Dreams of Khalistan: Bakersfield Sikhs reflect on activist's killing

Oct. 7—Upon hearing the news that day, Gurpinder Singh admitted: He was shocked, but he wasn't surprised.

A priest by trade, Gurpinder Singh had at the time only just moved to the Central Valley, to Bakersfield, to act as a custodian of the Guru Granth Sahib, the religious scriptures of the Sikhs, for a local gurdwara, or temple.

On June 18, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh activist living in the Canadian town of Surrey, was shot dead in his truck outside his local gurdwara by two gunmen.

The assailants reportedly fired about 50 rounds — 34 of which hit Nijjar.

Months later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared before the House of Commons and accused agents of the Indian government of orchestrating the hit.

"Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty," Trudeau said at the time.

The accusation sparked protests worldwide, from smashed windows in San Francisco to an Indian flag torn from its stand at a government building in London.

"In the past few weeks and months, time stood still for Sikhs across the world," said Bakersfield City Councilwoman Manpreet Kaur, during closing remarks at the city's Sept. 27 meeting.

In Fresno, protesters picketed outside the State Bank of India. Naindeep Singh, the executive director of the Fresno-based nonprofit Jakara Movement, told Fox 26 reporters that "the assassination" was a part of "a long history of attempting to silence Sikh voices for freedom, justice and human rights."

"We will not be silent in the face of tyranny from the Indian government," he added.

Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he supports a "full investigation into the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar."

Valadao, who represents parts of Fresno and Kern counties, and co-chairs the American Sikh Congressional Caucus, said constituents from Hindu and Sikh communities have reached out with their respective concerns.

"I will continue to monitor this crime and ensure accountability," Valadao wrote.

And whereas cities across the world protested in the streets, Gurpinder Singh and others kept to themselves.

Silent protest

Many Sikhs in Bakersfield are still wary to speak about the killing publicly, or appear in Western media, out of fear of reprisal.

Conversation on the topic largely remained confined to local Sikh gurdwaras — four of which are in the city's Ward 7, the state's third largest concentration of Sikhs.

Sitting beside a translator in a gurdwara courtyard — with children playing soccer in the surrounding field — Gurpinder Singh spoke softly of the killing.

Nijjar, from his post as president of his local gurdwara, championed the creation of Khalistan, a sovereign homeland for Sikhs formed out of the Punjab from India and Pakistan.

"He was not an extremist, he was not a terrorist," Gurpinder Singh said. "He was advocating for Khalistan in a democratic way, which was his right."

What is Khalistan?

It's a movement with a tumultuous history, of which Gurpinder Singh and others in Bakersfield remember deeply. Prior to British occupation, the former state of Punjab had long existed as a self-contained nation, a Kingdom of Sikhs.

Following the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947, colonies were redrawn along religious lines — Muslims moving west into the newly formed Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs steered east.

Calls for a return to that kingdom were quickly quelled, and as decades proceeded, resentment mounted until it reached a bloody climax in the 1980s.

This period is described by historians as a brutal, secessionist struggle in Punjab that spanned more than a decade, claimed thousands of lives, and spawned a culture of killing, kidnapping and police corruption.

Sitting beside Gurpinder, Symbal Singh, another Sikh Punjabi man living in Bakersfield, chimes in.

He remembers the time well, having gone to college at a local university: it was a tit-for-tat conflict, between an overwhelming government and separatists galvanized by second-class treatment and the belief their identity faced erasure.

Symbal Singh and others don't necessarily condone the violence of that time, but these retaliations must be considered in context.

Twice, the Indian army brought tanks and artillery upon the Sikhs' Golden Temple, their holiest site, in Amritsar to rout the separatists' leadership.

The first assault happened in June 1984, which led to the assassination of India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who was gunned down by two of her Sikh bodyguards five months later. Her killing triggered anti-Sikh riots that left thousands of Sikhs burned, clubbed or hacked to death in a firestorm of zealous violence.

Symbal Singh would flee the country four years later, in 1988.

"Why I'm alive today is because (I) and people of my age took refuge in Canada and America," Symbal Singh said. "That's how we are surviving."

Looking back, it was a period, he said, where being politically vocal was almost as dangerous — for you and your family — as being a young man.

A common practice, he continued, was for Punjabi police to stage gunfights, in detention or in emptied fields, and gun down unarmed Sikh men, for which they likely received promotions.

"They would empty a vehicle of people they had detained over the past couple of days," Councilwoman Kaur translated for Symbal Singh. "And they would either tell them to start running through the field and shoot them or they would say, 'Oh, they had a conflict with somebody else,' and basically stage a shootout."

Ensaaf, a Pleasanton-based documentary group, called the period from 1984 to 1995 the "Decade of Disappearances," in which nearly half the Sikhs' young male population was wiped out. In 2016, the Fresno City Council would declare the period "a genocide."

"Even to this day, in some districts you can't find young boys to marry," Kaur explained for Symbal Singh. "Because (Indian agencies) murdered so many men that even to this day, it's a challenge to find enough men to marry women in Punjab."

Where is the movement today?

Today, the Khalistan movement is outlawed in India, even in Punjab, where Sikhs — despite comprising about 2% of the country's 1.3 billion people — form a majority.

There is no active insurgency in Punjab, and the word Khalistan exists in India as a contemporary boogeyman, one that critics of India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, say is used to bolster his image and wrangle in his Hindu majority.

What little support for the Khalistan movement that remains there is dwarfed by the support found in the Sikh diasporic communities in Britain, Canada and the United States.

Yet even 8,000 miles away, Gurpinder Singh said lingering concerns remain.

In the weeks since the killing, the FBI has notified several Sikh activists in the United States, reportedly warning them of threats against their lives.

"The FBI visited Sikhs residing in California to warn them (that their) lives are at risk," Kaur said, citing a Sept. 23 report from The Intercept. "Sikhs throughout the U.S. have received police warnings about potential threats."

Was does Nijjar's death mean for Sikhs in Bakersfield?

Symbal Singh said he hasn't heard of any death threats against people in Bakersfield. But he's confident they're real, just as he and the others are confident India played a role, as they have in the death of others.

Nijjar, after all, was among several Sikh activists killed or found dead under contested circumstances this summer — the third in a span of 45 days.

And like the others, Nijjar was labeled a terrorist by India's National Investigation Agency, which accused him of attempting "to radicalize the Sikh community across the world." The designation came in 2020, months after Nijjar took on the role of president at his local gurdwara in Surrey.

But Gurpinder and those in Bakersfield thought of the slain activist as a visionary, one who mourned for the loss of others, practiced peacefully and spoke against the Hindu-first policies of India's Modi.

For many Sikhs in Bakersfield, the accusation by Trudeau validated the reasons they left.

"Whenever Hindus talk about their own Hindu nation, they are not given any punishment or anything, but if a Sikh asks for Khalistan, they are sent to jail," said Simran Singh, a Punjabi Sikh man who joined the conversation. "Even today."

One of Nijjar's final efforts was a push for unofficial referendums, held in Surrey in 2022, and again in September. While Sikhs for Justice, a Canadian-Sikh advocacy group, has not yet released the results, it reported more than 100,000 people voted. Prior to his death, Nijjar announced a third vote for Oct. 29.

Acts like these, which are otherwise considered here as protest — such as removing an Indian flag from a government building — are often denounced as terrorism in India, by its government and mainstream press.

"If you're talking about reputational issues and reputational damage, if there's any country that needs to look at this, I think it's Canada," India's foreign ministry spokesperson, Arindam Bagchi, told reporters in a Sept. 21 news conference. "And its growing reputation as a place, as a safe haven for terrorists, for extremists, and for organized crime."

Yet for many Sikhs, it doesn't matter their level of activism or beliefs on Khalistan; rather, for Gurpinder, it's the name on his credit card and turban on his head that determine the treatment he receives the moment he lands in an Indian airport.

"We are humiliated by Indian agencies," Singh said. "They are asked, 'How many people have you killed?' and they suspect everybody whose last name is Singh ... They treat us like terrorists."

When asked how it made him feel, Gurpinder Singh reported a familiar response: shocked, but not surprised.