After the call for a separate homeland for Sikhs during India’s freedom struggle was doused, it was on October 12 in 1971, that an advertisement in The New York Times announced the birth of Khalistan, or the land of the pure.
The advert claimed that the Sikhs were launching the final crusade till victory is achieved and they were a nation in their own right. While a part of the Sikh population in Punjab at the behest of Pakistan took up arms and violent insurgency raged, it received support from the Sikh diaspora and at many places the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was hailed on ocassions. For the separatist Sikhs, who remain in a minuscule minority, it was revenge for the attack on Golden Temple in which militant leader Jarnail Singh Bindrawale and his supporters were gunned down.
In his book Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project Terry Milewski wrote that the meek response from the Canadian government dates back to 1982 when Indira was still at the helm. Her regular complaints to Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre Trudeau who was then the Prime Minister of Canada were hardly met with any action. Khalistani backers continued to roam free and organise anti-India rallies.
While the support for the separatist movement in India has died over the years, in Canada, the push for a motherland has hardly seen any ebbing primarily due to the vote bank politics. Canada has a Sikh population of more than 770,000, or about 2% of its total population.
Also Watch: From Hardeep Singh Nijjar to Harmeet Singh: timeline of Khalistani leaders killed abroad
Therefore, calls for a referendum by the banned Sikhs for Justice or marches hailing the assassination of Indira have been allowed by the subsequent governments. SFJ is an outlawed organisation in India and has been linked to the rocket-propelled grenade attack at Punjab Intelligence headquarters in Mohali in May 2022.