Political assassination is a practice as old as human society, although the term itself derives from the 12th-century Persian Order of Assassins, first described by Marco Polo. Julius Caesar, Thomas Becket, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Leon Trotsky, John F Kennedy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Olof Palme and Yevgeny Prigozhin were victims of notorious political assassinations. They had one thing in common: all were high-profile targets.
That is not a description that may be accurately applied to Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen shot dead in June by two masked gunmen outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia. If Nijjar had any claim to fame, it was as a campaigner for Khalistan, a notional Sikh homeland in the Indian Punjab fiercely opposed by India’s government. His activism provides the only plausible motive for his murder. Little-known though he was, Nijjar’s death was a political assassination, too.
