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“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 individuals.
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 identify 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 USA. Canada, with greater than 770,000 Sikhs, has the most important Sikh inhabitants exterior India. A lot of them left India in the course of 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 individuals on social media,” stated Paramjit Singh, 45, a truck driver who lives on the outskirts of Jalandhar, in northern Punjab. “They don’t let individuals eat in peace.”
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