New Delhi: While India-Canada remain embroiled in a diplomatic row over the killing of Sikh extremist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June this year — with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claiming “a potential link between agents of the Government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen” and India refuting the allegation — back home, a stunning 95 percent of Sikhs had said they were “overwhelmingly proud of their Indian identity”, according to a Pew Research Center survey, the results of which were published in 2021.
The survey results had also shown that 70 percent of Indian Sikhs felt that anyone disrespecting the country cannot be called a Sikh.
According to the survey, ‘Religion in India’, 93 percent of Punjabi Sikhs were proud to live in the state and like India’s other religious groups, most did not see evidence of widespread discrimination against their community — a mere 14 percent felt that Sikhs faced discrimination in India, and 18 percent said they faced religious discrimination the year before (the survey was held between end of 2019 and early 2020).
Outside India, Canada is home to the world’s largest Sikh population, constituting about 2.1 percent of its population, or approximately 770,000 individuals, according to media reports which cited a 2021 census.
Also read: Worried over fallout of shaky ties, Indian students keep a close watch on Canada developments
‘Communal violence a problem’
The Sikh separatist movement — which calls for the establishment of a separate Sikh homeland, or Khalistan — and its impact also found a mention in the Pew survey which said, “Sikh-Hindu relations were marked by violence in the 1970s and 1980s, when demands for a separate Sikh state covering the Punjab regions in both India and Pakistan (also known as the Khalistan movement) reached their apex”.
Meanwhile, Sikhs were also more likely than other religious communities to see communal violence as a problem in the country — 78 percent of them rated communal violence as a major issue against 65 percent of Hindus and Muslims, the survey showed.
When it came to political preferences, while the Pew survey found that 33 percent of Sikhs in Punjab picked the Congress their choice, a report in the Hindu cited a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)-Lokniti survey, conducted in collaboration with the media organisation, as finding that close to half the Sikh votes in Punjab went to the Aam Aadmi Party in the 2022 assembly polls, bringing it to power in the state.
Traditional favourites, the Congress and the Shiromani Akali Dal, meanwhile suffered a decline in their Sikh support base, that study had additionally claimed.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
Also read: Guns, gangs & extremism — how nexus of organised crime and Sikh separatism took root in Canada