On June 18, Canadian Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead as he left the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, at night. The forty-five-year-old was a prominent figure in the Sikh community in BC. He had moved to Canada from the Indian state of Punjab in 1997 and worked as a plumber. At the time of his killing, he was president of the Sikh temple in Surrey. Many in the Sikh community in Canada believed that the Indian government had something to do with the murder. Then, on September 18, following weeks of worsening ties with India, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made it official. “Over the past number of weeks,” he said in Parliament, “Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.” India has denied the accusation, calling it “absurd.”
Nijjar had been declared a terrorist in India in late 2020. A press release issued at the time by the National Investigation Agency, India’s specialized counterterrorism law enforcement agency, stated that Nijjar stood accused of “launching a concerted secessionist campaign” for the creation of Khalistan, a separate sovereign state for Sikhs in South Asia. The separatist Khalistan movement had been at its peak in Punjab in the 1980s but lost steam after the violent insurgency was crushed through sustained operations by Indian security forces, which included the storming of the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, in the city of Amritsar in 1984. India remains strongly opposed to the Khalistan movement and is particularly irked by many in the Sikh diaspora who continue to demand a separate homeland for Sikhs.
