Sikhs living in US, UK and Canada fear surveillance by Indian agents, informants

BENGALURU – Mr Gill (name changed) was having dinner at home with his wife in central England when the local police knocked on the door.

“The police said they had information that my life was under threat, that I should be careful and inform them if someone is following me, or move out of my house to be safe,” the British-born Sikh in his 30s told The Straits Times, while requesting anonymity. 

He runs a history podcast on YouTube, and works in a digital solutions company.

“Why me? Who could want me dead?” he said he asked himself, after receiving the “threat to life warning notice” from the police in May 2023, a copy of which ST has seen. It said “your personal safety is now in danger”, and advised him to get burglar alarms, change daily routines, always walk with someone, install a camera at the door and maybe even leave the area for a while.

Mr Gill said he kept looking over his shoulder for weeks.  

The police refused to tell him the source of the threat. Maybe it was Sikh separatist groups he had criticised, he thought.

But he was gripped with a new fear a month later when Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a naturalised Canadian, was gunned down outside a Sikh temple in Canada, and the authorities there said Indian diplomats were involved in his murder. Mr Nijjar had also been warned of threats to his life by the Canadian police.

Mr Gill had previously spoken on his podcast about the Indian government’s repression of critics.

Now he wondered: “Could Indian state agents really be involved in targeting vocal Sikhs abroad?”

This is the question many in the Sikh diaspora of around two million are asking today, as Canadian and American leaders and law enforcement agencies accuse the Indian state and top consulate officials of targeting critics and Sikh separatists abroad. 

At least two dozen Sikhs living in the UK, US and Canada have received police warnings about being potential targets of attacks since 2023, according to media reports. ST has confirmed the numbers with some British and Canadian legislators.

While the police, by policy, did not reveal who was behind the threats, the recent incidents have revived long-simmering fears that the Indian state could be involved.

India denies involvement.

It also refuted allegations by Canadian intelligence that listed Indian diplomats – including the recalled Indian High Commissioner to Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma – as “persons of interest” in Mr Nijjar’s murder investigation.

The Indian government called Canada’s allegations “absurd”, while Mr Verma, in remarks to Canadian network CTV News aired on Oct 20, said the allegations against him were baseless and “politically motivated”.

India also accused Canada of being a “safe haven” for terrorists, extremists and “anti-India activities”, adding that Ottawa has ignored 26 extradition requests of “anti-India” criminals over the past decades.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs did not respond to queries from ST.

Mr Nijjar was a prominent leader in the Khalistan movement, which calls for an independent Sikh state in India. New Delhi labelled him a terrorist in 2020 and accused him of many crimes, including a 2007 cinema bombing and the 2009 assassination of Sikh Indian politician Rulda Singh, the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) overseas wing.

Secession roots and fears

The Indian government has always taken a hard stance against secessionists abroad.

But Sikh diaspora groups and Canadian intelligence allege that the scrutiny has more recently been extended to a broader crackdown on critics of the government, purportedly moving from intimidation to violence. 

The Indian government’s repression of overseas and India-based Sikhs and Punjabis ranges from “banning of social media handles in India, even if it has nothing to do with Khalistan, suppressing facts in the media, to labelling human rights advocates as separatists and terrorists”, said Mr Harinder Singh, co-founder of the Sikh Research Institute in New Jersey in the US.

“But assassinations – that is unprecedented,” added Mr Singh, whose organisation conducts research and workshops on Sikhism and describes itself as apolitical.

Four Indians are facing trial in Ottawa for the murder of Mr Nijjar. 

In 2023, social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram blocked the handles of Mr Jaskaran Sandhu and his news website Baaz News from being accessed in India, following a “legal request” from the Indian government.

This was after he posted articles on a police manhunt in Punjab for 31-year-old Amritpal Singh, a pro-Khalistan leader and radical Sikh preacher who was so popular that even after his arrest, he won the June 2024 parliamentary election from prison. 

Rest of World, a US-based non-profit publication focused on technology, reported in March 2023 that access to more than 120 X handles was blocked in India under Indian government requests. These included those of journalist Gagandeep Singh in Canada, Indian Express journalist in Punjab Kamaldeep Singh Brar, Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh and Canadian poet Rupi Kaur.

After a demand from the Indian government in March 2024, YouTube blocked access to reports by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about Mr Nijjar’s killing in India.

The Canadian police chief on Oct 15 alleged that Indian consular officials had used “extortion, intimidation and coercion” against Sikhs in the country.

The US and Canada have called such actions “transnational repression”, which is when a government targets political dissidents or critical members of diaspora communities outside its borders. 

“We always knew this. Now everyone else knows,” said British Columbia-based Mr Sandhu, a board member of Canada-based advocacy group World Sikh Organisation.

Canada is home to the largest Sikh diaspora, with around 700,000 Sikhs, followed by ahout 500,000 each in the US and UK. Within India, about 24 million to 26 million Sikhs remain, predominantly in the agrarian northern state of Punjab. Sikhs are India’s fourth-largest religious group after Hindus, Muslims and Christians. 

Sikh families fled India in a wave of migrations in the 1980s, due to a violent Khalistan insurgency and aggressive counteractions by the authorities.

Tensions escalated dramatically in 1984 when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the storming of the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar, where Sikh militants were holed up, causing nearly 500 casualties and damage to the sacred site.

Months later, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, leading to widespread anti-Sikh riots in which mobs killed nearly 3,000 Sikhs across India in what is now known as the 1984 Sikh massacre. Human rights groups reported that leaders of Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party fanned the anti-Sikh riots.

These events continue to shape Sikh identity and community dynamics today both in India and among the diaspora.

In 1985, a bomb blast on an Air India flight from Canada to India killed all 329 people on board. A Sikh separatist was convicted by Canadian courts of making explosives, but the victims’ families said Canada did not do enough to bring to justice others involved in the attack.

The violent movement has since faded, but some Sikhs living abroad remain vocal in advocating for Khalistan – using peaceful, legally permissible freedoms of expression in those countries – and seeking reparations for the 1984 massacre. There have been very few convictions of police officers and politicians from the Congress party in power then and a lack of monetary compensation for victims’ families, while calls to recognise the massacre as a genocide have been ignored.

London-based editor Pav Singh noted that “discussions about the lack of justice for 1984 victims are often conflated with Khalistani secessionism”. 

“The Indian government – whether under the Congress or Bharatiya Janata Party – uses the Khalistan bogeyman as a stick against the Sikh diaspora community, but does little to address the genuine calls for justice by non-separatists,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Indian media has “built an exaggerated narrative that all of the Sikh diaspora is for separatism”, by only “highlighting the inflammatory, anti-India threats of some Sikh separatists” who do not represent the diverse views of the community, he added. 

What the Canada, US, UK, Australia and New Zealand governments are saying today is “validating what some members of the Sikh diaspora have long sensed and observed”, Mr Harinder Singh said.

Blacklisting diaspora

Prominent Sikh community leaders in the US, UK and Canada told ST about the alleged coercion by Indian state agents to get members of the Sikh community to spy on one another under threats of travel bans, visa revocations or “no-fly orders” that block them from entering India.

American journalist Angad Singh found out the Indian government had blacklisted him only when he was deported from New Delhi in August 2022, he told ST.

He had been an assistant producer for Vice News’ Emmy-nominated 2020 documentary, India Burning, about the impact of Hindu supremacist policies on minority communities under the Modi government in India.

He is one of more than 100 overseas Indians whose permanent residency the BJP-led Indian government has cancelled in the past 10 years, often over what it calls “anti-India activities”.

Mr Angad Singh, who lives in New York, said the government alleged that his “anti-national propaganda” cast doubts on India’s secular credentials. “I am denied entry into India probably because of my journalism, but a part of me cannot help wonder if the style of my turban, the untrimmed beard I keep, play into it.”

A government lawyer had asked in the Delhi High Court how Mr Angad Singh “can be trusted” in India when a farmers’ protest – led by mostly Punjabis and Sikhs in 2020 and 2021 – against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s farm laws was going on.

The government eventually withdrew the laws, but some of its ministers continue to brand the protesting farmers and their supporters in the diaspora as “Khalistani terrorists”. 

The fundamental problem, as many in the diaspora see it, is how easily even non-political Sikhs are labelled as separatists and, consequently, anti-India simply because of their religious identity.

Sikhs and Punjabis abroad still feel a close affinity to India, but “the Indian government has never believed this”, said Mr Satnam Singh Chahal, executive director of the non-profit California-based North American Punjabi Association.

“There is a sad trend of Indian embassy officials tormenting the diaspora with bribes, racial stereotypes of criminality and constant surveillance,” added Mr Chahal, whose organisation has campaigned to expel some Indian diplomats over abuse and corruption in the past.

He recalled a consulate official asking him a few years ago to “search for a person for me as an informer”, which Mr Chahal said he refused to do.

Another American Sikh told ST that an embassy officer had asked him to meet after working hours in 2022 “to talk about” restoring his permanent residency in exchange for “cooperation”. “I didn’t pursue it,” the American said.

Both asked that ST reports only partial details of these incidents to protect the identities of those involved.

Mr Verma, who was expelled by Canada along with five other Indian diplomats, had told CTV that embassy officials did nothing covertly, but they did “overtly” collect information on pro-Khalistanis in Canada in Indian “national interest”.

Ottawa’s ongoing Foreign Interference Commission, which was initially looking into China’s alleged meddling in the 2019 and 2021 elections in Canada, is now hearing evidence about Indian agencies monitoring and threatening dissidents, and engaging in campaigns to pressurise Canada to criminalise Sikh activism.

The US has also charged two Indian nationals, including a former Indian intelligence officer, with attempting to assassinate Sikh American separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. 

Mr Pannun’s organisation, Sikhs for Justice – based in the US – is banned in India, and he himself faces charges of promoting terrorism.

‘Stuck between polarised views’

Other than a small minority that is ideologically committed to creating a state just for Sikhs, most Sikhs were agnostic about Khalistan, said Professor Pritam Singh, emeritus professor of economics at the Oxford Brookes University in England. 

But Mr Nijjar’s killing and allegations of Indian state involvement have “revived dormant angers” about New Delhi “eroding federal powers like river water rights in Punjab”, the suppression of criticism like during the farmers’ protests, and how the government casts any expression of historical grievances as anti-national, he added.  

“Khalistan has become a slogan of protest today rather than a political aspiration.”

Although Sikhs are minorities in Canada, the US, UK and Australia, the reformist origin of the religion makes the community politically and socially active and vocal, Prof Singh noted. 

Earlier, most in the Sikh diaspora were from peasant origins. Many Sikhs today are professors, lawyers, doctors, accountants, politicians and economists. “They are more articulate, well connected, and know how to assert democratic rights,” Prof Singh said. 

Mr Gurpreet Singh, a Sikh Canadian news anchor for Spice Radio in Vancouver, said that a separate Sikh homeland has no appeal for him and most other global, liberal Sikh diaspora members, but “Nijjar’s killing gave oxygen to the Khalistan movement”. 

“Those who never talked about Khalistan earlier and used to dismiss inflammatory Khalistanis as covert Indian collaborators dividing Sikhs are now joining rallies and referendums,” he said. 

“The great tragedy of transnational repression is that the place for moderate, secularist people is shrinking. We feel stuck between polarised views, where you have to be either pro-Khalistani or pro-Modi,” he added. 

While some gurudwaras, or Sikh places of worship, in the US, UK and Canada permit peacefully advocating Khalistan, others have barred any discussions about it.

Ms Kamal Preet Kaur, a Labour Party councillor from the London Borough of Hillingdon, noted that in the UK, US and Canada, “pro-Khalistan and pro-BJP rallies are clashing head-on regularly these days”.

“One holds a rally, the other responds, both are coming out to the streets to fight out the narrative battle,” she said. 

She expects that Oct 31 – the 40th anniversary of the 1984 massacre – will see “many rallies, perhaps clashes, and tight security around the Indian embassy”.  

Sharing Ms Kaur’s concerns about the effect of this growing polarisation, Mr Pav Singh is also getting ready to publish 1984 Sikh Archive, an exhaustive online record of witness affidavits and photographs of the massacre and its aftermath. 

It aims to expose the young Indian-origin diaspora to complex histories “beyond propaganda by extremists from both sides”.