Sikhs maintain a rally in Sacramento, California forward of a March 31 referendum for independence.

Sandhya Dirks/NPR

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Sandhya Dirks/NPR

Sikhs maintain a rally in Sacramento, California forward of a March 31 referendum for independence.

Sandhya Dirks/NPR

It’s a busy Saturday on the Sacramento Gurdwara Bradshaw on the edges of town surrounded by fields and strip malls. In entrance of the brand new, gleaming white temple, a crowd of individuals are dressed of their most interesting for a marriage. The morning worship is piped in via loudspeakers.

Walk across the again of the domed constructing and also you encounter a sea of shiny yellow flags emblazoned with daring, blue letters spelling out a phrase: Khalistan.

Khalistan does not exist on any map, however it’s an imagined homeland for some Sikhs who dream of their very own nation separate from India. The requires an unbiased state have grown extra pressing amongst Sikhs within the wake of final yr’s foiled assassination attempt of a Sikh activist on U.S. soil. The Justice Department charged an Indian national within the plot.

Sikhs are an ethno-religious group who come initially from what’s now the Indian state of Punjab. There are an estimated half a million Sikhs in America, lots of them based mostly in California.

An extended line of truck cabs and automobiles snake throughout the Gurdwara car parking zone — vans as a result of Sikhs make up an rising share of truckers in America. This caravan is on the brink of take to the streets of Sacramento and its sprawling suburbs — a rally on wheels to get out the vote forward of Sunday’s referendum.

The query on the poll: Should there be an unbiased Khalistan?

After stops in Europe and Canada, the nonbinding Khalistan referendum is rolling out within the U.S. The first vote was in San Francisco on the finish of January. Organizers say it was so standard that they scheduled a second vote for the top of March.

“We will be no more”

The struggle for Khalistan has a protracted historical past, however the roots of this referendum could be traced to occasions that occurred 40 years in the past, says Irbanjit Sahota, who helped set up the rally.

“We want to let the world know that this happened to us in India, that there was a Sikh genocide in November 1984.”

In the early Nineteen Eighties some Sikh separatists have been violent of their calls for for Khalistan. In 1984 in response to rising unrest, the Indian military took over the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of Sikh websites, together with different Gurdwaras. A number of months later, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.

What adopted was extra horrific bloodshed — offended mobs pulled individuals from their properties, temples have been burned to the bottom, Sikhs disappeared.

“We’re never going to get justice from India,” Sahota says. “I don’t know that the world can do much to get us justice.”

In 2005 then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh formally apologized for the anti-Sikh violence. For some Sikhs, that wasn’t sufficient. They wished what occurred in 1984 acknowledged as a genocide. Sahota says additionally they wished one thing else.

“I feel our only way forward is to make Punjab an independent state where we can practice our religion, preserve our culture, preserve our history.”

Sahota says although that violence occurred many years in the past, the present authorities in India — the Hindu nationalist BJP, led by Narendra Modi — is focusing on non secular and cultural minorities, together with Sikhs. At the rally, one truck towed a U-Haul trailer with an enormous signal: “Modi: Face of Hindu Terror.”

“It just makes it worse,” Sahota says. “Now we have no place. Before we felt like we were not just equal citizens. But now we feel like either we have to do something or we will be no more.”

“Sikhs are happy in India”

Not each American Sikh believes the Modi authorities’s Hindu nationalist agenda is harmful for Sikhs.

“To say that it’s a systematic, some kind of program going against Sikhs in this day and age is not there,” says Jasdip Singh, the chief of Sikhs for America. “What we do” he says of his group, “is highlight the contributions of the Sikh community in the U.S. and we try to integrate the community into the mainstream America.”

Singh was additionally a founding member of the group Sikhs for Trump.

He says the state of affairs for Sikhs has considerably improved because the violence of the 80s and 90s. “Sikhs do have issues in India like any other community, but they have a legal framework, they have a constitution, they have a justice system in India,” he says. “Sikhs in India are happy.”

For Sikhs dwelling outdoors of India, he says, “which is a very, very small percentage of the Sikh population to start asking for a separate homeland, I mean, I don’t understand that.”

He famous the referendum has no authorized standing — it’s nonbinding. Even if hundreds of thousands of Sikhs vote for Khalistan, nothing will occur, as a result of it is a purely symbolic train.

“As immigrants, when we come here, we come here to contribute to this country — positive things,” he says. “If we want to protest for Khalistan, we should go to India, Punjab and start protesting. Why are we using the soil of this country to bring issues that are not relevant to America?”

But the U.S. authorities has begun to take discover of the Indian authorities’s remedy of minority non secular and ethnic teams.

In December, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom urged the U.S. State Department to listing India as a “country of particular concern” because of “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief.”

This month, the Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights heard testimony from consultants and activists in regards to the risk to minority communities coming from the Indian authorities.

Transnational Repression

There are three moments in current historical past that shift and form Sikh American identification, in line with Harman Singh, with the Sikh Coalition. The civil rights advocacy group was itself based because of the preliminary second, the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center.

The first post-9/11 hate crime was the homicide of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man in Mesa, Arizona by a white man who wished to “kill a Muslim.”

About a decade later, in 2012, a white supremacist walked right into a Gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and began taking pictures, within the deadliest hate crime in an American place of worship on the time.

Both tragedies introduced American Sikhs collectively.

But the third second, the one we’re in proper now, Singh says, reveals a really totally different risk.

This previous winter, the FBI unsealed an indictment accusing an Indian authorities worker of orchestrating a murder-for-hire assassination try of a Sikh separatist activist in New York City. The company labeled the incident an instance of transnational repression — oppression or interference by overseas governments on residents or former residents overseas.

“This is a major turning point within the Sikh community,” Singh says.

“There are significant problems with the safety of Sikhs in the United States, but also the targeted harassment, intimidation attempts by India to silence dissent here,” he says.

Singh and the Sikh Coalition aren’t concerned within the Khalistan referendum, however Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the person focused for assassination in New York is. Pannun is the chief of Sikhs for Justice, which is organizing the referendum marketing campaign. The Indian authorities has labeled him a terrorist, and banned him and Sikhs for Justice from India.

The revelations of the plot to kill Pannun got here on the heels of the homicide of one other Sikh activist in British Columbia. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian authorities of being behind his demise. The Indian authorities denied any involvement and says that within the U.S. case their worker had acted alone.

The poll, not the bullet

While the killing in Canada and the assassination try in New York drew consideration, transnational repression shouldn’t be new to many within the Sikh group, says Harman Singh. “Folks who advocate for this idea of Khalistan, an independent Sikh state, have been very vulnerable to transnational repression for several decades.”

Sikhs who advocate for Khalistan or vote within the referendum aren’t terrorists, he argues. “What India has done is criminalize the right to self determination,” he says.

At the Gurdwara Bradshaw Sacramento, the vans are gearing as much as get on the highway, horns are honking and music is blasting from loudspeakers.

Sikh for Justice’s coordinator Avtar Singh Pannu is there serving to to fireplace up the gang. He says the referendum is an opportunity to inform their story and vote for freedom. After California, the subsequent cease is New York.

When requested if he’s afraid of being focused or killed, Pannu says no, as a result of “everyone dies someday.” But, he says, everybody must also have the fitting to self dedication.

“We believe ballot,” he says. “We don’t believe bullet, and this is how we stand for that.”