Opinion | Khalistan Movement Isn’t Humanitarian. It Isn’t Peaceful. And It Doesn’t Speak For Most Sikhs

Sikhs worldwide, be they students, entrepreneurs, healthcare workers, or tradespeople, pay the reputational price of a movement they did not choose

Khalistan is routinely sold in the West as a civil-rights campaign: a tidy story about free speech, identity, and ‘human-rights’. It’s emotionally convenient because it reframes scrutiny as prejudice. But if you follow the record, not the slogans, a different picture emerges. Khalistan is not humanitarian, not peaceful, and it does not speak for the Sikh mainstream. It functions as a globalised ecosystem, born in Cold War-era geopolitics, scaled through diaspora fundraising and political cover, and sustained today through intimidation, propaganda, and a visible crime–extremism overlap that stains Sikh identity while enriching a narrow set of operators.

Its defenders often begin in 1984 and then leap straight to present-day grievances. That leap is the trick. The Hudson Institute study on Khalistan separatist activism describes the Punjab insurgency era as a prolonged campaign of violence and notes that ‘some 25,000 were murdered, mostly Sikhs’, over roughly 12 years (about 5.7 killings a day). The point Western audiences miss is blunt: this violence did not ‘protect Sikhs’. It preyed on them.

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Then the violence travelled West. Canada learned this on June 23, 1985, when Air India Flight 182 was bombed, killing all 329 people aboard, including 268 Canadian citizens. A proof that open democracies can be used as logistics bases.

And for a movement over half a century old, ‘Khalistan’ remains vague as a governing project: no recognised state, no enforceable borders, only self-styled ‘governments-in-exile’, shifting maps, and lots of propaganda. Those maps reveal the unseriousness; they claim Indian Punjab while excluding any part of Punjab in........

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