The Khalistani Rebellion

"We don't want any violence. We don't want any violence from pro-Khalistan forces or the Indian side."

"We are saying, let's give votes a chance ... We are fighting for our own political opinions to be heard."

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, Sikhs for Justice

 

"They're using Canadian territory for activities which could jeopardize India's security and interests."

"If the [Canadian government can do something about the referendum] and try to prevent it, that would be useful because it only creates a bad atmosphere and incites violence against India and Indians."

Manish, Indian High Commissioner to Canada 

"Secessionism amongst Sikhs has been very much in retreat in India itself."

"My sense is that there aren't serious tensions between Hindus and Sikhs."

"The main attacks that Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs have faced have come from white nationalist groups -- racist groups -- attacking all of them equally as people of colour."

Dr. Narendra Subramanian, political science professor, McGill University

Trudeau and then-Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, left, met with Chief Minister of Punjab Amarinder Singh in Amritsar . (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

 

Relations between Canada and India, long friendly, have become somewhat strained in the last several years. Jagmeet Singh, the leader of Canada's third political party, the New Democratic Party (NDP) is a Khalistan proponent and supports the referendum being carried out on Canadian soil. Harjit Sajjan, now Minister of International Development was formerly Canada's Minister of Defence, and a supporter of a Sikh homeland in the Khalistan movement to separate the Indian Punjab from India to become a Sikh-autonomous region.

 

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited India in 2018, his manner of dress was bizarre enough to draw the amazed attention of Indians; the Trudeau family costumed themselves throughout the trip in flashy outfits not even Bollywood stars would appear in. At a reception, the appearance of a former Khalistani convicted of attempted murder of a visiting Punjabi official to Canada, proved an embarrassment to Canada, and a provocation to Narendra Modi's government.

 

A former premier of British Columbia Ujjal Dosanjh, himself a Canadian Sikh, had years ago been savagely beaten by Sikh separatists for his public condemnation of the separation movement. A British Columbia Sikh newspaper editor who had also been critical of the movement was murdered by Sikh separatists. And Canada's worst terrorism event took place when in the mid-1980s Khalistani terrorists placed bombs on Air India Flight 182 flying from Canada to India, killing all 329 aboard. 

There are 800,000 Sikh Canadians comprising 2.1 percent of the Canadian population, a huge diaspora. In 2019 the Statistics Canada total for all Indo-Canadians came to 1,008,995. By no means does the total, whether Hindu or Sikh support the separatist movement of Sikh nationalists. After the Air India bombing, the Khalistan movement receded to a degree in its provocations. At the present time, however, another movement has arisen calling for a referendum on separatism among the global diaspora of Indian Sikhs.

 

Khalistan Referendum in Canada (Source: Twitter/@Azhar Javaid)

 

Called the Punjab referendum, it asks people of Sikh origin their opinion of the Sikh-majority Indian state of Punjab separating, fulfilling the dream of Khalistan. Canada has become one amongst the first to hold votes, organizers claiming that over 100,000 people participated in the balloting near Toronto a month ago. A group calling itself Sikhs for Justice is careful to point out theirs is a peaceful exercise in free will. A situation that New Delhi sees as an abhorrent attempt against its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Whatever the outcome of the referendum it has no legal status; it is not binding, and completely unofficial. Its organizers hope to strike a 'moral' victory to enable it to apply international pressure on India. Voting on the referendum began in the U.K. a year ago, went on to Italy and Switzerland, and a second round resumed in Brampton, just outside Toronto a month ago. It is destined to move to Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Surrey and Abbotsford early in the coming year before travelling to the United States.

With the balloting complete, its organizers hope to be able to present a compelling proof to the United Nations that Indian Sikhs have a moral and traditional heritage right to their own geography independent of India to be self-governed by Sikhs alone. The ghostly horror of the partition of India and Pakistan, and Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1948 comes to mind. India's reaction to the movement has been predictably condemnatory.

The truly curious thing about the entire situation is that separation appears to be entirely led by the expatriate Indian Sikh community. Within India, Sikhs, particularly those living in the Punjab, appear rather less than interested in separating, more than a little comfortable with the status quo. Indian Sikhs appear not to be influenced by the strenuous, disruptive efforts of the diaspora to impose upon them a state they're not asking for.

And what is passing strange, is the fact that their peers populating the globe in foreign countries as citizens of those countries, expend time, energy and political will in expounding their vision of a dire need for an exclusionary homeland, one where neither they nor their descendants will cleave to and live within. In Canada, a rift is appearing between Canadian Hindus and Canadian Sikhs. The former becoming targets of the latter.

Liberal Member of Parliament Chandra Arya last month accused "Khalistani extremists' of painting  graffiti on the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir temple in Toronto. In July, a Rutgers University report warned of an explosion in "Induphobia:" online. The source not Sikhs, but white supremacists, Islamists and Iranian trolls sowing division.

A crowd waving Khalistan flags faced off with nationalists brandishing the Indian flag in a Mississauga, Ont., parking lot on Diwali. Police watched as the two sides yelled and set off fireworks, but there was no violence. Photo by SherePunjabRadio AM600 /YouTube

Multiculturalism in Canada

"There are going to be repercussions [if the bill passes]."
"At this point, we should talk about building relations with this country, we should talk about the trade."
"Something that happened 35, 36 years ago ... that has no relevance."
Anil Shah, New Delhi Canada India Foundation

"...I fail to sympathize with the priority that some leaders of the [Sikh] community in Canada -- not all -- give to labelling their suffering and victimization as genocide."
Dr.Frank Chalk, history professor, Concordia University

Sikh shops and establishments were targeted and burnt in Delhi during anti sikh riots in 1984. Image Credit: AFP

As past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Dr.Chalk does come from a position of objective perspective. Genocide is a word that is far too loosely bandied about lately. It has a clear enough definition; a deliberate plan to annihilate a distinct group of people of ethnic or national origins. And here we speak of millions of people exterminated as in the Holocaust or the Armenian mass murder by the Ottoman Turks; the swift slaughter of the Tutsi by the Hutu tribe in Rwanda another case in point.

 

Relations between Indian Sikhs who yearn for a homeland of their own that they call 'Khalistan', and India is tense and fraught with incipient violence, occasionally breaking out in incidents of Hindu-versus-Sikh nationalists. Canada suffered its first dreadful terrorism act in a deliberate bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, an act of sabotage by Canadian Sikhs that caused the death of 307 passengers and 22 crew, the majority Indo-Canadians. Hostility between Sikhs and Hindus have simmered for years.

But they came to a head when Sikh bodyguards assassinated then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, furious to avenge the storming by Indian troops of the sacred Golden Temple of Amritsar where Sikh separatist militias were taking cover. The assassination resulted in a wave of pogroms where up to 3,000 Sikhs were killed by Hindus on a murderous rampage responding to the killing of Indira Gandhi. Her Congress Party was blamed for inciting the rioters. And while one death by a murderous mob is too many, 3,000 do not constitute a genocide.

 

Sikh property was systematically identified and destroyed. Image Credit: AP

And nor should it be expected by any expatriate ethnic group that has settled in Canada -- and many have, from all over the world, many arriving as refugees escaping from dreadful persecution by their own state -- that a memorial day be set aside to highlight their special grievance, as legitimate as the grievance itself may be. It was left behind and the raging hatred should be left there as well, and not consume the community that re-establishes itself in Canada to be part of the Canadian identity.

But that was not the intention of an Ontario Member of the Provincial Parliament whose purpose it was to persuade the Ontario legislature to assign a special day of commemoration for the thousands of Sikhs that were killed in New Delhi and elsewhere in India. Understandably, New Delhi and the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is anything but pleased at the prospect of this vestige of irreconcilable cultural-heritage/religious difference within his population becoming symbolic within Canada of Indian Hindu nationalistic fanaticism.

 

As large as the Sikh community in Canada is, it is counter-balanced by a larger East Indian Hindu component. Comprising 3.9% of the Canadian population, there are approximately, 1,400,000 Indo-Canadians, of whom a half-million are Sikh. As Canadians it is in everyone's best interest that they live together as Canadians, allowing their enmities to remain back in India if their differences cannot be resolved.

 

Yet Sikh organizations have been working to rally the current Government of Ontario to support legislation to crate a "Sikh genocide week" in memory of the 1984 riots following Indira Gandhi's murder. There is a good chance the bill could pass in the legislature, in the process alienating Hindu-Canadians, along with the government of India which already looks askance at the seeming sympathies of the federal government of a politically-active Sikh-Canadian population in vote-rich Ontario.  

According to history professor Frank Chalk, as loathsomely horrible as the  attacks were they fail to meet internationally accepted definition of the term, genocide. This, despite New Democrat Gurratan Singh's determination to see the legislation pass after he introduced the bill last month, claiming cries for justice among the Sikh community should be heard: "The trauma of this genocide is real and still impacts Sikhs that call Ontario home", he insisted.

And then there is the reasonable voice of Anil Shah who agreed the killings were reprehensible acts of revenge, but they were not government-perpetrated genocide. There is an unfortunate precedent when in 2017 the Ontario legislature passed a motion instigated by a a member describing the events that took place in New Delhi as a genocide which India took to illustrate that Ontario favoured the Khalistani separatist movement, which led to a distancing between the two countries diplomatically.

Relatives grieve at a funeral after the sikh riots in Delhi. Over three days in Nov 1984, 350 Sikhs had lost their lives here. Image Credit: AFP