| Abstract: | The Sikh community are a distinctive cultural and religious community in South Asia with a vibrant diaspora and a rich history, calling the Punjab region of the Indian Subcontinent their homeland. Although a largely peaceful community, starting in the early 1980s, radical separatists spearheaded a bloody campaign to carve out an independent, theocratic Sikh state known as Khalistan (Land of the Pure) in Punjab and the surrounding areas of Northern India (HAF, 2023). The Indian government came down strongly on the movement, and in the civil war that ensued, the domestic demand for a separate state eventually became dormant. Although ‘normalcy’ returned to the Punjab region in the mid-1990s, Khalistan lived on in the diaspora, particularly in multi-cultural democracies such as Canada, which accepted and assimilated many migrants from Punjab (Shani, 2023). With around 4% of Canadians of Indian ethnicity (1.3 million individuals) and 1,00,000 Indian students, Canada has one of the largest overseas Indian communities (Singh, 2023). As such, India and Canada share ties of democracy and pluralism and have deep interpersonal bonds; however, the Khalistan movement, which has adapted itself well to the workings of democracy, is greatly pressured by the diaspora in the country. The support it has been receiving from the Canadian government, particularly in recent years, has often been a major obstacle in bilateral discourse. This paper makes a humble attempt at analysing the factors responsible for the popularity of the demand, particularly among the Indian diaspora in Canada, and its subsequent impact on various aspects of Indo-Canadian relations, particularly in the Narendra Modi- Justin Trudeau years. While the years preceding the Modi-Trudeau era did witness some of the more violent flashpoints between the two countries, the present dispensation has once again seen their bilateral relations floundering over the Sikh separatist issue, the dealing with which requires skill and acumen as has been rarely witnessed before. |
