Khalistan movement
Based on Wikipedia: Khalistan movement
In 2024, something remarkable happened in Indian democracy: two men won seats in Parliament while advocating for the dissolution of the very country they'd been elected to serve. One of them, Amritpal Singh, ran his campaign from prison. These weren't fringe candidates scraping together a handful of votes. They represent the latest chapter in a movement that has shaped South Asian politics for nearly a century, sparked an insurgency, and continues to roil diplomatic relations between India, Canada, and other Western nations with large Sikh diaspora communities.
This is the story of Khalistan, the dream of a Sikh homeland.
A Faith Without a Country
To understand why some Sikhs want their own nation, you first need to understand what Sikhs lost.
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sikhs ruled Punjab. Not as subjects of some distant emperor, but as sovereigns. The Sikh Misls, a loose confederacy of warrior bands, controlled eastern Punjab from 1733 to 1799. Then came Maharaja Ranjit Singh, one of the most remarkable rulers in Indian history, who unified these fractious groups into the Sikh Empire. His kingdom stretched from the Khyber Pass to the Sutlej River, encompassing territories that now belong to India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
This wasn't a minor regional power. The Sikh Empire had a professional army trained by European officers, its own coinage, and diplomatic relations with Britain. When Ranjit Singh died in 1839, the British viewed the Sikhs as the last major obstacle to complete control of the subcontinent.
It took two brutal wars, but by 1849, the Sikh Empire was finished. The British dissolved it into princely states and absorbed Punjab into their colonial administration. For Sikhs, this wasn't just political defeat. It was the end of sovereignty they had built over generations.
The Birth of an Idea
When empires collapse, their subject peoples start imagining alternatives. As British India began to crumble in the 1930s, everyone was scrambling to position themselves for what came next. Muslims had the Muslim League demanding Pakistan. Hindus had the Congress Party, which would inherit the machinery of the British state. But what about the Sikhs?
The first explicit call for Khalistan came in 1940, in a pamphlet bearing that exact title. The word means "Land of the Khalsa," referring to the community of initiated Sikhs founded by the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh, in 1699. Around the same time, other Sikh leaders proposed "Sikhistan," an independent Sikh nation.
These weren't identical proposals. Sikhistan, championed by Master Tara Singh, imagined a Sikh federation that would reserve the right to join either Pakistan or India. Khalistan was envisioned as a theocratic state led by the Maharaja of Patiala, with a cabinet representing various regional units. Both proposals included Lahore, the historic capital of the Sikh Empire, which ultimately went to Pakistan.
There was also a more pragmatic proposal called Azad Punjab, or "Free Punjab." This wasn't about creating a Sikh state at all. It was about redrawing borders to create a Punjab where Muslims would be about forty percent of the population, Hindus another forty percent, and Sikhs the remaining twenty percent. In this configuration, Sikhs would hold the balance of power, serving as kingmakers between the two larger communities.
The British Cabinet Mission dismissed all of these proposals as unrealistic. They had a point. Before partition, Sikhs weren't actually a majority in any district of Punjab except Ludhiana, where they made up about forty-two percent of the population. Creating a Sikh homeland would have required either massive population transfers or accepting a state where Sikhs were themselves a minority.
Partition and Its Discontents
When British India was carved up in 1947, the surgery was performed along religious lines. Muslim-majority areas went to Pakistan. Hindu-majority areas stayed with India. The Sikhs, concentrated in Punjab but not dominant anywhere, were caught in between.
The human cost was staggering. Somewhere between one and two million people died in the communal violence that accompanied partition. Millions more became refugees. The Sikh population, which had reached nearly twenty percent in some Pakistani districts, collapsed to about 0.1 percent as survivors fled east. They settled in Indian Punjab, which now included areas that would later become the states of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.
But even after this massive demographic shift, Sikhs remained a minority in their new home. Indian Punjab was still Hindu-majority. The dream of a Sikh-majority state remained unfulfilled.
The Punjabi Suba Movement
The Akali Dal, the main Sikh political party, took a different approach in independent India. Instead of demanding outright separation, they campaigned for a Punjabi Suba, a province for Punjabi speakers. This was strategically clever. India had reorganized states along linguistic lines, creating Maharashtra for Marathi speakers and Gujarat for Gujarati speakers. Why not Punjab for Punjabi speakers?
The catch was obvious to everyone. Punjabi speakers were overwhelmingly Sikh. A Punjabi-speaking state would, in effect, be a Sikh-majority state. The Indian government, still traumatized by partition, initially refused.
It took until 1966 for the Punjab Reorganisation Act to pass. Punjab was divided into three parts: a new, smaller Punjab, the state of Haryana, and additional territory transferred to Himachal Pradesh. The city of Chandigarh, Punjab's capital, became a Union Territory administered directly by the central government. It would serve as the shared capital of both Punjab and Haryana.
This satisfied nobody. Sikhs in Punjab resented sharing their capital. They resented even more the water-sharing arrangements imposed on the rivers flowing through their state. Punjab would receive only twenty-three percent of the water from the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej rivers, with the rest diverted to Haryana and Rajasthan.
These grievances weren't about religion. They were about resources, about feeling exploited by the central government in Delhi. But in Punjab, where Sikh identity was intertwined with regional identity, economic grievances quickly took on a religious coloring.
The Anandpur Sahib Resolution
In 1972, the Akali Dal lost the Punjab elections badly. The party needed to reinvent itself. The following year, it passed the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, a document that would become perhaps the most controversial text in modern Sikh political history.
The resolution demanded radical devolution of power from the central government to the states. It called for the transfer of Chandigarh and other territories to Punjab. It asked for Sikhism to be recognized as a religion separate from Hinduism, not merely a Hindu reform movement as some scholars had argued.
Was this a demand for Khalistan? That depends on who you ask. The resolution never explicitly called for secession. But its critics argued that "radical devolution" was code for independence, that the document represented the maximum Akali position of a sovereign state dressed up in the language of federalism.
For several years, the resolution gathered dust. Then came the 1980s.
The Rise of Bhindranwale
Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a religious preacher, the head of a Sikh seminary. In the late 1970s, he was actually supported by Indira Gandhi's Congress Party as a way to divide the Sikh vote and weaken the Akali Dal. This strategy, using religious extremists as political pawns, would prove catastrophically shortsighted.
The catalyst for what came next was the 1978 Sikh-Nirankari clash. The Nirankaris were a sect that many orthodox Sikhs considered heretical. When violence broke out between the two groups, leaving thirteen Sikhs dead, Bhindranwale emerged as a fiery defender of Sikh orthodoxy.
In 1982, Bhindranwale and the Akali Dal joined forces to launch the Dharam Yudh Morcha, the "righteous struggle." Thousands joined the movement, attracted by its promises to address genuine grievances about water rights, Chandigarh, and Sikh autonomy. But the movement increasingly came under Bhindranwale's influence, and Bhindranwale was not interested in compromise.
By 1983, Bhindranwale had taken up residence in the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism. From this sanctuary, armed militants carried out attacks on perceived enemies. The line between religious activism and terrorism became impossible to distinguish.
Operation Blue Star
In June 1984, Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to enter the Golden Temple complex and remove the militants. The operation, codenamed Blue Star, was a military success and a political catastrophe.
The army killed Bhindranwale and his followers. But they also killed hundreds of pilgrims who happened to be in the complex during a major Sikh holiday. The Akal Takht, one of the five temporal seats of Sikh religious authority, was severely damaged. For Sikhs around the world, Operation Blue Star was an assault on their faith itself.
Five months later, two of Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in her own garden. The killers were immediately shot, but their act triggered anti-Sikh pogroms across northern India. Official estimates put the death toll at around three thousand. Survivors and human rights organizations believe the true number was much higher.
The Insurgency
After 1984, the Khalistan movement militarized. Groups like Babbar Khalsa and the Khalistan Commando Force launched a guerrilla campaign that would last more than a decade.
In 1986, the Khalistan Commando Force assassinated General Arun Vaidya, who had commanded Operation Blue Star, shooting him on a street in Pune. In 1985, Babbar Khalsa bombed Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people aboard in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Canadian history. The bomb had been placed on the plane in Vancouver by Canadian members of the group.
The Indian government responded with a counterinsurgency campaign that human rights organizations condemned for widespread torture, extrajudicial killings, and disappearances. Exact death tolls from the insurgency remain disputed, but estimates range from tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand.
By the mid-1990s, the insurgency had largely burned itself out. The last major attack came in 1995, when a Babbar Khalsa member assassinated Beant Singh, the Chief Minister of Punjab, in a bomb blast that killed seventeen others.
Why the Movement Failed
The Khalistan insurgency collapsed for several interconnected reasons.
The most brutal was simply that the Indian security forces won. The counterinsurgency campaign, however brutal its methods, succeeded in killing or capturing most of the militant leadership. Potential recruits saw that joining the movement meant likely death or imprisonment.
The militants also turned on each other. The movement fractured into competing factions that spent as much energy fighting each other as fighting the Indian state. This internal warfare alienated ordinary Sikhs who might have sympathized with the movement's goals but couldn't support its methods.
Most fundamentally, the movement never achieved majority support among Punjab's Sikhs. Many sympathized with grievances about water rights and federal autonomy. Far fewer wanted actual independence, especially if it meant more violence and economic disruption. When the shooting stopped, most Sikhs were relieved.
The Diaspora Dimension
Here's where the story takes a turn that still shapes international relations today.
The Khalistan movement has always had two centers of gravity: Punjab itself and the Sikh diaspora, particularly in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. After the movement's defeat in Punjab, the diaspora became its primary home.
This wasn't coincidental. As early as 1969, Jagjit Singh Chohan, a former Indian politician, had moved to London to campaign for Khalistan. Davinder Singh Parmar started organizing pro-Khalistan meetings in London in the 1950s, initially attracting fewer than twenty attendees. By the 1970s, he was raising Khalistani flags in Birmingham.
The diaspora provided something the movement couldn't sustain in Punjab: safety. In Canada or Britain, advocating for Khalistan wouldn't get you killed. The diaspora also provided money. Sikh communities in the West were often economically successful, and some channeled funds to the movement.
After the militancy ended in Punjab, yearly demonstrations continued abroad, particularly around the anniversary of Operation Blue Star. For many diaspora Sikhs, especially those whose families had suffered during the violence, Khalistan remained a cause worth supporting even if it seemed politically impossible.
Contemporary Tensions
The Indian government has never stopped viewing the Khalistan movement as a security threat, even in its diminished form. In 2023, this produced one of the most serious diplomatic crises in recent memory when Canada accused India of involvement in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh leader in British Columbia whom India had designated a terrorist.
The accusation touched off a diplomatic firestorm. India denied involvement and accused Canada of harboring Khalistani extremists. Former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh claimed that recent extremism was backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, commonly known as the ISI, and "Khalistani sympathisers" in Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
These accusations have a complicated relationship with evidence. Some militant activity has indeed continued. In early 2018, Indian police arrested members of several militant groups in Punjab. But critics argue that India uses the Khalistan label too broadly, applying it to peaceful activists and critics of the government.
The Territorialisation of Sikhism
Sikh historian Harjot Singh Oberoi makes a provocative argument about the entire concept of Khalistan. He points out that territory has never been central to Sikh self-definition. The Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism's holiest scripture, draws from saints across North and South India. Major Sikh pilgrimage sites like Takht Sri Patna Sahib in Bihar and Hazur Sahib in Maharashtra are far from Punjab.
According to Oberoi, the association between Sikhs and Punjab is actually quite recent, dating to the 1940s. Faced with the prospect of Muslim dominance in Pakistan and Hindu dominance in India, Sikh leaders began constructing what Oberoi calls "meta-commentaries and signs" to argue that Punjab belonged to Sikhs and Sikhs belonged to Punjab. This was a strategic response to political circumstances, not an expression of ancient religious geography.
This doesn't mean the attachment isn't real now. Ideas that begin as political strategies can become deeply felt identities. But it does suggest that Khalistan is less a recovery of lost sovereignty than a modern political project dressed in historical clothing.
The Current State of Play
Today, the Khalistan movement exists in a strange twilight. In Punjab itself, it has minimal political support. The Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar), the only explicitly pro-Khalistan party recognized by India's Election Commission, is a marginal force.
And yet.
In 2024, Amritpal Singh won a parliamentary seat while incarcerated. He had been arrested in 2023 after a standoff at a police station that recalled, for many observers, the confrontational style of Bhindranwale. Also elected was Sarabjeet Singh Khalsa, whose father was one of the bodyguards who assassinated Indira Gandhi.
These victories don't mean Punjab wants independence. Both men won in their specific constituencies, not in a statewide referendum on secession. But they do suggest that the memory of 1984, and the grievances it created, haven't faded.
In the diaspora, the movement continues to attract supporters, particularly among younger Sikhs who grew up hearing stories of Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh pogroms from their parents and grandparents. For them, Khalistan represents justice for historical wrongs, even if the prospect of an actual independent state seems remote.
The Impossible Geography
Perhaps the most fundamental problem with Khalistan is the map.
Different proponents have proposed different boundaries, but all face the same challenge. The historical Punjab, the Punjab of Ranjit Singh's empire, was divided by partition. Lahore, the empire's capital, is in Pakistan. Any Khalistan that included these lost territories would require Pakistan to surrender land, something Islamabad would never do voluntarily.
A Khalistan limited to Indian Punjab would be economically tiny and strategically vulnerable, surrounded by a much larger and more powerful India with every incentive to undermine it. It would also mean abandoning the Sikhs living elsewhere in India, turning them from a recognized religious minority into foreign nationals.
The movement has never convincingly addressed these practical questions. But perhaps practical questions aren't really the point. For many supporters, Khalistan represents something more abstract: recognition of Sikh distinctiveness, acknowledgment of historical injustice, and sovereignty in a world where Sikhs have repeatedly been ruled by others.
What Remains
The Khalistan movement is probably best understood not as a political program with realistic prospects of success, but as an expression of historical memory and communal grievance. It emerged from the trauma of partition, was forged in the fires of 1984, and persists because the wounds from that year have never fully healed.
For India, it represents an ongoing security concern and a complication in relations with countries that host large Sikh populations. For those countries, particularly Canada, it creates a difficult balance between protecting free expression and maintaining relations with a rising power. For Sikhs themselves, it remains a divisive question, with some viewing it as a sacred cause and others as a dangerous distraction from more achievable goals.
What's certain is that the movement isn't going away. As long as there are Sikhs who remember Operation Blue Star, who lost family in the violence that followed, or who simply believe that their community deserves its own place in the world, the dream of Khalistan will persist. Whether it remains a dream or someday becomes something more depends on events that no one can yet foresee.