Throughout his first journey to India as Canada’s prime minister in 2018, Justin Trudeau made a go to to the northern state of Punjab, the place he received a photograph op in full Punjabi costume on the Golden Temple, the holiest website of the Sikh faith.
He additionally received, courtesy of the Indian authorities, an earful of grievances — and a listing of India’s most-wanted males on Canadian soil.
The killing this summer season of 1 man on that listing, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, has became a diplomatic battle between India and Canada. Mr. Trudeau claimed this month that Indian brokers had orchestrated the assassination inside Canada. India rejected the assertion and accused Canada of ignoring its warnings that Canadian Sikh extremists like Mr. Nijjar had been plotting violence in Punjab in hopes of constructing the state right into a separate Sikh nation.
However past the recriminations, a extra complicated story is unfolding in Punjab, analysts, political leaders and residents say. Whereas the Indian authorities asserts that Canada’s lax perspective towards extremism amongst its politically influential Sikhs poses a nationwide safety risk inside India, there’s little assist in Punjab for a secessionist trigger that peaked in lethal violence a long time in the past and was snuffed out.
Violence in Punjab that the federal government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi attributes to Sikh separatists is, actually, largely gang-related, a chaotic mixture of extortion, narcotics trafficking and score-settling. The prison masterminds, usually working from overseas, make the most of financial desperation in a state the place farmers are crushed by rising debt and plenty of youths lack employment or course — issues compounded by a sense of political alienation in minority Sikh communities.
For Mr. Modi, the pursuit of a small however noisy assemblage of criminals in a faraway nation — India had been pushing for the extradition of 26 earlier than Mr. Nijjar’s dying — and the amplification of the separatist risk present an vital political narrative forward of a nationwide election early subsequent 12 months.
It furthers his picture as a strongman chief who will go to any extent to guard his nation. It has prompted even a few of his staunchest critics to rally round him within the face of Canada’s accusation. And it gives a contemporary risk to level to after Mr. Modi capitalized on violent Islamic militancy emanating from Pakistan earlier than the final election, in 2019, to create a political wave.
On Tuesday, the Indian international minister, S. Jaishankar, stated that Canada had seen “quite a lot of organized crime” associated to “secessionist forces,” whereas including that focused killings had been “not the coverage of the Indian authorities.”
Stoking the specter of Khalistan — the would-be Sikh homeland — as a nationwide problem as soon as once more has pushed India’s 25 million Sikhs right into a tough area. Previous wounds of prejudice towards them have been reopened, they usually now discover themselves in the course of a diplomatic conflict that separates them from household within the massive Sikh diaspora.
For Mr. Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Social gathering, or B.J.P., there’s little value in an exaggerated portrayal of safety dangers in a minority group, analysts say.
The get together, whose leaders espouse a nationalist ideology that prioritizes majority Hindus over minority teams like Muslims and Christians, has tried to court docket Sikhs as a constituency, seeing them as a part of the prolonged Hindu household. Mr. Modi himself has usually visited Sikh temples and worn the Sikh turban.
However Sikhs have vehemently opposed that effort, viewing it as an try to erase their distinctive id — each as a group and as followers of a faith they contemplate distinct. Sikhs had been a dominant a part of a farmers’ motion in 2021 that gave Mr. Modi the most important political problem of his decade in energy, forcing him right into a uncommon concession, with Parliament repealing legal guidelines meant to open agriculture to market forces.
In Punjab meeting elections final 12 months, the B.J.P. managed to win solely two out of 117 seats.
Every time Punjabis have felt unheard and indignant lately, they’ve voted out their authorities, not pursued separatism. In 2022, that discontent was so widespread that Punjab voted for not one of the outdated events that had beforehand ruled it, together with the pre-eminent Sikh non secular get together.
As a substitute, it voted into energy a comparatively new outfit that was in energy in only one different state, as a result of it promised higher governance — improved colleges and well being care.
“There isn’t any Khalistan motion as such,” stated Surinder Singh Jodhka, a professor of sociology on the Jawaharlal Nehru College in New Delhi. “However there’s a sense that someway justice shouldn’t be finished to us.”
Khalistan has remained largely a diaspora problem, with proponents of violently pursuing the trigger making up a tiny minority. To the extent that Sikhs in Punjab discuss separatism, it’s in opposition to a nationwide ruling get together and its sister organizations, some with their very own path of violence, that talk brazenly about their want to show India right into a Hindu state.
It was a sentiment expressed earlier this 12 months by a younger man who paraded across the state portraying himself as the brand new prophet of Khalistan, prompting a manhunt and an web shutdown.
The rise of the 30-year-old preacher, Amritpal Singh, was mysterious. His arrest in a cat-and-mouse chase this spring, after his supporters had grown so emboldened that they attacked a police station to free one in every of their detained accomplices, put a quiet finish to his saga.
However Mr. Singh, giving speeches and interviews through which he blended his attraction for the separatist trigger with social points reminiscent of drug rehabilitation, gave voice to a sense that the B.J.P. has been prejudiced by pursuing and prosecuting Sikhs for doing the identical factor that India’s Hindu proper itself has finished — specific concepts of non secular nationalism.
“Which mountain has been introduced down by merely speaking about Sikhs’ rights?” stated Gurdeep Singh, a farmer in Punjab.
The Khalistan separatist motion, which dates in earnest to earlier than the delivery of post-colonial India in 1947, reached a bloody climax within the Nineteen Eighties, when a bunch of militants violently took over the Golden Temple to push their trigger. The wave of separatist violence on the time included the bombing of an Air India flight, en path to London from Toronto, that killed greater than 300 folks.
Afterward, because the separatist violence fizzled out, hope for a extra inclusive future for Sikhs took maintain, even with little justice for the widespread violence inflicted by the federal government within the title of cracking down on extremists. Between 2004 and 2014, India had its first, and solely, Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh.
However Khalistan remained a preoccupation of some Sikhs in nations like Australia, Britain and the US. Canada, with greater than 770,000 Sikhs, has the biggest Sikh inhabitants exterior India. Numerous them left India throughout the separatist violence, or the years instantly after it, carrying wounds that fueled their Khalistani advocacy.
“They don’t even have funds, they usually can’t come right here as a result of they’re banned in India, however they attempt to provoke folks on social media,” stated Paramjit Singh, 45, a truck driver who lives on the outskirts of Jalandhar, in northern Punjab. “They don’t let folks eat in peace.”
Amarinder Singh, who was the chief minister of Punjab in 2018 and gave the most-wanted listing to Mr. Trudeau, had made the assembly tough earlier than it even started: He had publicly declared a number of of Mr. Trudeau’s cupboard ministers to be Khalistani sympathizers, together with Canada’s first Sikh protection minister, Harjit Sajjan, who was a part of the delegation.
“I gave him a listing of 10, 12 names,” Mr. Singh stated of Mr. Trudeau. “I advised him that these are the people who find themselves creating mischief.”
Mr. Singh described these on the listing as “gangsters” and criminals, somewhat than fighters carrying the torch of a united ideology. “After they can’t get any cash in these nations, they begin shouting about Khalistan,” he stated.
However, Khalistan has turn into extra regularly mentioned in Indian nationwide politics over the previous three years. As Mr. Modi’s lieutenants grew pissed off with the Sikh-led farmer protests in 2021, they usually labeled the protesters as Khalistanis stoked by exterior forces.
“Mr. Modi is enjoying this politics for votes,” stated Kamaljit Singh, a farmer from the outskirts of Jalandhar who participated within the protests. “We’re caught within the center.”
