While there may be some support for Khalistan in India’s Punjab, almost all of the activities of the movement are restricted to four countries: Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. The US and the UK have strong hate crime legislation, so the Khalistani activities there are mostly peaceful. It is in Canada that one finds the Khalistani movement going out of hand.

There, uniquely, one finds the national government dependent upon Sikh support. The Khalistanis in Canada openly promise a genocide and ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Canada, but the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not said a word to dissuade them. It is interesting to note that Canada’s Prime Minister-in-Waiting Pierre Poilievre loses no opportunity to take down Trudeau but he too has been silent on the Khalistanis. It is because come election time, he too might need Sikh support to form a government. Canadians have a worldwide reputation of being the sages of the western world. Jinnah in fact wanted India and Pakistan to live peacefully like the US and Canada. Much is made of how strong an ally Canada is of the US, but Canadians, for a myriad of reasons, hate the Americans.

Advertisement

One cannot enter into a dinner conversation in Canada without mauling the Americans. I have lived in Canada so I know. The other thing is that Canadians are very parochial. You cannot do business in Canada without an established presence in Canada. I worked for a small Silicon Valley company who wanted to sell its wares in Canada. It was not allowed to do so without having an office in Canada. It couldn’t afford an office there, so it gave up in despair. Some 200,000 Indian students go to Canada every year with the vast majority paying their tuition and living expenses. Canadian universities are trembling at losing the business of these students.

They are counseling the Hindu students that they have nothing to worry about, whereas in fact there is a lot to worry about. While university administrators fret, albeit selfishly, Trudeau has had nothing to say to the Hindu students. Freedom of expression also means that you speak up when required, not just go yak-yak-yak endlessly. It was 1981 and my family had just moved to Delhi. The streets of Delhi used to empty out at 8pm. Terror was in the air. A terrorist from the Punjab was sending his folks to Delhi to kill its citizens. He was a strangelooking man, wiry, but he spoke well.

Therein his charisma. Most of what he uttered was hatred against Hindus. His name was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. For some he was a saint, for others a devil. Terror stalked the Punjabi heartland. Bhindranwale’s goons indulged in a massacre of Hindus. Nothing could be done about it. The Punjab Police was largely complicit with Bhindranwale’s aims and ambitions. Thousands of Hindus perished in the Punjab between 1981-84. It was four years of hell for them. Many moved out of their ancestral homes in the Punjab.

The government seemed inert but was not averse to talking to Bhindranwale. But Bhindranwale wanted the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to visit him in the Golden Temple in Amritsar where he was ensconced. That was just not possible. It was 1984 and I was graduating from high school. I needed to pick up an application from a college in Haryana. My friend’s mom advised me not to go. The return journey was in a Punjab Roadways bus that passed through Punjab.

Those days Bhindranwale’s favourite activity was pulling passengers out of buses, segregating the Hindus from the Sikhs, and then shooting the former. My friend’s mom was concerned that I, a Hindu, too might meet such a fate. But I had to go so I went. All the time the bus was traversing Punjab, I was on tenterhooks. It was only when it crossed state borders that I heaved a sigh of relief. Bhindranwale, by many accounts, was about to declare Khalistan when the Indian army moved against him. Pakistan and rich Sikhs from the US supported him. Today there is no charismatic Sikh leader in the Punjab to rival Bhindranwale.

There is also only tepid support from Pakistan. All you have are these nuisance-makers from primarily Canada. But it would be dangerous to dismiss them only as nuisance-makers. They have a dream, and dreams can have nightmares for others. Today India is much stronger than in the eighties. If it could weather the Khalistani storm then, what is the tempest of today.

(The writer, an expert on energy, contributes to journals in India and overseas. The views are personal.)