Opinion | How Khalistan Is Very Much A Canadian Issue

We can no longer treat Khalistan, as it currently manifests in parts of the diaspora, as somebody else’s problem

For years, Canadians have been told that Khalistan is an “Indian issue", a distant quarrel for India and the diaspora. That is no longer credible. The politics of Khalistan now sit in Canada’s gurdwaras, campuses, courtrooms, and security files.

From Proxy War to Insurgency

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After losing its third war with India in 1971, Pakistan’s military establishment adopted a doctrine of ‘bleeding India by a thousand cuts’: if it could not win on the battlefield, it would weaken India from within by backing separatist and religious militancy.

Punjab became a target. Pakistan’s ISI cultivated radical leaders who pushed the myth of a permanent Hindu–Sikh divide, instead of two intertwined traditions under a broader Sanatan umbrella. Khalistan was marketed as a separate Sikh homeland and as the only supposed guarantee of safety.

The result was a Khalistan insurgency through the 1980s and into the 1990s, killing more than 21,000 people, mostly Sikhs and Hindus who did not support separatism, and culminating in Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple (June 1984), the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (October 1984), the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi (November 1984), and the assassination of Punjab CM Beant Singh (August 1995).

Kanishka: Canada’s Blind Spot

As the insurgency was defeated in Punjab, many of its ideological and logistical backers moved abroad to the UK, US, Australia, and especially Canada, exploiting refugee and asylum channels. Canada paid the highest price with the bombing of Air India Flight 182.

By 1982, Canadian security services knew that the terrorist group Babbar Khalsa was operating here. Its leader, Talwinder Singh Parmar, was wanted for murder in India and openly preaching that Indian planes would ‘fall from the sky’. Internally, Babbar Khalsa was treated as a terrorist group by 1984, yet it remained legal in Canada until 2003 (after post-9/11 processes and the U.S. Executive Order 13224), and even raised money through tax-free ‘charity’ status.

In July 1984, at the World Sikh Organization’s inaugural convention in New York, Parmar’s ally Ajaib Singh Bagri called for the killing of tens of thousands of Hindus (essentially repeating........

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