That the president would cancel a Sikh temple visit over a knotted handkerchief shows the old, bold Obama is gone—he now governs in fear. Tunku Varadarajan laments his gutlessness.

Barack Obama has become a Sikh joke. The 44th president of the United States, a man who offered himself up to the world as the cosmopolitan alternative to the Little Americanism of the Bush years, has dropped plans to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar—the Vatican, as it were, of the Sikh religion—on his state visit to India in early November. As The New York Times reports, the president would have had to cover his head with a knotted handkerchief on his visit to the shrine, in keeping with Sikh religious tradition, so the White House invertebrates scuttled plans to go there out of fear that images of Obama with a cloth on his head would reignite rumors that he is a Muslim.

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I don't think obuma was afraid of covering his head with cloth to meet Sikh religious requirements. I think he was afraid of another Sikh religious requirement. All Sikh males must wear a ceremonial dagger on their person. Obuma wasn't afraid of looking like a muslim, he was afraid of looking like a porcupine.