Global Courant
During his first trip to India as Canada’s prime minister in 2018, Justin Trudeau visited the northern state of Punjab, where he was photographed in full Punjabi attire at the Golden Temple, the Sikh religion’s holiest site.
He also received, courtesy of the Indian government, an earful of grievances – and a list of India’s most wanted men on Canadian soil.
The murder this summer of one man on that list, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, has turned into a diplomatic war between India and Canada. Mr. Trudeau claimed this month that Indian agents orchestrated the killing in Canada. India rejected the claim, accusing Canada of ignoring warnings that Canadian Sikh extremists like Mr Nijjar were plotting violence in Punjab in the hope of turning the state into a separate Sikh nation.
But beyond the allegations, a more complex story is unfolding in Punjab, say analysts, political leaders and residents. While the Indian government claims that Canada’s lax attitude toward extremism among its politically influential Sikhs poses a threat to national security in India, there is little support in Punjab for a secessionist cause that culminated in deadly violence decades ago and since was swept away.
The violence in Punjab that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government blames on Sikh separatists is in fact largely gang-related, a chaotic mix of extortion, drug trafficking and score-settling. The criminal masterminds, who often operate from abroad, are taking advantage of economic desperation in a state where farmers are being crushed by rising debt and many young people are left without work or management – problems exacerbated by a sense of political alienation in Sikh minority communities.
For Mr. Modi, the pursuit of a small but vocal group of criminals in a faraway land — India had pressed for the extradition of 26 criminals before Mr. Nijjar’s death — and the strengthening of the separatist threat are a major political story ahead of a national elections early next year.
It promotes his image as a strong leader who will do anything to protect his nation. It has even prompted some of his staunchest critics to side with him against Canada’s accusations. And it presents a new threat to point to after Modi took advantage of the violent Islamist militancy emanating from Pakistan before the last elections in 2019 to create a political wave.
On Tuesday, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said Canada had seen “a lot of organized crime” linked to “separatist forces,” while adding that targeted killings were “not the policy of the Indian government.”
Fanning the threat of Khalistan – the so-called Sikh homeland – as a national issue has once again put India’s 25 million Sikhs in a difficult situation. Old wounds of prejudice against them have reopened and they are now in the middle of a diplomatic clash that separates them from their families in the large Sikh diaspora.
For Mr. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there is little cost to insinuating a security risk posed by Sikhs, analysts say.
The party, whose leaders embrace a nationalist ideology that privileges majority Hindus over minority groups such as Muslims and Christians, has sought to court Sikhs as a constituency and consider them part of the extended Hindu family. Mr Modi himself has often visited Sikh temples and worn the Sikh turban.
But Sikhs have fiercely opposed this effort, seeing it as an attempt to erase their unique identity – both as a community and as followers of a religion they see as different. Sikhs were a dominant part of a farmers’ movement in 2021 that presented Modi with the biggest political challenge of his decade in power, forcing him to make a rare concession with Parliament repealing laws intended to open agriculture to market forces.
In last year’s parliamentary elections in Punjab, the BJP managed to win only two of the 117 seats.
Whenever Punjabis have felt unheard and angry in recent years, they have voted out their government and not pursued separatism. By 2022, that discontent was so widespread that Punjab did not vote for any of the old parties that previously ruled the country, including the leading Sikh religious party.
Instead, it voted into power a relatively new group that had held power in only one other state because it promised better governance: better schools and health care.
“There is no Khalistan movement as such,” says Surinder Singh Jodhka, professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “But there is a feeling that we are somehow not being done justice.”
Khalistan has largely remained a diaspora issue, with advocates of violently pursuing the cause being a small minority. To the extent that Sikhs in Punjab talk about separatism, they are in opposition to a national ruling party and its affiliates, some with their own trail of violence, that speak openly about their desire to turn India into a Hindu state.
It was a sentiment expressed earlier this year by a young man who paraded around the state portraying himself as the new prophet of Khalistan, leading to a manhunt and an internet shutdown.
The rise of the 30-year-old preacher, Amritpal Singh, was mysterious. His arrest during a cat-and-mouse chase this spring, after his supporters grew so bold that they attacked a police station to free one of their detained accomplices, put a quiet end to his story.
But Mr. Singh gave speeches and interviews in which he mixed his appeal for the separatist cause with social issues such as drug rehabilitation. He expressed the feeling that the BJP has become biased by pursuing and persecuting Sikhs for doing what the Indian Hindu right itself has done: expressing ideas of religious nationalism.
“What mountain has been brought down just by talking about Sikh rights?” said Gurdeep Singh, a farmer in Punjab.
The separatist movement in Khalistan, which actually predates the birth of post-colonial India in 1947, reached a bloody climax in the 1980s, when a group of militants forcibly took over the Golden Temple to press their cause. The wave of separatist violence at the time included the bombing of an Air India flight en route to London from Toronto, killing more than 300 people.
Then, like the separatist violence extinctHopes for a more inclusive future for Sikhs took hold, even as there was little justification for the widespread violence committed by the government in the name of cracking down on extremists. Between 2004 and 2014, India had its first and only Sikh Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.
But Khalistan remained a concern of some Sikhs in countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States. Canada has the largest Sikh population outside India, with more than 770,000 Sikhs. A large number of them left India during the separatist violence, or in the years immediately afterwards, with wounds that fueled their Khalistani advocacy.
“They don’t even have money, and they can’t come here because they are banned in India, but they try to provoke people on social media,” said Paramjit Singh, 45, a truck driver who lives on the outskirts of Jalandhar. , in northern Punjab. “They don’t let people eat in peace.”
Amarinder Singh, who was the chief minister of Punjab in 2018 and gave the most wanted list to Mr Trudeau, had made the meeting difficult before it even started: he had publicly stated that several of Mr Trudeau’s ministers were Khalistani sympathizers. including Canada’s first Sikh Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, who was part of the delegation.
“I gave him a list of ten, twelve names,” Mr. Singh said of Mr. Trudeau. “I told him these are the people who are causing mischief.”
Mr Singh described those on the list as “gangsters” and criminals, rather than fighters carrying the torch of a united ideology. “If they cannot get money in these countries, they start shouting about Khalistan,” he said.
Nevertheless, Khalistan has been discussed more frequently in Indian national politics over the past three years. As Mr. Modi’s lieutenants grew frustrated with the Sikh-led farmers’ protests in 2021, they often labeled the demonstrators as Khalistanis incited by outside forces.
“Mr. Modi is playing this politics for votes,” said Kamaljit Singh, a farmer from the outskirts of Jalandhar who took part in the protests. “We are in the middle of it.”
