Before Part 11
Every part until now has been about dead people. This one is not.
Most of the people in this part are alive. Some are in prison. Some are running organisations. Some are facing charges that have not been tried, in three countries, right now as I write. That changes what I am allowed to do, and I want to set the rules out before I start rather than have you guess at them.
Rule one: an allegation is not a finding, and that cuts in every direction.
The Indian state has called a number of living men terrorists. Some of those men have never been tried. Canada has accused Indian government agents of murder on Canadian soil. That accusation has not been proved in a Canadian court either. I am going to keep saying which is which, over and over, until it becomes tiring — because the entire public argument about this subject consists of people treating their own side's allegations as proven and the other side's as propaganda.
There is one exception, and it is the most important fact in this part. In the New York case, a man pleaded guilty and has been sentenced. That is no longer an allegation. Chapter 6 explains exactly what it does and does not establish.
Rule two: the idea, the organisations, and the crimes are three different things, and I will not merge them.
A person can want a separate Sikh state and have never harmed anyone. A person can run a lawful advocacy group in Canada and have nothing to do with a bomb. A person can plant a bomb and use the word Khalistan while doing it. Treating those three as one thing is the single most common error in writing on this subject, and both sides commit it — one to make the idea look like a crime, the other to make the crime look like an idea.
Rule three: I am going to be blunt about the word "Khalistani" itself.
It has become, in Indian public speech, a word you throw at a Sikh who annoys you. Farmers protesting a farm law were called it. Journalists have been called it. That is Chapter 10, and it is in this part because you cannot understand the strength of the movement abroad without understanding what the label does at home.
None of that makes the movement's own record clean. Part 10 catalogued what was done in this name — a bombed airliner, murdered moderates, bus passengers separated by religion. That is not erased by anybody's misuse of a word.
And one honest declaration. Part 1 said I would examine an ideology that treats Hindus as the enemy. This is where I do it. I also said I would state the strongest case for Khalistan before answering it, and I do that here — the answer, the full audit, is Part 12. If Chapter 9 feels like it stops just before the verdict, that is deliberate. The verdict needs a whole part.
— L.S.The thing that outlived the movement
Part 10 ended in 1995. The militancy inside Punjab was finished. Two years later Punjabi voters elected an Akali Dal–BJP coalition — a Sikh religious party governing in alliance with a Hindu nationalist one. That is not what a population on the edge of secession does.
So this part begins with a puzzle.
If the movement was destroyed inside Punjab by 1995, and the voters of Punjab then did that, what exactly is the thing that still exists in 2026?
Because something clearly does. In 2023 a man was shot dead in a gurdwara car park in Surrey, British Columbia, and the Prime Minister of Canada stood up in Parliament and accused the government of India of being behind it. In 2024 the United States Department of Justice charged a serving Indian official with hiring a hitman to kill an American citizen in New York. In 2025 Canada listed an Indian criminal gang as a terrorist entity. Referendum events run in Britain, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, Canada and the United States.
None of that is happening in Punjab.
The shape of this part
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 1940 | The word "Khalistan" is coined in a pamphlet — and rejected within weeks by the leader of the Akali Dal. |
| 1971–1980 | Jagjit Singh Chohan takes the idea abroad. A newspaper advertisement in New York. A "Council of Khalistan." A house in London. Passports, stamps and currency that no country recognises. |
| 1984–1995 | The decade of Part 10. The idea acquires a body count, at home and abroad. |
| 1995–2007 | Defeat inside Punjab. Survival abroad. Chohan returns to India and dies there in 2007. |
| 2007–2020 | Sikhs for Justice is founded. A referendum campaign begins. India bans the organisation in 2019 and designates its counsel a terrorist in 2020. |
| 2023–2026 | Surrey. New York. Two killings — one carried out, one prevented — turn a fringe argument into a crisis between India and two of its closest partners. |
The Ghadar template
Part 6 described the Ghadar movement. Punjabi migrants on the west coast of North America, radicalised by the racism they met there, formed a revolutionary party in 1913 and sailed home to start a rising. They had money, a newspaper, real courage and a real grievance.
The rising did not happen. Punjab did not join them. The British hanged the leaders, and Punjabi villagers — many of them families of serving soldiers — often turned them in.
I called that pattern the Ghadar template: a diaspora that is more radical than the homeland, funded better than the homeland, and mistaken about the homeland.
That template is the analytical frame for this entire part. I am not asserting it fits. I am proposing it as a test, and Chapter 8 runs the test on actual election results.
The counting problem, again
Part 10 had a counting problem about the dead. This part has a counting problem about the living, and it is worse, because at least a body can in principle be counted.
Nobody can tell you how many people support Khalistan.
The movement's organisations announce referendum turnouts that no independent body has verified. The Indian state asserts that support is essentially zero, which is a claim about the private opinions of thirty million people and is not verifiable either. Journalists at the events count what they can see and repeatedly arrive at figures far below the organisers'.
Where I have numbers I can source, I give them and name who counted. Where the only figures available come from an interested party, I say so and let them stand as claims.
1The word, and the man who refused it
The word "Khalistan" is younger than the demand for Pakistan, and it was denounced by the most powerful Sikh leader of the age within weeks of being invented. Almost nobody arguing about it knows this.
March 1940
On 23 March 1940 the Muslim League passed the Lahore Resolution — the demand that became Pakistan. Part 2 covered where that idea came from. Part 7 covered what it did to Punjab.
Within weeks, a pamphlet appeared in reply. It was written by a man named Dr Vir Singh Bhatti, and in it he coined a word by the same method the Muslim League's supporters had used to coin theirs.
Khalsa is the community founded by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 — Part 4 covered that in detail. -stan is a Persian ending meaning "land of."
Khalistan therefore means, literally, "land of the Khalsa." It is built exactly like Pakistan, Hindustan, Afghanistan and Baluchistan. That is not a coincidence. It was a reply, in the same grammar.
This matters for a reason that has nothing to do with linguistics. The word did not come out of Sikh scripture. It did not come out of the Guru period. It did not come out of Ranjit Singh's empire, which never used it — Part 5 showed that his state called itself Sarkar-i-Khalsa and was not a Sikh-only country in any case.
The word was coined in 1940, in a specific political argument, as an answer to somebody else's proposal.
The refusal
The response of Master Tara Singh, president of the Shiromani Akali Dal and the dominant Sikh political figure of the period, was to denounce the pamphlet. His objection was that it added a third confusion to a situation already wrecked by the League's demand.
This is the fact I want on the record early, because it is routinely left out by people on both sides who find it inconvenient.
Why both sides skip this fact
The central claim of Sikh separatism is that Khalistan is an ancient national aspiration temporarily suppressed. But the word is from 1940 and the most authoritative Sikh political leader of that moment rejected it immediately. An eighty-six-year-old word is not an ancient claim.
The standard Indian account is that Sikh separatism is an alien implant with no roots in the community. But it was a Sikh who coined it, and Akali politics in the 1940s did contain real sovereignty proposals — Tara Singh himself argued for Azad Punjab and at moments spoke of Sikhistan. The demand was not imported. It was argued over, in Punjabi, by Sikhs, and it lost.
Both of those are true at once. That is the shape of this whole subject.
What the Akalis actually asked for
Part 7 covered 1947 in detail, so here I will only restate the outcome. The Sikh leadership of the 1940s made several sovereignty-adjacent demands across the decade — Azad Punjab, a Sikh state, guarantees within a united India — and in the end took the option of India, having concluded that a Sikh state was not achievable and that Pakistan was worse.
There is no serious dispute that the choice was made under terrible constraint. There is also no serious dispute that it was made.
The word "Khalistan" was invented in 1940 by a Sikh, rejected within weeks by the leading Sikh politician of the day, and had no organisational life of consequence for the next thirty years.
Everything in the rest of this part is built on a word that started its life being turned down.
2A country declared from a house in London
The modern movement has a founder, and he is not a martyr, a militant or a mystic. He was a dentist and a former Punjab finance minister who moved to Britain and, from there, announced the existence of a country.
Who Chohan was
Dr Jagjit Singh Chohan (1929–2007) was a qualified dentist from Tanda in Hoshiarpur district. He was briefly Deputy Speaker of the Punjab Assembly in the late 1960s and served as a state finance minister.
He was, in other words, a mainstream Punjabi politician who had been inside the system and had not risen far in it. In 1969 he lost his seat. Shortly afterwards he left for Britain.
13 October 1971
On 13 October 1971, an advertisement appeared in The New York Times proclaiming the beginning of a movement for an independent Sikh state.
This is the founding public act of the modern Khalistan movement, and I want to be precise about three things concerning it.
Documented The advertisement was published, on that date, in that newspaper, by Chohan.
Documented Its timing was extraordinary. It ran weeks before the December 1971 war in which India dismembered Pakistan and Bangladesh was created. A campaign to break up India, launched in an American newspaper, on the eve of that war.
Asserted by Indian intelligence, widely repeated, not independently confirmed That the Pakistani embassy in Washington paid for the advertisement. This claim comes from Indian intelligence assessments. It is repeated constantly in Indian writing. I have not found independent documentary confirmation of the payment, and I flag it as a serious and plausible allegation rather than an established fact.
That third row is a good example of what this part is going to do repeatedly. The allegation is not silly. The timing is genuinely striking, Chohan did visit Pakistan, and Pakistani officials did later host him. But "Indian intelligence sources said so" is not the same category of evidence as a court record, and I am not going to pretend it is.
The Council, the House, and the props
In April 1980 Chohan announced the Council of Khalistan, styling himself its president. In May 1980 he was in London, running what he called Khalistan House.
From there the movement acquired the apparatus of statehood without any of the substance:
- A declaration of independence
- Postage stamps
- Currency notes
- Passports
- A flag, an anthem and a cabinet-in-exile
No country recognised any of it. Not one. Not Pakistan, which had every incentive; not any Muslim state; not any government anywhere at any point in the following forty-six years.
The part that is hardest for both sides
Chohan is awkward for the movement because of how he ended, and awkward for the Indian state for the same reason.
After years abroad, his Indian citizenship revoked and his passport cancelled, Chohan returned to India in 2001. He lived out his remaining years in Punjab and died there in 2007. He was not imprisoned for life. He gave interviews. He contested the political ground and got nowhere.
For the movement, the founder came home and the homeland did not rise to meet him. For the Indian state, the man it had spent thirty years describing as the arch-enemy of the union was allowed to live quietly in Punjab, which is not what states do with people they genuinely regard as existential threats.
Aulakh and the Washington operation
The other name from this generation is Dr Gurmit Singh Aulakh, who ran a Council of Khalistan operation out of Washington DC from the mid-1980s until his death in 2017. His method was lobbying: press releases, Congressional contacts, submissions to human rights bodies.
It is worth understanding what that work looked like, because it explains something about the present. Aulakh's most effective material was not about Khalistan at all. It was about 1984, about the disappearances, about Khalra. In other words: the strongest asset the separatist movement has ever had abroad is the documented conduct of the Indian state in Part 10.
This is the engine of the entire diaspora movement, and it will appear again in every chapter that follows.
The movement's own programme — a separate state — has never persuaded many people. Its evidence file about what was done to Sikhs between 1984 and 1995 has persuaded a great many. The two get bundled together, and the strength of the second carries the first.
That is why Chapter 8's finding matters so much, and why Part 12 has to separate the grievance from the proposal and audit them apart.
3The network now: who is actually who
"Khalistani groups" is a phrase that does an enormous amount of hiding. It is used to cover a proscribed bombing organisation and a registered Canadian advocacy body in the same sentence. They are not the same thing and this chapter separates them.
The three categories
| Organisation | What it is, and its legal status |
|---|---|
| Babbar Khalsa International | An armed organisation from the militancy period. Proscribed as a terrorist organisation by India, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Responsible, through its Canadian branch, for the Kanishka bombing of 1985 — Part 10. |
| International Sikh Youth Federation | Militancy-period organisation. Proscribed in India and several other countries. The UK de-proscribed it in 2016 — the Home Secretary declined to defend the proceedings, citing "insufficient information to conclude that the group remains concerned in terrorism," and both Houses approved. A useful reminder that these designations are contestable and are sometimes contested successfully. |
| Khalistan Tiger Force | Designated a terrorist organisation by India. This is the group India says Hardeep Singh Nijjar led — Chapter 5. |
| Sikhs for Justice | Founded in New York in 2007. A campaigning and litigation organisation; its central project is the referendum. Banned in India in July 2019 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Not proscribed in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, where it operates lawfully. |
| World Sikh Organization of Canada | A mainstream Canadian Sikh advocacy body, founded 1984, active on civil rights and religious accommodation cases. Not proscribed anywhere. Regularly described in Indian commentary as a Khalistani organisation; it rejects the description. |
Read that table twice. The distance between the first row and the last is the distance between a bombing that killed 329 people and a body that files court cases about turbans in the workplace.
The Indian objection: the categories leak. Personnel, platforms and money move between advocacy organisations and harder ones; a group that files lawsuits in Toronto can also honour men convicted of murder. That is not paranoia. It has happened.
The objection from the other side: the leak is used to justify collapsing every Sikh political actor abroad into "Khalistani," including elected politicians and human rights lawyers who have never advocated separatism at all. That is not paranoia either. It also happens, constantly.
I keep the categories separate and note the crossings where they are documented. That is the only method available that does not simply adopt one side's convenience.
Sikhs for Justice
SFJ was founded in New York in 2007 — twelve years after the militancy inside Punjab was over. This matters. It is not a surviving militant organisation that changed tactics. It was created abroad, after the fighting ended, by lawyers.
Its general counsel and public face is Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen and attorney based in New York. He is the single most visible figure in the movement today.
Documented India banned SFJ under the UAPA on 10 July 2019, and designated Pannun individually as a terrorist under the same Act on 1 July 2020. The ban on SFJ has since been extended.
Documented He has issued repeated public video statements, including messages that Indian agencies have treated as threats against Indian aviation and against named individuals. Several FIRs and NIA cases exist in India.
Documented He has never been convicted of an offence in the United States, where he lives, and remains at liberty there. American law protects a great deal of speech that Indian law does not.
The unresolved question Whether his output constitutes incitement, or protected political speech that India finds intolerable, is exactly the question the two legal systems answer differently. That disagreement — not any secret sympathy for separatism — is why Washington has not acted against him.
The money question
Where does the funding come from? This is asked constantly and answered badly.
The honest answer has three parts.
First, the ordinary and largest source is the diaspora itself. Punjabi Sikh communities in Canada, Britain and the United States are numerous and, in many cases, prosperous. Gurdwara collections, event fees and individual donations are the base. This is not sinister and does not require any state.
Second, gurdwara control is the real prize. Large North American gurdwaras handle substantial sums and confer enormous legitimacy. Control of their management committees has been fought over — sometimes in elections, sometimes in court, occasionally violently — for four decades. Whoever holds the committee holds a platform and a budget.
Third, on Pakistani state funding: the evidence is strong for the 1980s and 1990s and much thinner for now. Part 10 established the ISI's role in the militancy period as documented. Applying that finding automatically to the present is a different claim, and the public evidence for it is assertion-heavy. I treat it as unresolved and return to it in Chapter 9.
The network is not one organisation. It is a proscribed militant remnant, a set of lawful advocacy bodies, a litigation-and-referendum operation founded in 2007, and a contested set of gurdwara committees that supply money and legitimacy to whoever wins them.
Any sentence that treats all of that as a single entity is either propaganda or laziness.
4The referendum, and the numbers nobody can check
It is called Referendum 2020. It began in 2021, is still running in 2026, has no legal effect anywhere on earth, and produces turnout figures that no independent body has ever been able to verify. It is also the most effective thing the movement has done in thirty years.
What it actually is
Sikhs for Justice announced a global referendum on Sikh independence. Voting opened in London on 31 October 2021 — the anniversary of Indira Gandhi's assassination, which is not an accident — and has continued at city-by-city events ever since: Switzerland, Italy, Australia, Canada, the United States.
Understand what this is not.
This is not a referendum in any legal sense. No government organises it. No electoral commission supervises it. No voter roll exists. Nobody is bound by the result. Nobody checks whether a person has voted at more than one event, or in more than one city, or in more than one country.
It is a series of privately organised public gatherings at which people fill in a ballot paper. The organisers then announce a number.
Voting is open to Sikhs worldwide, not to residents of Punjab — who cannot participate, because holding such an event in India would be a criminal offence and the organisation is banned there.
The numbers, and who says them
| Event | Organisers said | What could be independently established |
|---|---|---|
| Surrey, BC September 2023 | More than 200,000 over two days | A news director present counted approximately 65,700. CBC News reported it was unable to verify the organisers' figure. |
| London | Over 30,000 | Reported via the organisers and outlets carrying their claim. No independent count located. |
| Ottawa November 2025 | 53,000-plus — announced as the largest single-day figure in the Canadian series | No independent verification located. |
| Seattle 22 March 2026 | Approximately 27,000 | No independent verification located. |
The Surrey gap is the one that tells you the most, because it is the only case where somebody actually counted. Organisers said more than 200,000. An observer on the ground counted about 65,700. That is a ratio of roughly three to one.
I am not asserting that ratio applies everywhere. I am pointing out that in the single instance where a count exists, the announced figure was roughly three times it — and that every other figure in that table comes from the announcing party alone.
The steelman, stated properly
Rule 3 requires the best version of the argument, so here it is, put the way a supporter would put it.
"Of course it has no legal force. Nobody claims it does. It is not a mechanism for creating a state; it is a mechanism for demonstrating that a constituency exists — the same function served by every unofficial plebiscite in the history of self-determination movements, several of which are now UN member states.
The demand that we produce verified figures is made in bad faith by a state that has criminalised the act of voting in this poll on the territory it concerns. You cannot ban the vote at home and then demand the vote at home as proof.
And whatever the exact number: tens of thousands of people, in wealthy democracies, in the rain, standing in queues for hours, is not nothing. Nobody queues for four hours for a cause they are indifferent to."
That last point is fair and I am not going to wave it away. Queues are real. The people in them are real.
The answers to it are these, and they are not rhetorical.
One. Turnout at a voluntary event measures intensity, not proportion. The people who show up are by definition the committed. It tells you a committed minority exists; it cannot tell you what share of Sikhs it represents, and it is not designed to.
Two. The self-reported figures are unverifiable in principle, not just in practice. With no roll and no duplicate check, the same person voting in London, Milan and Toronto is three votes. That is not an accusation of fraud. It is a description of the design.
Three. The claim that Punjab's exclusion is entirely India's doing is strong but not complete. Punjab holds real elections, frequently, with genuinely competitive outcomes — Chapter 8. Separatist-adjacent candidates have contested them and have sometimes won. There is an available measurement of Punjabi opinion. It is simply not the one the referendum produces.
5Surrey, June 2023
On 18 June 2023 a man was shot dead in the car park of a gurdwara in British Columbia. Three months later the Prime Minister of Canada told his Parliament that agents of the Indian government may have been responsible. Nothing about the relationship between India and the West has been the same since.
Who Hardeep Singh Nijjar was — both accounts
He was born in 1977 in Punjab and went to Canada in 1997. He worked as a plumber. He was the president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, one of the largest Sikh places of worship in North America. He was 45 when he was killed, shortly after evening prayers, in the car park of his own gurdwara.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar: the two descriptions
A designated terrorist. India's National Investigation Agency named him as chief of the Khalistan Tiger Force, a proscribed organisation. Indian agencies alleged he was involved in a 2007 cinema bombing in Ludhiana, that he ran weapons training in British Columbia, and that he directed activity inside Punjab. A cash reward was announced for information on him.
He denied all of it. He wrote publicly that he supported the right of Sikhs to self-determination but had "never believed in, supported or been involved in any violent activity." He was a Canadian citizen. Canadian authorities had not charged him with any offence. He said he was being harassed by Indian intelligence and had raised it with Canadian officials.
Here is the position I am obliged to take, and it will satisfy nobody.
The allegations against Nijjar were never tested in any court, in any country. He was never tried and never convicted. An NIA designation is an executive act, not a verdict.
That does not mean the allegations were false. It means they were untested — and they can no longer be tested, because he is dead.
And it does not matter to the legal question in any case. A state may not kill a citizen of another state on that state's territory because it believes him guilty of something. That is the whole of the Canadian complaint, and it does not require Nijjar to have been innocent.
18 September 2023
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons and said Canadian security agencies were pursuing "credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen."
Read the wording. It is heavily qualified: credible allegations, potential link, agents of. That is the language of an investigation, not of a finding.
India rejected the allegation as absurd and motivated. Diplomatic expulsions followed in both directions. India suspended visa services for Canadians for a period, and required Canada to withdraw 41 diplomats from India.
What has happened since, in order
Established Nijjar was shot dead on 18 June 2023 in Surrey, British Columbia.
Established In May 2024 the RCMP arrested four Indian nationals — Karan Brar, Kamalpreet Singh, Karanpreet Singh and Amandeep Singh — and charged them with first-degree murder and conspiracy.
Established Bail was granted to the accused in January 2025. The case proceeded to the British Columbia Supreme Court by direct indictment, a step that bypasses a preliminary inquiry.
Alleged, not proved That the government of India directed the killing. Canada has asserted this at the highest level. As at mid-2026 no court has ruled on it.
Denied India has consistently and categorically denied any involvement, and has never resiled from that denial — including during the diplomatic reset of 2025–26.
I want to be exact about one more thing, because it is where most commentary goes wrong. Charging four men with the murder is not the same as proving state direction. Establishing who pulled the trigger and establishing who ordered it are separate evidentiary problems. The first is before a Canadian court. The second, as at the time of writing, is not.
6New York: the plot that stopped being an allegation
Everything else in this part is contested. This is not. In a New York courtroom in 2026, a man admitted under oath that he had been hired to arrange the murder of an American citizen on American soil, and that the person who hired him worked for the government of India. He has been sentenced.
What the indictment said
In November 2023 the United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national. The allegation: that he had been recruited in May 2023 by an Indian government employee to arrange the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in New York — a US citizen, unnamed in the document but universally understood, and later confirmed, to be Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
The plot failed for a reason that is almost farcical. The "hitman" Gupta hired was an undercover American law enforcement officer. A payment of $15,000 was made as an advance. The entire arrangement was being recorded by the people he thought he was employing.
The name
In October 2024 a superseding indictment named the Indian official previously identified only as "CC-1." He was Vikash Yadav — a former assistant commandant in the Central Reserve Police Force, described in the indictment as employed by India's Cabinet Secretariat, the part of the Indian government that contains the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence service.
The FBI issued a warrant. India stated that Yadav was no longer a government employee. He was separately arrested by Delhi Police in an unrelated extortion and kidnapping case and was granted bail in April 2025. He has not been extradited.
13 February 2026
Gupta pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to three counts: murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
On 29 May 2026, he was sentenced by US District Judge Victor Marrero to 24 years in prison.
A guilty plea is not a press briefing, an intelligence assessment or a leak. It is a formal admission, made under oath, accepted by a federal judge, and followed by a 24-year sentence.
The plot against Pannun is therefore no longer a claim made by one government about another. It is a matter of judicial record in the United States.
What it establishes, and what it does not
Now judicially established A conspiracy to murder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen, in New York, existed. Nikhil Gupta was part of it, has admitted it, and is serving 24 years.
Charged by the United States, uncontested in court That the man who directed Gupta was Vikash Yadav, then employed by the Cabinet Secretariat. Yadav has not appeared to answer the charge, so it has not been tested adversarially.
Not established How far up the Indian government knowledge or authorisation went. The indictment does not answer this and no court has. Anyone who tells you it has been proved either way is going beyond the record.
India's position India denies any state involvement in a plot to kill Pannun, and has characterised the matter as the unauthorised act of an individual. It set up a high-level inquiry committee in response to the American information.
The consequence for every other argument in this part
This is the reason Chapter 6 sits where it does.
Before February 2026, India's blanket position — that all such accusations are fabrications by hostile actors and separatist lobbies — was internally coherent. You could believe it without believing anything unlikely.
After a guilty plea and a 24-year sentence in a US federal court, that blanket position is no longer available. Something happened. A conspiracy to kill a man in New York existed, and the person the United States says organised it was employed by the Indian government at the time.
That does not prove Surrey. Different country, different case, different evidence, no verdict. But it destroys the argument that such a thing is unthinkable — which was, until 2026, the main thing standing between the Canadian allegation and belief.
7The gangster turn — and the reset that followed
In October 2024 the Canadian police made an allegation that went considerably further than one killing. Then, within a year, both governments decided they had more to gain from trade than from the argument. Both of those facts belong in this chapter, and neither cancels the other.
14 October 2024
The RCMP took the unusual step of going public mid-investigation. Commissioner Michael Duheme said investigators had linked agents of the Indian government to a pattern of serious criminal activity in Canada — homicides, extortion and coercion directed at members of the South Asian diaspora.
The alleged method was the part that mattered: not intelligence officers acting directly, but the use of organised crime networks as intermediaries. The network named was the gang associated with Lawrence Bishnoi, an Indian gangster who has run his operation from inside Indian prisons.
Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, after India declined a request to waive their immunity. India expelled six Canadian diplomats in reply and called the allegations preposterous.
Then the designation
On 29 September 2025, Canada listed the Lawrence Bishnoi gang as a terrorist entity — an Indian criminal organisation, formally designated as terrorists by a G7 government.
A subsequent RCMP report went further, describing the group as "acting on behalf of" the Indian government.
The Canadian position: a foreign state used a criminal gang as a proxy to intimidate, extort and kill people on Canadian soil. That is a sovereignty violation of a very serious order.
The Indian position: the allegations are unsubstantiated, no evidence has been produced publicly, and Canada is responding to domestic political pressure from a constituency that includes people India regards as terrorists.
What can be said: the Bishnoi gang is real, violent, transnational and operating in Canada — nobody disputes that. The claim that it operates on behalf of the Indian state is a police assertion that has not been tested in court. It is a serious assertion from a serious institution. It is not a verdict.
The reset — and what it tells you about all of this
Then something happened that surprised almost everyone.
Justin Trudeau left office. Mark Carney became Prime Minister of Canada in 2025. In June 2025, at the G7, Carney and Narendra Modi agreed to rebuild relations. High Commissioners were restored. In February 2026 Carney visited India on a four-day official visit, with trade and security cooperation at the centre of it.
The Nijjar allegation was not withdrawn. India's denial was not withdrawn. Neither government resolved anything. They simply decided the dispute was costing more than it was worth.
Between 2023 and 2026 Canada accused India of murder on Canadian soil, expelled its High Commissioner, designated an Indian criminal network as terrorists, and then signed trade agreements with the same government — with the accusation still standing and still denied.
For anyone in the movement who believed that Western outrage would translate into Western pressure, this is the most important fact in this part. It did not. It translated into a trade delegation.
That is the Ghadar template again, and in its cruellest form. In 1914 the diaspora believed the world would respond to Punjabi grievance and it did not. In 2026 the diaspora watched a G7 government make an accusation of extraterritorial murder and then travel to New Delhi to talk about market access.
8Inside Punjab: what the voters actually did
Punjab holds real elections. They are competitive, governments lose them, and the results are not what either side of this argument would like. This chapter is the test, and it does not deliver a clean answer to anybody.
Why elections are the best instrument available
We cannot survey thirty million people on secession. But Punjab votes, often, and its elections are genuinely uncertain — three different parties have formed governments there in the last fifteen years. Voters throw out incumbents. Independents win. The results are not managed.
Elections are a blunt instrument for measuring a view on independence, because nobody is on the ballot offering it. But they are the only large-scale, repeated, independently counted measurement of Punjabi opinion that exists. Everything else in this argument is an assertion.
The record
| When | Result |
|---|---|
| 1997 | Akali Dal–BJP coalition wins the assembly. Two years after the militancy ends, Punjab elects a Sikh religious party in alliance with a Hindu nationalist one. |
| 2022 assembly | AAP sweeps Punjab — a party with no panthic programme whatsoever, campaigning on schools, clinics, electricity and corruption. The Akali Dal, the traditional vehicle of Sikh politics, is reduced to three seats. |
| June 2022 | Simranjit Singh Mann, a lifelong hardline panthic politician, wins the Sangrur by-election — the sitting Chief Minister's own vacated seat — four months after the sweep. By 5,822 votes: 253,154 to 247,332. A real win, and a narrow one, on very low by-election turnout. |
| 2024 Lok Sabha | Congress 7, AAP 3, Akali Dal 1, Independents 2. BJP zero. The two independents are Amritpal Singh (Khadoor Sahib, margin 197,120 — the largest in Punjab) and Sarabjit Singh Khalsa (Faridkot, margin 70,053), son of one of Indira Gandhi's assassins. |
| 2026 civic polls | AAP retains its base, winning 958 of 1,977 wards. The Akali Dal fails to recover. |
The strongest case each side draws from this
The 2024 result, read two ways — both readings are serious
A jailed preacher held under the National Security Act won a Lok Sabha seat by the largest margin in the state, and the son of Indira Gandhi's assassin won another. Neither had a party, money or a machine. Punjabis knew exactly what they were voting for and did it anyway.
That is not apathy. That is a constituency, and it is growing precisely because the Akali Dal collapsed and left nobody else speaking for it.
Two seats out of thirteen. The other eleven went to Congress and AAP — parties whose manifestos contain nothing resembling separatism. Two years earlier the same electorate had handed AAP a landslide on drains, schools and electricity bills.
A protest vote against three discredited mainstream parties, in two seats, is not a mandate to leave India. If it were, the same voters would not have spent the previous election on municipal services.
Both of those are honest readings of the same numbers. Here is what I think the evidence actually supports, stated carefully.
1. A real panthic constituency exists. It is concentrated in the Majha border districts, it is capable of winning parliamentary seats without a party organisation, and it is not going away. Anyone claiming support for hardline Sikh politics inside Punjab is zero is refuted by two 2024 results.
2. It is a minority, and not close to a majority. Eleven of thirteen seats, and a preceding assembly landslide for a party running on governance, say so.
3. Its growth is a symptom of collapse, not conversion. The Akali Dal destroyed its own credibility — the 2015 sacrilege incidents and police firing, the alliance choices, the family control. The panthic space did not expand. Its occupant died and something moved into the vacancy.
4. Voting for Amritpal Singh is not the same as voting for secession, and there is no way to separate the two from a ballot. This is a genuine limit on what this evidence can show, and I am not going to overclaim past it.
The survey evidence, with its limits stated
Two data points exist. Both need caveats, and I am giving the caveats rather than just the numbers.
Pew Research Center, Religion in India (published 2021). Among Sikh respondents: 95% said they were very proud to be Indian, and 70% agreed that a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh. Only 14% said Sikhs face a lot of discrimination in India.
This finding is quoted constantly in Indian commentary as proof that Sikhs reject Khalistan. It does not say that, because it did not ask that.
National pride and constitutional preference are different questions. A person can be proud to be Indian and still believe Punjab was cheated on water, Chandigarh and the SYL canal — Part 8's entire file. The survey was also fielded between late 2019 and early 2020, before the farmers' protest, which changed the political temperature in Punjab considerably.
What it does establish, robustly, on a sample of 1,782 Sikhs: at that moment, Sikh national identification with India was high — not marginal, not grudging, and not consistent with a population on the verge of leaving.
The BBC surveys of April 1984. At the absolute peak of the crisis — two months before Operation Blue Star — separate surveys reported that 88% of Sikhs in Punjab and 82% of Sikhs in Britain were against the idea of Khalistan.
If that is accurate, it is the single most important number in this part, and it is worth sitting with. At the moment of maximum grievance, maximum mobilisation and maximum militant presence, roughly nine in ten Sikhs in Punjab did not want the thing.
9The two big claims, tested
Two sentences do most of the work in this argument. One says Khalistan is a Pakistani intelligence project. The other says it is the suppressed will of the Sikh nation. Both are stated here at full strength, and then tested.
Claim one: "Khalistan is a Pakistani project"
"The 1971 advertisement was paid for by Pakistan's embassy. Chohan operated with Pakistani facilitation. The ISI ran training camps, supplied weapons and money to Babbar Khalsa, the KCF and the KLF, and provided sanctuary across the border throughout the militancy — this is documented and India has said so for forty years.
The demand serves Pakistan's strategic interest precisely: it would detach India's border state, its granary, and the recruiting ground of a large share of its army. No Pakistani government has ever supported an equivalent movement among its own Sikhs, or among Punjabi Muslims, because the object was never Sikh freedom. Rawalpindi has been open about Kashmir. Khalistan is the same instrument aimed at a different limb."
Testing it.
Part 10 examined this and produced a verdict I am keeping: false as stated, true when amended. The ISI's role in the militancy period is documented and was substantial. But every cause of the movement was domestic — Chandigarh, the water allocation, the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, the Congress cultivation of Bhindranwale, Blue Star, November 1984. Not one of those required Pakistan.
For the present period, three further things must be said.
One. The word was coined by a Sikh in 1940 in opposition to the Muslim League's demand. Whatever the movement later became, it did not begin as a Pakistani instrument. It began as a reply to one.
Two. The evidence for current Pakistani state funding of the diaspora network is thin in the public record. Assertion is plentiful; documentation is not. The bulk of the money is plainly diaspora money — gurdwara collections and individual donations in Canada, Britain and the United States. That requires no foreign intelligence service at all.
Three, and this is the point that does the real damage: if the movement were principally a foreign operation, the Indian state's own conduct would not matter to its strength. It manifestly does. The recruiting material that works is not Pakistani. It is Indian — 1984, the disappearances, Khalra, and now the New York indictment. Chapter 6 was a bigger gift to the movement than anything Pakistan has managed in twenty years.
Pakistan armed this movement. Pakistan did not cause it, does not currently fund most of it, and cannot sustain it.
What sustains it is a grievance file that the Indian state wrote itself and has never closed.
Claim two: "Khalistan is the will of the Sikh nation"
"Sikhs were promised autonomy and given a truncated state without its capital, without its rivers and without its Punjabi-speaking areas — Part 8. When they protested peacefully through the Akali morchas, they were jailed. When they passed a resolution through constitutional means, it was declared secessionist.
Then the state stormed their holiest shrine on a martyrdom anniversary, organised the killing of thousands of them in its capital city, disappeared thousands more, and convicted almost nobody for any of it.
A people that is told it cannot obtain justice inside a state is entitled to conclude that it should not be inside that state. The referendum queues, the 2024 result, and the fact that a foreign government has now accused India of murdering Sikhs abroad are all evidence that the conclusion is spreading, not fading."
Testing it.
The grievance half of that argument is not weak. It is, in the main, documented — by this work across Parts 8, 9 and 10, and largely by the Indian state's own commissions and courts. I am not going to soften it and Part 12 will not soften it either.
The inference is where it fails, and it fails on the movement's own chosen ground.
One. The claim is about the will of a people. Punjab has voted repeatedly, freely and unpredictably, and has never returned a separatist mandate — not in 1997, not in 2022, not in 2024, not in 2026. A movement claiming to speak for a nation cannot indefinitely explain away every election that nation holds.
Two. The referendum measures the committed, not the proportion, and its own numbers cannot be checked. Chapter 4.
Three. Roughly nine in ten Sikhs in Punjab were against Khalistan at the peak of the crisis in 1984, on the available survey evidence. If the claim was not true then, when the grievance was rawest, the burden on anyone asserting it is true now is very heavy.
Four, and this is the hardest one. The people who acted in this name between 1984 and 1995 killed a great many Sikhs — police, journalists, politicians, clergy, and villagers who would not pay. They shot Harchand Singh Longowal in a gurdwara for signing an accord that gave Punjab Chandigarh. A movement's claim to embody a people sits badly beside its record of killing that people's own leaders for negotiating.
The grievance is real and largely proven. The mandate is not.
These are separable, and the entire argument turns on refusing to separate them. Part 12 separates them and audits the proposal on its own terms — water, land, capital, borders and exit routes — with the grievance fully granted.
10The label: what "Khalistani" now means
A word that described a political demand now functions, in Indian public speech, as a way to end an argument with a Sikh. This chapter is here because the label has become one of the movement's most reliable recruiting assets, and it is not the movement that supplies it.
What the word does now
Between 2020 and 2021, farmers — a large proportion of them Sikh Punjabis — camped on the roads into Delhi in protest against three farm laws. The laws were eventually withdrawn.
During that protest, and for a long time afterwards, a great many of those farmers were publicly described as Khalistanis: on television, by political figures, and at enormous volume online. So have journalists, comedians, students, activists, and Sikhs who criticised government policy on entirely unrelated matters.
The word has changed jobs. It used to describe someone who wanted a separate country. It is now frequently used to mean a Sikh who is arguing with me.
When a word can be applied to a farmer objecting to crop pricing, it has stopped carrying information about separatism.
The other half, stated honestly
Rule 5 applies here as everywhere, so: the label is not conjured out of nothing.
There were Khalistan flags at some protest sites. Sikhs for Justice openly attempted to attach itself to the farmers' movement and offered money in its name. Separatist organisations abroad did try to claim the protest as their own. The farm unions rejected this, repeatedly and publicly — but the attempt was real, and people who point to it are not inventing it.
What follows is that a genuine phenomenon existed at the margin, and it was then used to characterise the whole. That is a specific and identifiable error, and it is the one this chapter is about.
Why this is a strategic disaster for the Indian state
Here is the mechanism, and it is worth stating plainly because it is not usually stated at all.
The core proposition of Sikh separatism — the thing it has to establish before anything else follows — is: Sikhs cannot be fully and safely Indian.
Every time a Sikh who has no interest in separatism is publicly called a Khalistani for holding an ordinary political opinion, that proposition acquires a small piece of evidence. Not from a pamphlet. From lived experience, on national television.
This is not an argument that the movement is therefore right. Chapter 9 already found its central claim unsupported by every measurement available. It is an argument about causation: a state that wants fewer separatists has a direct interest in not telling loyal citizens that they are separatists.
Part 11 is about a movement that survives almost entirely outside Punjab. Chapter 8 showed it cannot win an election inside Punjab. So the obvious question is what keeps it alive at all.
The answer is two things, and both are Indian: an unclosed grievance file from 1984–1995, and a live, continuously renewed supply of evidence that Sikh identity is treated as suspect. The movement does not have to generate either. It only has to point.
11Scorecard: what Part 11 proves
FALSE The word was coined in a pamphlet in March 1940 by Dr Vir Singh Bhatti, in reply to the Muslim League's Lahore Resolution of the same month. Master Tara Singh, president of the Akali Dal, denounced it within weeks.
Sikh sovereignty arguments in the 1940s were real — Azad Punjab, Sikhistan. But the specific demand, under this name, is 86 years old and was rejected by Sikh leadership at birth.
FALSE AS STATED; PARTLY TRUE WHEN AMENDED The 1971 New York Times advertisement was allegedly paid for by Pakistan's Washington embassy — an Indian intelligence claim, widely repeated, not independently documented. ISI arming and training of militant groups in the 1980s and 1990s is documented and was substantial.
But the word was coined by a Sikh against the Muslim League; the causes were entirely domestic; the present-day funding base is overwhelmingly diaspora money; and the recruiting material that actually works is Indian conduct, not Pakistani propaganda.
FALSE IN EVERY SENSE THAT MATTERS Chohan declared one from London in 1980, complete with passports, stamps, currency and a cabinet. In forty-six years not one government on earth has recognised any of it — including Pakistan, which had every incentive.
Chohan himself returned to India in 2001 and died there in 2007.
UNVERIFIABLE BY DESIGN No voter roll, no duplicate check, no independent supervision, no legal effect, and the population of Punjab cannot participate.
In the one case where an independent count exists — Surrey, September 2023 — organisers announced more than 200,000 and an observer counted about 65,700. CBC News reported it could not verify the organisers' figure. Every other number in the series comes from the announcing party alone.
What the queues do establish: a committed minority exists, abroad, in numbers that are not trivial. What they cannot establish is a proportion.
ALLEGED AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL; NOT PROVED IN COURT Trudeau's September 2023 statement was carefully worded — "credible allegations of a potential link." Four Indian nationals were charged with the murder in May 2024 and granted bail in January 2025; the case went to the BC Supreme Court by direct indictment. As at mid-2026, no court has ruled on state direction.
India has denied involvement throughout, including during the 2025–26 diplomatic reset. Charging four men with the killing is not the same as establishing who ordered it.
NO LONGER AVAILABLE AS A POSITION On 13 February 2026 Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering, in a plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York. On 29 May 2026 he was sentenced to 24 years.
The US superseding indictment of October 2024 named the official who directed him as Vikash Yadav, then employed by India's Cabinet Secretariat. Yadav has not been extradited and the charge against him remains untested.
This does not prove the Canadian case. It removes the presumption that such a thing could not happen — which was the main defence the Canadian allegation had to overcome.
NOT SUPPORTED BY ANY AVAILABLE MEASUREMENT 1997: Akali–BJP coalition, two years after the militancy ended. 2022: AAP landslide on schools, clinics and electricity; the Akali Dal reduced to three seats. 2024: Congress 7, AAP 3, Akali Dal 1, independents 2 of 13. 2026 civic polls: AAP retains its base.
Survey evidence points the same way — 95% of Sikh respondents "very proud to be Indian" (Pew, published 2021, fielded 2019–20); and at the peak of the crisis in April 1984, BBC surveys reported 88% of Sikhs in Punjab against Khalistan.
ALSO FALSE — AND THIS IS THE OTHER HALF In 2024 Amritpal Singh won Khadoor Sahib by 197,120 votes — the largest margin in Punjab — while detained under the National Security Act in a jail in Assam, with no party and no machine. Sarabjit Singh Khalsa won Faridkot by 70,053. In June 2022 Simranjit Singh Mann won the Sangrur by-election.
A real panthic constituency exists, concentrated in the Majha border belt. It is a minority. It grew because the Akali Dal destroyed itself and left the space empty — a vacancy filled, not a population converted.
FALSE, AND STRATEGICALLY EXPENSIVE Farmers protesting crop laws, journalists, comedians and students have been labelled with it. The separatist case requires one proposition above all — that Sikhs cannot be fully and safely Indian. Every misapplication of the label supplies public evidence for exactly that.
The honest other half: SFJ did try to attach itself to the farmers' protest, and some Khalistan flags did appear. The farm unions rejected it publicly. A marginal phenomenon was then used to characterise a movement of hundreds of thousands.
A DIASPORA MOVEMENT LIVING ON AN INDIAN GRIEVANCE FILE Not an insurgency — that ended in 1995. Not an electoral force in Punjab — Chapter 8. Not a recognised state project — nobody has ever recognised it.
What exists is a network of organisations abroad, funded mainly by diaspora money and gurdwara committees, whose most persuasive material is not its own programme but the documented conduct of the Indian state between 1984 and 1995 — now supplemented by a federal conviction in New York.
It cannot win Punjab. It does not need to in order to persist. And the 2026 Canadian reset showed what its ceiling abroad looks like: an accusation of extraterritorial murder, followed by a trade visit.
Timeline of Part 11
What happens in Part 12
Part 12, The Feasibility Audit, does the thing this part has deliberately not done. It grants the grievance in full — every finding of Parts 8, 9 and 10, conceded without argument — and then asks a different question entirely.
Would it work?
Not "is it deserved." Not "is it just." Those are the questions everyone argues about and they are not the questions a state is built on. Part 12 runs the proposal the way I would run a business plan across a desk:
- Water. The hardest question there is. Punjab's rivers rise outside Punjab. Headworks upstream sit in territory a separate Punjab would not control. Part 8 established the dependency; Part 12 prices it.
- Land and borders. A landlocked state with no port, one hostile frontier and one former-parent frontier. What is the exit route for a grain economy?
- Capital and revenue. What is the tax base, what is the currency, who lends to it, and on what terms?
- Demography. Who would actually be inside such a state, and what happens to everyone who is not Sikh — roughly two in five of Punjab's present population?
- The precedent. Part 5 audited the one Punjabi sovereign state that has actually existed. It lasted forty years and destroyed itself in ten. That record is admissible evidence and Part 12 admits it.
Emotion is not admissible in that chapter. Neither is sentiment on the other side. It is the chapter I have been building toward since Part 1, and it is where this work stops describing the argument and starts answering it.
Sources & further reading — Part 11
Court records and official documents
- United States v. Nikhil Gupta, US District Court for the Southern District of New York — indictment unsealed November 2023; superseding indictment naming Vikash Yadav, October 2024; guilty plea 13 February 2026; sentencing before Judge Victor Marrero, 29 May 2026.
- Government of Canada, Global Affairs — statement of Minister Mélanie Joly announcing the expulsion of Indian diplomats, 14 October 2024.
- Public Safety Canada — listing of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang as a terrorist entity, 29 September 2025; and the Currently Listed Entities register generally, for the status of Babbar Khalsa International and the ISYF.
- Royal Canadian Mounted Police — public statements of Commissioner Michael Duheme, 14 October 2024, and subsequent reporting on the Bishnoi group.
- Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India — UAPA notification banning Sikhs for Justice, 10 July 2019, and subsequent extensions; UAPA designation of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun as an individual terrorist, 1 July 2020.
- Hansard, House of Commons of Canada — statement of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 18 September 2023.
- Colin Bloom, Does Government "do God"? An independent review into how government engages with faith, UK Government, April 2023 — the "Sikh extremism" section.
- UK Home Office — The Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2016, SI 2016/391, de-proscribing the International Sikh Youth Federation; laid 22 February 2016, with the accompanying Hansard debates in both Houses.
- Election Commission of India — Punjab results, 2022 Vidhan Sabha and 2024 Lok Sabha, for all margins and seat totals cited.
Survey data
- Pew Research Center, Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, 29 June 2021. Fielded late 2019 to early 2020; 29,999 respondents including 1,782 Sikhs. The 95% "very proud to be Indian" and 70% "cannot be a Sikh" figures come from here, with the caveats given in Chapter 8.
- Lokniti-CSDS Punjab post-poll studies, 2022 and 2024.
- BBC surveys of April 1984 on Sikh attitudes to Khalistan in Punjab and Britain — as reported subsequently; I have not been able to inspect the original instrument, and flag the figure as widely cited rather than personally verified.
Journalism
- Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) — four decades of reporting on Sikh militancy in British Columbia, gurdwara politics and the Air India case. The indispensable source on the Canadian end.
- CBC News — reporting on the Surrey referendum turnout and its verification problems; on the Nijjar charges, court appearances and bail.
- The Globe and Mail — profile of Hardeep Singh Nijjar; reporting on the diplomatic expulsions and on the Bishnoi designation.
- Global News (Canada) — reporting on the RCMP allegations and the terrorist listing.
- The Tribune (Chandigarh), ThePrint, Deccan Herald — Punjab electoral coverage, the Amritpal Singh detention and NSA extensions, and Indian coverage of the Gupta and Yadav proceedings.
- Al Jazeera, BBC, Reuters — the Gupta guilty plea and sentencing; profiles of Pannun and Yadav.
Scholarship and background
- Gurharpal Singh, Ethnic Conflict in India: A Case-Study of Punjab — on the structural politics of the demand.
- Darshan Singh Tatla, The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood — the standard scholarly account of exactly the subject of this part.
- Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation — interviews with militants, valuable for how participants describe themselves.
- Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries — for the longer argument about Sikh identity formation underlying all of this.
- Wikipedia entries on Jagjit Singh Chohan, Gurmit Singh Aulakh, Khalistan Referendum, Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Tara Singh (activist), used for dates and cross-checking only, and verified against the primary sources above wherever a claim in this part depends on them.
Three categories appear throughout this part and I have tried to mark every one of them.
Court record — the New York conviction. This is the strongest evidence in the part and the only thing in it that has survived an adversarial process.
Police or government assertion — the RCMP's Bishnoi finding, India's NIA designations, the Pakistani funding of the 1971 advertisement. Serious, from serious institutions, and untested.
Interested-party claim — every referendum turnout figure, and every assertion that support is zero. Reported as claims, attributed, and not adopted.
Where I have collapsed those categories anywhere, I have made an error, and I would like to be told about it.