Free donuts, proclaimed the misspelt placard put up outside the gurdwara on Old Weston Road in Toronto in 1984. Four months earlier, when Indian troops had stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, angry Sikhs had gathered outside the gurdwara, burning Indian flags and volunteering to join assassination squads. Then, the day after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her guards, a pop-up stall was set up to distribute sweets: “Revenge for Revenge,” it announced.
Last week, as a tractor-drawn tableau of Indira Gandhi’s killing drove through Brampton on Toronto’s north-west fringes, India reacted with outrage. The macabre celebration of the former PM’s killing isn’t exceptional or new, though.
Tableaux of identical design were driven through Sacramento in April 2023 too. Gurdwaras across the West have embraced hagiographic portraiture of Indira Gandhi’s assassins, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, as well as the man responsible for the mid-air bombing of an Air India flight, Talwinder Singh Parmar. In 2008, a group of Sikh students in a Surrey school wore T-shirts praising separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Later that year, British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell attended a procession where Parmar’s images were displayed.
For a conversation that goes beyond comforting moral outrage, though, Indians need to engage with just why the Khalistan movement has proved tremendously tenacious—if ultimately ineffectual—among diasporic Sikh communities. The answer implicates us all in many discomfiting ways.
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Khalistan on the Hudson
Every story begins somewhere—but in some cases, there just isn’t a good narrative hook on hand. Early in the last century, large numbers of immigrants began to arrive in Canada, looking for work. “The sudden appearance of a few thousand Sikhs, coupled with a fairly large population of Chinese labourers, many of whom also were employed in lumber, led to a number of anti-Asian riots,” sociologist James Chadney records.
Even though racial restrictions on immigration were lifted, after 1947, Sikh communities felt secure in segregating themselves from the wider milieu, using religion as a means of drawing boundaries between themselves and other ethnic groups.
This separatism had little connection to events in India. Though Indira Gandhi had begun sponsoring far-Right groups in Punjab to undermine the centre-Right Shiromani Akali Dal, it was yet to have a significant impact in Canada. Former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) officer GBS Sidhu, who arrived in Toronto in 1976, discovered exactly two Khalistan supporters — a Toronto businessman called Kuldip Singh Sodhi and Uday Singh in Sudbury.
In 1971, former Punjab minister Jagjit Singh Chauhan put out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, demanding an independent Sikh State. Eight weeks or so later, Indian troops captured the city of Dhaka. For good reasons, few took Chauhan’s demand for a Sikh State seriously.
Khalistan’s would-be plenipotentiary briefly returned to India in 1977, perhaps hoping for political rehabilitation after the Emergency. Two years later, though, he travelled back to London, as it became clear that Indira Gandhi would return to power. He established the government of Khalistan in exile in London, such as it was, in 1984.
Even if Chauhan did not succeed in creating foundations for a violent insurgency in Punjab, problems flared in the Sikh diaspora in Canada. Local labour activist Kuldip Singh Samra—a one-time communist involved in the anti-racism movement—claimed to have been inspired by Chauhan’s piety and vowed support for Khalistan, journalist Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew have written.
Kuldip evidently hoped Chauhan’s support would help capture control of the Pape Avenue Gurdwara and its vast endowments. Samra had lost elections in 1977 and 1978, despite support from a cohort of young, sometimes violent, anti-racism vigilantes. The power struggle escalated until Kuldip shot a judge and a political rival dead inside a Toronto courtroom and then fled to India.
Eventually, the Government of India extradited Kuldip to Canada in 2013, where he is serving a life term currently.
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Violence and community-building
The bombing of Air India 182 in 1985—carried out, we now know, thanks to an official investigation, under the benign gaze of Canada’s intelligence services—demonstrated that elements of groups like the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) and International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF) become a transnational terror threat. There were other things going on within the Sikh community in Canada, though, which illustrated an even deeper crisis unfolding.
For one, pro-Khalistan groups began a murderous war against secular figures in the community. Tara Singh Hayer, a journalist who played a key role as a prosecution witness in the Air India case, was killed in 1998. Many others were killed in the struggle to take control of gurdwaras.
For one, a new generation of youth had become enmeshed in gangsterism, drawing on the zeitgeist among the immigrant milieu. Inspired by ethnic-Latin gangs running drug networks throughout the United States, Bhupinder ‘Bindy’ Johal, John Dosanjh, and Bal Butter became icons of a second-generation assertion of identity. The scholar Manjit Pabla has noted Bhupinder was a folk hero to many.
In some cases, even the cause of the killings wasn’t apparent. The ageing Air India bomber and now a PM Narendra Modi supporter, Ripudaman Singh Malik was murdered by contract killers in July 2022 and is speculated to have been paid the price for gangland deals, reneging on Khalistan, and as punishment for his involvement in terrorism.
The violence that runs through diasporic Sikh communities is, in some sense, evidence of the failure of countries like Canada and the United Kingdom to genuinely integrate immigrants into the wider milieu.
Largely cut off from the wider White Canadian milieu, anthropologist Parminder Bhattal has perceptively observed, the term Khalistan became an identity marker for young Sikhs. Instead of being a call for a tangible, sovereign State, it served as a means for young Sikhs to “distinguish themselves from other Canadian youth, particularly non-Sikh South Asian youth”.
Following a visit to Canada for a family wedding, a prominent Amritsar resident told scholar Paramjit Judge: “There was not a single white man among the invitees. After having stayed for so long, the Sikhs have not become part of the Canadian society.”
The scholar Jaspal Singh has noted how British pro-Khalistan rap invokes tropes of trauma and nationhood not as a call to war in a distant land, but to build a cultural identity that distinguishes itself from South Asian Hindus and Muslims.
Frontiers of the community are maintained not just by the invocation of Khalistan, but the—often brutal—punishment of miscegenation, forced marriages, and the social isolation of cultural rebels.
A movement in ruins
The scholar Ajai Sahni has noted that even in India, the Khalistan movement is a simulacrum of the armed insurgency it once was: Terror attacks have had to be conducted not by ideologically motivated recruits in either the West or India, but by small-time criminals. Few people have been killed as a result of terrorism in Punjab over decades; crimes of passion or greed claim far greater numbers of lives.
Even as India protests the macabre displays of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, it’s worth considering exactly how much it amounts to. Last year, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) installed a portrait of Dilawar Singh, the suicide bomber who killed Chief Minister Beant Singh, in the Golden Temple. The museum has long hosted portraits of the killers of the PM.
The Indian government believed that allowing such displays enables marginal movements to be dissolved into the mainstream of politics. Even after Chauhan issued his famous advertisement, and Indira Gandhi’s killing, Rajiv Gandhi allowed him to return home in 1989. An unofficial blacklist barring Khalistan activists in the West from coming home was removed in 2019.
Forgetting is indeed a powerful tool of healing—but for it to work, a genuine reckoning with the truth must come first. The inability of Indians to have a genuinely introspective conversation about the past—the bombing of the Air India flight, 1984 riots, storming of the Golden Temple, the PM’s assassination—has poisoned relationships among the Indian diaspora, and at home.
“I know what a ghost is,” wrote Salman Rushdie. “Unfinished business, that’s what.” It’s time for India to lay its ghosts to rest.
Praveen Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)