Did India carry out or abet the assassination of a Sikh leader on Canadian soil?
On Monday, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, accused India’s government of having a role in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh separatist who was gunned down in Surrey, British Columbia, in June. Sikhs make up less than two per cent of the population of India, but are a majority in the northwestern state of Punjab.
At Partition, the Sikh community saw itself as being very vulnerable. It was a small community in the united British Punjab—less than about fourteen per cent of the population. Sikhs tried to come up with various schemes to keep the community together, to keep Punjab together, but unfortunately that did not come to pass, as the British wanted to exit India and Punjab quickly. Thereafter, Indian states or provinces were organized along linguistic lines.
When did the Indian government begin to get so concerned about Sikhs on foreign soil advocating for Sikh issues in India? How important is the push for a Sikh homeland to Sikh identity in many of the Western Sikh communities you study? That’s an interesting question, because in the eighties it was associated with the equivalent of religious fundamentalism that was pervasive throughout many of the faith traditions, especially after 1979. But in recent years, that relationship has, to some extent, broken down, because some of the hard-core faith groups have become, in some ways, apolitical. They’ve become much more spiritually oriented. They are still there in the background, but not in any great strength.
Is there concern among Indian-origin communities in the West about surveillance being done in Western countries by the Indian government? The life and times of militants are not without past histories of radicalism and engagement in violence. And it may well be that he was a party to it, but it may well also be that the case against him is fabricated. So I cannot comment with any confidence on that.
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