Five people are in hospital after two opposing groups clashed inside a Brampton Sikh temple Sunday afternoon.

The fight broke out at the Guru Nanak Sikh Centre at Glidden Rd. near Hwy 410 and Steeles Ave. when one group tried to break up the other group’s meeting. It started as a fistfight but witnesses say turbans soon flew and hammers, machetes and construction knives were brandished as a group of about 100 people clashed at about 3:45 p.m.
The fight spilled outside as Peel Regional Police scrambled to take control, said witnesses.

“It was quite chaotic,” said Jagdish Grewal, editor of Punjabi Post, a newspaper published in Brampton, who arrived minutes after the fight broke out and saw two men lying outside with a bloodied hammer between them. Others were being given first-aid and taken to hospital.

Inside the hall, where the scuffle happened, Grewal said knives and machetes were still lying on the floor along with torn blood-soaked clothes. “There was blood too on the tiles,” Grewal told the Star.

At heart is the control of the temple but no one will say that openly.

The management was not available to comment on Sunday’s violence but members of the temple said trouble had started brewing a couple of days earlier when the group opposing the management announced that it would hold a meeting inside the temple.

“All we wanted was to have a meeting to discuss matters of the temple,” said Rampal Dhillon, who was inside the hall when the fight broke out. “We started the meeting at 3 p.m. and it was going smoothly when about two dozen people stormed inside.”

They were wielding hammers, machetes and construction knives, said Dhillon, who lives in Dundas, near Hamilton. There was screaming and yelling as people shoved and pushed to get outside, he added.

“It’s an ongoing dispute among the board members,” said Const. George Tudos of Peel Regional Police, adding that police had been called in earlier. “There was indication that there might be some trouble here.”

This fight comes two weeks after Manjit Mangat, a prominent Brampton lawyer, was stabbed outside the Sikh Lehar Centre, a Sikh temple located barely a kilometre away from the temple at Glidden Rd. Witnesses had said at least two men brandished unsheathed kirpans, the ceremonial dagger worn by baptized Sikhs, triggering a fresh controversy about Sikhs’ right to wear it.