Free donuts, proclaimed the misspelt placard put up outside the gurdwara on Old Weston Road in Toronto in 1984. Four months earlier, when Indian troops had stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, angry Sikhs had gathered outside the gurdwara, burning Indian flags and volunteering to join assassination squads. Then, the day after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her guards, a pop-up stall was set up to distribute sweets: “Revenge for Revenge,” it announced.

Last week, as a tractor-drawn tableau of Indira Gandhi’s killing drove through Brampton on Toronto’s north-west fringes, India reacted with outrage. The macabre celebration of the former PM’s killing isn’t exceptional or new, though.

Tableaux of identical design were driven through Sacramento in April 2023 too. Gurdwaras across the West have embraced hagiographic portraiture of Indira Gandhi’s assassins, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, as well as the man responsible for the mid-air bombing of an Air India flight, Talwinder Singh Parmar. In 2008, a group of Sikh students in a Surrey school wore T-shirts praising separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Later that year, British Columbia premier Gordon Campbell attended a procession where Parmar’s images were displayed.

For a conversation that goes beyond comforting moral outrage, though, Indians need to engage with just why the Khalistan movement has proved tremendously tenacious—if ultimately ineffectual—among diasporic Sikh communities. The answer implicates us all in many discomfiting ways.

Khalistan on the Hudson

Every story begins somewhere—but in some cases, there just isn’t a good narrative hook on hand. Early in the last century, large numbers of immigrants began to arrive in Canada, looking for work. “The sudden appearance of a few thousand Sikhs, coupled with a fairly large population of Chinese labourers, many of whom also were employed in lumber, led to a number of anti-Asian riots,” sociologist James Chadney records.

Even though racial restrictions on immigration were lifted, after 1947, Sikh communities felt secure in segregating themselves from the wider milieu, using religion as a means of drawing boundaries between themselves and other ethnic groups.

To read more: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/celebration-of-indira-gandhis-killing-shows-old-communal-hatreds-still-hurt-indians-abroad/1622578/