Though lightly covered by American media, the Indian subcontinent has been in a state of near-civil-war off and on since simultaneously winning its independence and being partitioned into separate Indian and Pakistani states in 1947. Since that time, with frequent flare-ups, a host of separatist movements have come and gone, including the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency, the Jammu-Kashmir insurgency, and the Northeast India insurgency.
Another such insurgency, this one based on religious differences, has been centered in the state of Punjab in the far north. Bordering Pakistan, Punjab is the home of the Sikhs, adherents to a religious movement founded there in the 15th century. Although holding some elements in common with Hinduism, the region’s dominant religion, Sikhism has charted a different course that has provoked intermittent violence through the years.
The most politically active Sikh group in the Punjab is the Khalistan Movement, whose goal is to found the independent nation of Khalistan, which would consist of the Punjabi areas of both India and Pakistan. The Movement, which has been active since 1947, scored its most infamous coup with the Halloween assassination of Premier Indira Gandhi in 1984. It has been generally supported by Muslim extremists in Pakistan.
Since 1984, the Khalistan Movement has ebbed and flowed and had lately been considered nearly defunct, at least in India. It is by no means defunct, however, among the Punjabi diaspora, a huge, mainly Sikh group that may number as many as 10 million worldwide and is concentrated mainly in the United Kingdom and North America. Though not all Punjabis and Sikhs support the Khalistan Movement, the relative prosperity enjoyed by many in the West has enabled the movement to thrive and continue to operate, even as it has been surpressed at home.
In the United States live an estimated half million Sikhs, the majority of whom reside in California. And so it was in California on Sunday that Khalistan supporters attacked the Indian consulate in San Francisco. The violence there began with a large protest demonstration outside the consulate by hundreds of bearded and turbanned Sikhs bearing yellow Khalistan flags. Similar violence occurred in London and Canberra, in an apparently coordinated response to the Punjabi government’s search for Khalistani leader Amritpal Singh Sandhu, who is currently on the run back in India.
The government of India lodged strong protests to each of the host countries affected, as did many Indian groups.
The danger of importing whole peoples is a risk that Western governments seem unable to grasp. More often than not (and actually much more often), such diasporas come to us not with visions of liberty and peaceful commerce, but with old resentments freed up at last to rise anew in the relatively liberal states of the West. We currently have enough resentments among American citizens these days; one thing we don’t need is to import the resentments of foreigners.
For more, see News18.com.