India’s Sikh problem

Modi govt unwilling to concede that Sikh agitation is reaction to rise of extremist Hinduism

It is not unfair to say that India has a “Sikh problem”. I will examine this in two articles, the first of which appears today. The Khalistan separatist movement dates back in importance to before the 1947 birth of independent India. It reached bloody climax in the 1980s, when a group of militants violently took over the Golden Temple, one of the holiest places for the county’s Sikhs to promote their cause. The militant Sikhs bombed an Air India flight en route from London to Toronto, killing more than 300 people who were on the plane. There were troubles in India as well. Sikhs were a dominant part of a farmers’ movement in Punjab in 2021 that gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi the gravest political challenge of his then ten years in power forcing him to make a rare concession with the Indian parliament, repealing that the laws intended to open agriculture to market forces. The rural Sikh community believed that the new laws would bring in moneyed Hindu businesspeople who would buy out the state-protected farmers.

The Modi government is not willing to concede that the Sikh agitation both inside the country as well as outside is a reaction to the rise of extremist Hinduism. Prime Minister Modi sees the activities of Sikh separatists as mostly gang related, a chaotic mix of extraction, traffic in drugs, and score settling. According to one interpretation, the Sikh “criminal masterminds often operating from abroad, take advantage of economic desperation in a state where farmers are crushed by rising debt and many youths lack employment or direction — problems compounded by a feeling of political alienation in minority Sikh communities.”

Resentment against the rise of Hindu extremism was expressed in early 2023 by Amritpal Singh, a young Sikh who walked around Punjab portraying himself as the new prophet of Khalistan. When his supporters attacked a police station to free one of their detained accomplices, authorities ordered Singh’s arrest. A new prophet of Sikh grievances was thus born. But there are some in the Sikh leadership that had good working relationship with the members of the ruling Hindu party. Among them was Amrinder Singh who was the chief minister of Punjab in 2018. He met with Trudeau and gave the Canadian prime minister a list of 10 to 12 Sikh Canadians whom he labeled “mischief makers”. He had publicly declared several of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers as Khalistani sympathisers including Canada’s first Sikh defense minister, Harjit Sajjan, who was a member of the delegation that Trudeau had brought with him on that Indian visit.

The Sikh problem came to the attention of the world in a way that India and its prime minister would have least expected. The allegation by Trudeau in a speech on September 17 at the Canadian national assembly made an allegation that proved to be a bombshell. The prime minister said that the Indian government may have been behind the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, who had migrated to Canada and acquired Canadian citizenship. He was born in the city of Jullundur in north Punjab. He married in Canada and had two sons.

Nijjar had become active in the 770,000 Canadian Sikh diaspora and was leading those in his community who were working for the session of the Indian state of Punjab and become an independent country to be called Khalistan. In a complaint recorded in 2018, India’s premier investigative agency accused him of “conspiracy and planning to carry out a major terrorist attack in India”. It also alleged that he planned to violently attack gatherings of the nationalist right-wing organisation Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, which is the basis of support for Prime Minister Modi. The temple was located in the city of Surrey in British Colombia. After attending a meeting in the temple, he walked to his car parked in the parking lot and started his drive home when his way was blocked by a vehicle that had two hooded men who had been waiting for him. They jumped out of the car and fired sixty bullets at Nijjar who was killed instantly.

Trudeau’s speech followed weeks of behind-the-scenes contact with allied nations over the killing alleged to have been carried out by two men who reportedly belong to the Indian intelligence service known by its acronym, RAW. The acronym stands for the Research and Analysis Wing of the Ministry of External Affairs. Nijjar was visiting Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara where he was the president.

The Canadian government expelled an Indian diplomat identified as the senior intelligence officer at the Indian embassy in Canada. While not openly accused of having orchestrated the Nijjar assassination, the Trudeau administration was clearly pointing its finger at India. These moves sent relations between the two countries tumbling toward their lowest point. India reacted by expelling a Canadian official from the embassy in New Delhi. Weeks before the statement by Trudeau, he had asked its Western allies including Washington to publicly condemn the killing but the requests were turned down. The Canadian request landed Washington with a tricky problem. “We have been in close contact with our Canadian colleagues,” a senior Statement Department official said on September 19 in a press briefing. “We’re quite concerned about the allegations. We think it is important there is a full and open investigation, and we would urge the Indian government to cooperate with the investigation.”

To put the Nijjar case in the right context, it would be useful to address, albeit briefly, the history of Sikhs in India and the world outside. With a population numbering between 25 and 30 million, Sikhism is the world’s fifth largest religion. They are made up of an ethno-religious group that was formed in the late 15^th century in the province of Punjab by Guru Nanak, the first of a series of “gurus”. The term Sikh has its origin in the Sanskrit word “sisya” which means a disciple or student. Strict followers of the religion must always have uncut hair covered by a turban. Guru Nanak was succeeded by nine gurus. Their selection often led to bitter disputes in the community. To prevent that from happening repeatedly, the community decided to make Granth Sahib, the sacred scripture of Sikhism, as the tenth guru who would rule in perpetuity.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 9^th, 2023.

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