Final week, the U.S. Division of Justice introduced that it had foiled an alleged plot by an Indian official to homicide a Sikh activist and American citizen in New York Metropolis. The DOJ’s press launch discloses that Czech authorities detained and extradited the alleged murderer this previous June.
This announcement comes on the heels of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s public accusation that the Authorities of India was complicit within the June 18 homicide of Sikh Canadian chief Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Gunmen shot useless Mr. Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, outdoors a Sikh place of worship in Surrey, British Columbia. (The Indian Authorities has denied any involvement in Nijjar’s homicide.)
Trudeau’s rebuke garnered the eye of world leaders, and the story dominated headlines internationally. Most commentary has centered on India’s descent to authoritarianism. Some evaluation has rightly positioned Nijjar’s extra-judicial killing throughout the bigger sample of escalating state-sponsored minority persecution in Modi’s India, inflicting Genocide Watch to difficulty an alert that India is on the group stage of genocide.
What’s absent from this reporting, nonetheless, is a dialogue of the context undergirding these tensions. To see the image extra holistically, we should look at the questions: What are the Sikh group’s grievances in opposition to India, and what roots their requires political sovereignty? And why does Modi’s authorities really feel so threatened by requires Sikh self-determination that they might danger relations with world superpowers just like the U.S. and Canada?
The story of Sikh sovereignty begins with its founder, Guru Nanak (d. 1539 CE), who noticed the injustices round him and supplied one other manner. He revealed a brand new idea, ik oankar, which introduced the oneness of all beings, and which insisted that each one individuals are equally divine and inherently sovereign. Guru Nanak taught {that a} Sikh’s objective on this world is to achieve their very own liberation whereas additionally guaranteeing that each one folks have the chance to reside freely, too—and that when political leaders impinge on folks’s rights and freedoms, it’s a Sikh’s accountability to withstand that repression.
This ethos has manifested itself within the Sikh polity in numerous methods because it was first revealed centuries in the past, from resistance poetry, to an organized military, to political autonomy. The early 1800s noticed the rise of the Sikh Empire, led by the charismatic and pluralistic Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The British East India Firm conquered Punjab in 1849, the final space in South Asia to fall, bringing the area into colonial rule for practically a century.
Because the solar started to set on the British Empire, colonial management created new nation-states carved out totally on the idea of spiritual identification. Discussions on the time included the potential for various international locations for various non secular communities, together with Hindustan (India) for the Hindus, Pakistan for the Muslims, and Khalistan or Sikhistan for the Sikhs. The Sikh political leaders in the end declined to pursue a separate homeland and selected as an alternative to align themselves with the concept of a brand new secular, pluralistic democracy, together with the reassurance that, as a minority group within the new Indian nation, Sikh rights could be protected.
In August of 1947, the homeland of the Sikhs—Punjab—was divided into two practically equal components; the western half would type a part of Pakistan, and the jap half would turn out to be a part of India. What ensued following the formal partition of Punjab had been the most important and deadliest mass migrations in human historical past: students estimate between 200,000 to 2 million folks died within the communal violence, and that as much as 20 million had been displaced.
Numerous Sikhs deserted their houses and migrated east, together with members of our households. Those that survived began life throughout, abandoning their property, companies, and locations of worship. They even left behind the birthplace of their beloved founder, Guru Nanak, which now fell in Pakistan. Certainly, a good portion of Sikh heritage now lies on the Pakistani aspect of Punjab.
India started its nation-building mission, bringing the immense problem of forging a typical identification amongst massive and religiously, linguistically, and culturally various populations. What a majority of the overall inhabitants shared, although, was a Hindu identification, and this faith turned the middle round which political leaders determined to coalesce Indian nationwide identification, a lot to the dismay of India’s minority populations.
Indian management got here to see non secular minorities as a menace to their nation-building mission, viewing Sikhs with specific suspicion and disdain, recognizing they catalyzed anti-colonial efforts and performed a number one function in them. They had been additionally conscious that Sikhs nonetheless had current recollections of political autonomy in Punjab. Indian elites nervous about Punjab turning into a majority Sikh state that will acquire in political energy and threaten the steadiness of younger India. This led Indian management to disclaim Punjab and its Sikhs consequential rights that had been afforded to different states, together with official language standing for Punjabi and its personal state capital. India additionally weakened Punjab’s political energy by carving out territory from it for different states, akin to Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Furthermore, contravening riparian legislation, a global norm, India diverted Punjab’s river waters to different states and areas, a large financial blow to the state long-known because the breadbasket of India, and a menace to the livelihood of Punjab’s agrarian society.
Punjabi Sikhs quickly started agitating in opposition to the Indian authorities, protesting the erosion of its cultural, financial, and political rights. In 1978, Sikh management drafted the Anandpur Sahib Decision, which laid out an inventory of calls for to safeguard the rights of Sikhs in Punjab and different minorities round India.
A charismatic Sikh chief from a non secular seminary emerged throughout this era, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, whose ascent caught the attention of the Indian authorities. Bhindranwale spoke adamantly in opposition to the infringements of the Indian state, which by this stage had escalated to incorporate gross human rights violations. He referred to as on Sikhs and minorities all over the place to face up in opposition to oppression. Citing him as an anti-national who threatened India’s stability, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched a navy assault in opposition to him and his followers on the Golden Temple of Amritsar—probably the most important website for Sikhs—on a significant non secular vacation. Bhindranwale was killed within the assault, together with 1000’s of different Sikh pilgrims who had been worshipping there.
The worldwide Sikh group was livid in regards to the authorities’s assault and demanded justice. On this second, the motion for a separate Sikh homeland was reborn. Bhindranwale had acknowledged overtly that he neither supported nor rejected the concept of Khalistan – however that if the Indian authorities ever invaded the Golden Temple complicated, the inspiration for an impartial Sikh homeland could be laid.
Later that 12 months, Ms. Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, presumably to avenge her assault on the Golden Temple. Within the days that adopted, the ruling Congress Celebration, using state companies and infrastructure, organized violent anti-Sikh pogroms throughout North India, centered totally on the Indian capital of New Delhi. The pogroms left 1000’s of Sikhs useless, 1000’s extra displaced, and all Sikhs questioning if they might ever have a house in India.
Bhindranwale’s prediction got here true. The anti-Sikh violence of 1984 made many Sikhs really feel just like the sample of abuses below Indian management wouldn’t finish, and it fueled a brand new motion for Sikh self-determination. In July of 1984, Sikhs gathered in Madison Backyard in New York Metropolis and introduced their dedication “to help the battle of Sikhs within the Punjab for self-determination and the preservation of their distinct and non secular identification.” Lower than two years later, 1000’s of Sikhs gathered on the Golden Temple of their political custom of Sarbat Khalsa and introduced a decision to acknowledge Khalistan.
From the mid-Nineteen Eighties to the mid-Nineties, Punjab was enmeshed in a violent battle. A phase of the Sikh inhabitants took up armed resistance, with the goal of profitable an impartial Sikh state, free from the tyranny of India. This era of insurgency is commonly what westerners imply when they’re referring to the Khalistan Motion.
Whereas India accused militants of focusing on politicians and civilians, Indian safety forces employed widespread and systematic abuses for over a decade, together with torture, homicide, and enforced disappearances, focusing on anybody it suspected of being concerned within the insurgency or political motion for self-determination. Within the years since, human rights defenders and researchers have uncovered the extent of India’s atrocity crimes. In 1995, human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra launched official data demonstrating Punjab Police had kidnapped, killed and secretly cremated 1000’s of Punjabi Sikhs. Punjab Police subsequently kidnapped, tortured, and killed Khalra for refusing to retract his findings. In 2017, new proof demonstrated greater than 8,000 further extra-judicial killings, bringing complete estimates to 25,000.
Though the violent battle subsided by the mid-Nineties, the tradition of impunity for gross human rights violations and extra-judicial violence continues to grip Punjab. Not one of the chief architects of the crimes in opposition to humanity have been delivered to account, nor have survivors and their communities been given reparations. Furthermore, the federal government continues to make use of the specter of terrorism to focus on its critics, and the central difficulty of the denuding of Punjab’s river waters serves as a unbroken flashpoint.
This pressure was evident over the past couple of years, when India attacked Sikhs through the 2022 Farmers Protests by calling the protestors “Khalistanis and “Anti-nationals.” The accusations fell on deaf ears, with world recognition that Sikhs and others had been organizing to guard their agrarian livelihoods. The federal government used these similar techniques this previous spring throughout their manhunt for Sikh chief Amritpal Singh—once more, utilizing the specter of nationwide safety to violate human rights, focusing on journalists and group organizers in dragnet operations. Sikhs have turn out to be desensitized to those spurious accusations, nicely accustomed to the cynical nationalist playbook: demonize minorities to provoke the Hindu majority. That this technique is being deployed within the midst of an election 12 months isn’t any coincidence. Modi and his BJP regime have used this program diligently for 20 years.
And but, the Indian authorities’s alleged makes an attempt to kill international nationals on international soil point out a shifting strategy. Modi’s India is now keen to interact transnational repression and homicide of his critics, becoming a member of the ranks of China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia with these practices.
As India continues its slide from democracy to authoritarianism, Sikhs in India and around the globe have been reminded that this devolution isn’t just Modi’s India. It’s India as they’ve at all times skilled it. The newest assassination try in New York Metropolis and the homicide of Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil fall into a protracted historical past of abuses, underscoring why Sikhs don’t really feel safe and vindicating their long-held perception that India poses the best menace to its personal nationwide safety.