During his first journey to India as Canada’s prime minister in 2018, Justin Trudeau made a go to to the northern state of Punjab, the place he obtained a photograph op in full Punjabi costume on the Golden Temple, the holiest website of the Sikh faith.

He additionally obtained, courtesy of the Indian authorities, an earful of grievances — and a listing of India’s most-wanted males on Canadian soil.

The killing this summer of 1 man on that listing, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, has changed into a diplomatic war between India and Canada. Mr. Trudeau claimed this month that Indian brokers had orchestrated the assassination inside Canada. India rejected the assertion and accused Canada of ignoring its warnings that Canadian Sikh extremists like Mr. Nijjar had been plotting violence in Punjab in hopes of constructing the state right into a separate Sikh nation.

But past the recriminations, a extra advanced story is unfolding in Punjab, analysts, political leaders and residents say. While the Indian authorities asserts that Canada’s lax perspective towards extremism amongst its politically influential Sikhs poses a nationwide safety menace inside India, there’s little assist in Punjab for a secessionist trigger that peaked in lethal violence a long time in the past and was snuffed out.

Violence in Punjab that the federal government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi attributes to Sikh separatists is, in actual fact, largely gang-related, a chaotic mixture of extortion, narcotics trafficking and score-settling. The prison masterminds, usually working from overseas, reap the benefits of financial desperation in a state the place farmers are crushed by rising debt and plenty of youths lack employment or course — issues compounded by a sense of political alienation in minority Sikh communities.

For Mr. Modi, the pursuit of a small however noisy assemblage of criminals in a faraway nation — India had been pushing for the extradition of 26 earlier than Mr. Nijjar’s dying — and the amplification of the separatist menace present an necessary political narrative forward of a nationwide election early subsequent yr.

It furthers his picture as a strongman chief who will go to any extent to guard his nation. It has prompted even a few of his staunchest critics to rally round him within the face of Canada’s accusation. And it presents a contemporary menace to level to after Mr. Modi capitalized on violent Islamic militancy emanating from Pakistan earlier than the final election, in 2019, to create a political wave.

On Tuesday, the Indian overseas minister, S. Jaishankar, mentioned that Canada had seen “a lot of organized crime” associated to “secessionist forces,” whereas including that focused killings had been “not the policy of the Indian government.”

Stoking the specter of Khalistan — the would-be Sikh homeland — as a nationwide problem as soon as once more has pushed India’s 25 million Sikhs right into a troublesome area. Old wounds of prejudice towards them have been reopened, they usually now discover themselves in the midst of a diplomatic conflict that separates them from family within the giant Sikh diaspora.

For Mr. Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., there’s little value in an exaggerated portrayal of safety dangers in a minority group, analysts say.

The social gathering, whose leaders espouse a nationalist ideology that prioritizes majority Hindus over minority teams like Muslims and Christians, has tried to courtroom Sikhs as a constituency, seeing them as a part of the prolonged Hindu household. Mr. Modi himself has usually visited Sikh temples and worn the Sikh turban.

But Sikhs have vehemently opposed that effort, viewing it as an try and erase their distinctive id — each as a group and as followers of a faith they think about distinct. Sikhs had been a dominant a part of a farmers’ motion in 2021 that gave Mr. Modi the most important political problem of his decade in energy, forcing him into a rare concession, with Parliament repealing legal guidelines meant to open agriculture to market forces.

In Punjab meeting elections final yr, the B.J.P. managed to win solely two out of 117 seats.

Whenever Punjabis have felt unheard and offended lately, they’ve voted out their authorities, not pursued separatism. In 2022, that discontent was so widespread that Punjab voted for not one of the previous events that had beforehand ruled it, together with the pre-eminent Sikh non secular social gathering.

Instead, it voted into energy a comparatively new outfit that was in energy in only one different state, as a result of it promised higher governance — improved faculties and well being care.

“There is no Khalistan movement as such,” mentioned Surinder Singh Jodhka, a professor of sociology on the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “But there is a sense that somehow justice is not done to us.”

Khalistan has remained largely a diaspora problem, with proponents of violently pursuing the trigger making up a tiny minority. To the extent that Sikhs in Punjab speak about separatism, it’s in opposition to a nationwide ruling social gathering and its sister organizations, some with their very own path of violence, that talk overtly about their need to show India right into a Hindu state.

It was a sentiment expressed earlier this yr by a younger man who paraded across the state portraying himself as the brand new prophet of Khalistan, prompting a manhunt and an web shutdown.

The rise of the 30-year-old preacher, Amritpal Singh, was mysterious. His arrest in a cat-and-mouse chase this spring, after his supporters had grown so emboldened that they attacked a police station to free considered one of their detained accomplices, put a quiet finish to his saga.

But Mr. Singh, giving speeches and interviews during which he blended his attraction for the separatist trigger with social points akin to drug rehabilitation, gave voice to a sense that the B.J.P. has been prejudiced by pursuing and prosecuting Sikhs for doing the identical factor that India’s Hindu proper itself has carried out — specific concepts of spiritual nationalism.

“Which mountain has been brought down by merely talking about Sikhs’ rights?” mentioned Gurdeep Singh, a farmer in Punjab.

The Khalistan separatist motion, which dates in earnest to earlier than the beginning of post-colonial India in 1947, reached a bloody climax within the Nineteen Eighties, when a gaggle of militants violently took over the Golden Temple to push their trigger. The wave of separatist violence on the time included the bombing of an Air India flight, en path to London from Toronto, that killed greater than 300 individuals.

Afterward, because the separatist violence fizzled out, hope for a extra inclusive future for Sikhs took maintain, even with little justice for the widespread violence inflicted by the federal government within the identify of cracking down on extremists. Between 2004 and 2014, India had its first, and solely, Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

But Khalistan remained a preoccupation of some Sikhs in nations like Australia, Britain and the United States. Canada, with greater than 770,000 Sikhs, has the biggest Sikh inhabitants outdoors India. Numerous them left India in the course of the separatist violence, or the years instantly after it, carrying wounds that fueled their Khalistani advocacy.

“They don’t even have funds, and they can’t come here because they are banned in India, but they try to provoke people on social media,” mentioned Paramjit Singh, 45, a truck driver who lives on the outskirts of Jalandhar, in northern Punjab. “They don’t let people eat in peace.”

Amarinder Singh, who was the chief minister of Punjab in 2018 and gave the most-wanted listing to Mr. Trudeau, had made the assembly troublesome earlier than it even started: He had publicly declared a number of of Mr. Trudeau’s cupboard ministers to be Khalistani sympathizers, together with Canada’s first Sikh protection minister, Harjit Sajjan, who was a part of the delegation.

“I gave him a list of 10, 12 names,” Mr. Singh mentioned of Mr. Trudeau. “I told him that these are the people who are creating mischief.”

Mr. Singh described these on the listing as “gangsters” and criminals, fairly than fighters carrying the torch of a united ideology. “When they can’t get any money in these countries, they start shouting about Khalistan,” he mentioned.

Nevertheless, Khalistan has turn into extra continuously mentioned in Indian nationwide politics over the previous three years. As Mr. Modi’s lieutenants grew annoyed with the Sikh-led farmer protests in 2021, they usually labeled the protesters as Khalistanis stoked by outdoors forces.

“Mr. Modi is playing this politics for votes,” mentioned Kamaljit Singh, a farmer from the outskirts of Jalandhar who participated within the protests. “We are caught in the middle.”