul has to deal with a number of land-related issues.
“Land-related matters took up quite a bit of the discussion at the meeting today,” he told Asia Samachar in a telephone conversation.
These included the position of its existing land committee established to develop the gurdwara as well as the Punjabi school which is situated not too far from the existing gurdwara building.
In April 2016, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi announced a RM400,000 Federal Government allocation to renovate and upgrade Gurdwara Sahib Sentul in Kuala Lumpur.
Rajpal said the committee will also see how to use the gurdwara’s strong cashflow.
“We also need to see how we can best use the cash in hand. For a start, the house has decided to provide the hearse for free,” he said.
In the past, the gurdwara charged RM250 per use of the hearse.
At today’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), the house also elected Harpal Singh as secretary, Gurbachan Singh as treasurer and Rupinderjit Singh as assistant secretary. Those elected as committee members were Kuldeep Singh, Kuldeep Singh (two persons with the same name), Surinderpal Singh, Sukhdev Singh, Gurcharan Singh and Mindar Singh.
Sentul gurdwara elects its committee annually. Rajpal takes over from Charanjit Singh who took over from Sathwan.
At the AGM today attended by 196 members, Rajpal defeated out-going vice president Uphinder Singh with 182 to 64 votes.
Rajpal, 52, who carries a state title of Datuk, was a former Bar Council Selangor chairman between 2008 and 2011. Presently, he is the deputy chairman for the council’s Criminal Law Committee and Yayasan Bantuan Guaman Kebangsaan.
In one write-up on the Sentul gurdwara’s history, it is stated that the gurdwara was first known as Gurdwara Central Workshop, having taken its name from the nearby Central Railway Workshop where most of the Sikh members of the gurdwara were working. It was built in the early 1900s.
By 1910, the Sikh employees of the Federated Malay State Railways were by then a fairly large community in Sentul. They appealed to the Government for a piece of land to build the Gurdwara and this was granted in 1912.
Finally in July 1930, the sangat decided to build a new Gurdwara to replace the wooden structure. A local architect was engaged to design the building and prepare the necessary plans.
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