Surrey, British Columbia – On a Saturday afternoon in a Sikh temple in Surrey, Canada, boys and males with decided faces wield swords and sticks at one another in an historic martial artwork known as gatka.

“We are a rebellious community,” Gurkeerat Singh, a farmer, electrician, photographer and spokesperson for the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara Temple, tells me. Surrey is a couple of 45-minute practice journey outdoors of Vancouver. The metropolis of half one million folks is residence to the second-largest Sikh inhabitants within the nation.

Today, as the primary snow of the season melts in puddles outdoors the constructing, there’s a small however encouraging crowd watching the gatka match inside. “From a young age, we teach our children to be armed and learn how to defend themselves,” says Gurkeerat.

That want for the neighborhood to defend itself not looks like a hypothetical situation on this fast-paced suburban metropolis, which has the slogan: “The future lives here”. Not because the assassination of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey in June.

“The game has completely changed,” says 42-year-old Moninder Singh, a spokesperson for the British Columbia Gurdwaras Council.

“Now, it’s no longer, you live to fight another day but you don’t know if you’ll live, the way they’re operating. Hardeep’s assassination, although not a surprise, was still unprecedented.”

“They” refers back to the Indian authorities and “you” to the Sikh neighborhood in Surrey, which is on the eye of a significant diplomatic and political storm that has engulfed relations between Ottawa and New Delhi relations.

Nijjar, the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurudwara president who got here to Canada as a refugee in 1997 from Punjab in northwest India, was driving out of the temple’s car parking zone in his pick-up when he was shot lifeless by two masked assailants on June 18 – Father’s Day.

Many in the neighborhood consider the killers had been native gangsters, employed by the Indian state. They felt vindicated when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced to Parliament in September that there was credible proof that India had a hand within the killing of Nijjar.

It set off a diplomatic battle: Each nation expelled diplomats from the opposite, commerce talks stalled and even visa providers had been quickly affected.

At the guts of the accusation towards India lies its effort to crush a separatist Sikh motion that Nijjar advocated for vocally. For the previous 4 a long time, many Sikhs in communities world wide have been demanding that an independent Sikh state, often known as Khalistan, be carved out for them in Punjab.

India designated Nijjar and different pro-Khalistan leaders of the Sikh diaspora, resembling New York-based Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, as “terrorists” – a cost they and their supporters deny.

And in November, federal prosecutors within the United States indicted an Indian hitman on expenses of working with Indian authorities intelligence in a bid to kill Pannun, lending additional credence to issues that New Delhi was deploying kill squads for focused assassinations overseas.

The Indian authorities has insisted that such acts are usually not part of its coverage and stated it’s investigating the US allegations concerning the plot towards Pannun.

Six months after the homicide of 45-year-old Nijjar, a married plumber and father of two, a number of Sikh leaders in Surrey say they’ve obtained threats on social media. Some have been alerted to threats by Canadian officers.

But many in the neighborhood say that no matter occurs, they won’t be silenced or defeated.

‘Blown up in their face’

Today, Surrey is residence to about 154,000 followers of the Sikh religion, 170,000 Christians and about 30,000 Hindus. A hub for college students, immigrants and others on the lookout for cheaper housing, it’s a metropolis of procuring complexes, with many boasting Indian eating places with names like Happy Singh Sweet Treats.

Further down the freeway in Delta, a metropolis that borders Surrey, there’s a plaza known as Little India. Unveiled as a cultural precinct for the South Asian neighborhood in 2016, it options boutiques like The Turban Villa, which sells stitched turbans and equipment and gives providers “for any type of turban tying for marriages, parties” in addition to bridal outlets resembling Sleek Bazar. There are additionally insurance coverage and immigration brokers, cloth shops and chai sellers.

The space is a microcosm of the Sikh neighborhood’s rising stature in Canada’s public life. There are about 770,000 Sikhs within the nation – the most important inhabitants outdoors of India – making up 2.1 p.c of the inhabitants.

Many households moved to Canada within the Nineteen Eighties amid a harsh crackdown by Indian safety businesses in Punjab towards perceived supporters of the Khalistan motion, which worldwide rights teams condemned on the time. The Punjab police had been accused by activists, and even the US Department of State, of finishing up extrajudicial killings.

In June 1984, the Indian Army raided the Golden Temple within the Punjab metropolis of Amritsar with tanks to drive out armed separatists, killing tons of of individuals, together with pilgrims. Four months later, then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her bodyguards. An anti-Sikh bloodbath adopted within the streets of New Delhi and different components of the nation. Thousands of Sikhs had been killed.

Today, many see shades of a repeat of these assaults on Sikhs by Indian authorities – solely this time, in Canada.

“They’re very desperate right now to shut us out – and they’re willing to kill for it,” says Moninder, whose mother and father had been born in India. “But it’s sort of blown up of their face. That’s the identical tactic they utilized in Punjab, the place they might kill and strike concern into villages and households … ‘Your child is next.’

“It didn’t really have the intended effect and I think that was apparent a week after Hardeep’s assassination, when about 30,000 people marched his coffin through the streets. I’ve never seen something like that before.”

Moninder continues to be grieving the lack of a “brother”.

He describes his comradeship with Nijjar because the pairing of an odd couple. “I’m born and raised here,” says Singh. “He’s born and raised in Punjab. He grew up in a family that was fighting in the movement, was tortured by the police while he was a teenager… He fled the country because people around him started to disappear while he was in college. Me, I went to elementary school, high school, university, everything here.”

What certain them collectively, in about 2006, was the wrestle for Khalistan.

The motion has all the time ebbed and flowed, relying on occasions in Punjab and the way a lot traction the diaspora can obtain, says Moninder. After what he calls the “peak violence” of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, there was a interval of quiet when the neighborhood endured what he says was a collective post-traumatic syndrome dysfunction (PTSD) earlier than they realised that they wanted to regroup.

“For the last decade, we’ve been growing in strength,” says Moninder. “We had been vocal then. But now being vocal has landed rather a lot in a different way, particularly within the social media age. We’re in a position to get into folks’s properties sooner. It’s simpler. There’s extra channels to take action.

“India is having a hard time dealing with us now.”

‘They can kill us’

At a bus cease not removed from the temple, Amrita Sidhu, 68, a housewife who got here to Canada in 1998 from India together with her husband, tells me in restricted English that Nijjar was “not bad”.

“He did good work. He made [the] building very good. You see that building before, he made another building over that side,” she says pointing to the temple. “I don’t know what happened in India. In India, maybe he has a criminal record. Here, he did good work. He comes to the temple, he helps people.”

When requested if she thinks there might be one other homicide, she says, “I don’t know yet.”

Further down the freeway, reverse an insurance coverage enterprise, a bunch of younger males sporting turbans stand close to vehicles, passing a cigarette round. “Everybody’s busy shopping, getting on with their lives,” one in every of them says with a shrug after I ask how they really feel. “Nobody gives a s***. It happens.”

But many in the neighborhood do care.

Around the identical time as Nijjar’s assassination, Sikh activist Avtar Singh Khanda died all of a sudden in Birmingham within the United Kingdom, sparking questions from his household and pals. Months earlier, Khanda had voiced issues that Indian police had verbally harassed him through telephone and threatened his household in Punjab.

Members of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara are adamant the Indian authorities was behind Khanda’s demise, too. The circumstances are “highly suspicious”, says Gurpreet Kaur Rai, British Columbia’s president of the World Sikh Organization of Canada and a lawyer. “Although the UK government hasn’t come out to say that the Indian government was behind that, we know that it was.”

Closer to residence, at the least three Surrey Sikhs – those that have come ahead publicly – have obtained a “duty to warn” discover from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) that their lives had been in peril. The notices didn’t comprise particular particulars.

Gurmeet Singh Toor, a senior member of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, who was near Nijjar, obtained one of many notices. For safety causes, Toor has despatched his 11-year-old daughter to stick with his brother-in-law. When she is going to return, he says, “depends on the Canadian government and police”.

“I plead to the Canadian police if they [can] capture anybody who’s giving us [a] threat,” he says. “Otherwise they can kill us.”

Other Sikh leaders in the neighborhood, such because the gurdwara’s Gurkeerat Singh and Jasveer Singh, a senior press officer with the worldwide Sikh Press Association, often obtain threats on social media, they are saying.

The neighborhood additionally faces one other India-related risk, say its leaders.

In Surrey and close by Abbotsford, teams purportedly linked to Indian gangster Lawrence Bishnoi are threatening enterprise house owners, demanding ransoms from them. Bishnoi’s gang has beforehand claimed a job within the killings of pro-Khalistani activists in Canada.

Jasveer Singh describes it as a “different element of Indian nationalist thuggery”, claiming that the Punjabi Sikh neighborhood is being “terrorised” economically, too.

Behind the threats, there’s “a lot of jealousy about the Sikh diaspora” in Surrey, he says. “You can probably see it yourself. We’ve done very successfully,” he says. The nation has 18 Sikh members of Parliament and there are a lot of Sikh companies, he notes.

“We’ve held onto our heritage. We’re freedom fighters. We’ve held onto that … There’s a resentment that we’re newer migrants.” The gangs suppose that the neighborhood is towards India and that “we don’t deserve what we have”, he provides.

‘Chardi kala’

But Kaur Rai says the neighborhood is drawing power from its religion. “There’s a concept called ‘chardi kala’, which translates into ‘rising spirits’. So, we always try to stay and remain in chardi kala, even when times are tough.”

Kaur Rai, 25, herself grew up going to the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara to hope and volunteer. “We’ve always known that there’s these issues with the Indian state and Sikhs,” she tells Al Jazeera whereas sitting in her automobile, simply metres from the place Nijjar was gunned down. Yet, the neighborhood, she says, stays undeterred from its beliefs.

In the eating corridor on the identical stage of the two-storey temple, a free lunch is being served. We can see followers sitting cross-legged on a mat on the ground, consuming among the many sounds of kirtan (chanting), drums, chattering and the clanging of cutlery.

The diners right now embody Ajaib Singh Bagri, who was co-acquitted in 2005 of mass homicide and conspiracy expenses over two Air India bombings in 1985 that killed 331 folks.

“I think historically, maybe a few years ago, the people in the community and parents didn’t want to talk about Khalistan or even say the word because we were conditioned by the Indian state that it was a bad word to say,” says Kaur Rai.

But previously few years this has modified, she says.

“Hardeep’s death has been a watershed moment for Surrey, and all Sikhs around the world. People are coming to terms with the fact that everybody has the right to support and advocate for what they believe in and there’s nothing wrong with talking about or advocating for Khalistan.”

‘Unprecedented times’

That confidence throughout the neighborhood didn’t come simply.

“It took a long time,” says Moninder, of the British Columbia Gurudwara Council. “But India has nowhere to run now the truth is out for the entire world that India is running these types of operations across the world. They’re undermining the sovereignty of countries like Canada, the United States, the UK.”

Still, India isn’t the one one which has inquiries to reply. Given the present risk, many in the neighborhood now wish to understand how their authorities in Canada goes to maintain them protected.

“We don’t think it’s enough for you to just inform somebody and say, ‘Look, you know there’s a threat to your life, be safe’,” says Kaur Rai. “This murder has fuelled a fire in the community to hold those that are responsible accountable and ask for accountability, whether that be from the Canadian government or elsewhere.”

Nijjar’s picture is all over the place within the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara. Most prominently, he’s featured on a poster for an unofficial Khalistan international referendum marketing campaign that sits excessive up on the entrance of the temple. Previous rounds of voting had been held right here in September and October. More are slated for the US. The referendum, primarily focusing on the diaspora, asks Sikhs whether or not they need a separate nation carved out of India.

Nijjar can also be on the wall of the corridor the place a placard declares that he was the “first Khalistani leader in Canada to attain martyrdom”. It reads that he was “assassinated by the Indian government”. And he’s on a 2024 calendar at present being given out to neighborhood members.

“We feel his spirit gives us energy,” says Gurkeerat Singh. “He was a short individual. But when he walked into the room, he was the tallest man in the room.”

Unlike neighborhood veterans who endured the turbulence of the Nineteen Eighties, youthful members are nonetheless grappling with what the implications of Nijjar’s assassination are for them.

Jasveer, of the Sikh Press Association, was born in 1986, two years after the Golden Temple was invaded. He remembers watching a movie along with his mom in regards to the Nineteen Eighties and the way she began crying, reminded of the concern that had enveloped Punjab then.

Now, he says, he understands higher what his neighborhood elders went by means of.

“It’s one thing to hear about it … and being hated by the Indian government and the nationalists that don’t want Punjab to be free is one thing,” he says. “But to see it take this form … we’re in unprecedented times for our generation.”