Do Sikhs really want an independent Kalistan?

I have already made my thoughts known about the assassination of Canadian Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil, back in June 2023.

What's not entirely clear to me is to what extent the movement for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan is a real movement, espoused by a majority of Sikhs. I'm told that, if you ask most Sikhs in India for their views, you will probably be met by a sideways glance and a dismissive comment that Khalistan is an idea invented by the Sikh diaspora in countries like Canada, and that Sikhs living in India are not concerned with the idea.

Is this true? Certainly, in recent years, most of the noise about Khalistan has come from outside the country. Khalistan independence had its heyday in India back in the 1970s and 1980s. After the brutal storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest place in Sikhism, in 1984, which resulted in hundreds dead, and the anti-Sikh pogroms following the assassination of Indira Ghandi, which left thousands of Sikhs dead, the movement in India went, understandably, very quiet. 

Many Sikhs left India at that point, settling in accommodating countries like Canada, and some of those carried with them the dream of an independent Sikh homeland in the Punjab region of India (although many others wanted nothing more to do with it). In the meantime, Sikhs living in India appeared to join the mainstream of Indian (i.e. Hindu) life. Some of them did quite well for themselves, with some reaching the peaks of the legal profession, the armed forces, even politics.

So, ask a typical Sikh on the streets of New Delhi, and you will probably hear that Sikhs just want the status quo, and that talk of Khalistan is the work of rabble-rousers and malcontents overseas. Certainly, the Indian government is at pains to stress that there is no groundswell of public support for an independent Khalistan. But pry a little further and some will admit that many Sikhs do still hanker for their own land, but are just too scared and intimidated to speak of it inside India. 

The Indian anti-terror agency is feared, and many (alleged, I have to say here) extrajudicial killings and imprisonments have occurred over the years. Any Sikh that speaks out about Khalistan is labelled a terrorist and an "anti-national", much like Muslim dissenters in Kashmir. Just earlier this year, a Sikh preacher and separatist called Amritpal Singh mounted a series of protests in Punjab, but he was mercilessly hunted down and arrested by security forces, and he remains in a high-security jail to this day.

There is still a peaceful pro-independence group in Punjab called Dal Khalsa, which is allowed to persist, mainly as a sop to supporters, and proof to the world as a whole that India is a democratic country that allows political and religious dissent. But few Sikhs in India have any real hopes of achieving a Sikh homeland in India any time soon. Narendra Modi sees Hindu nationalism as a central plank of his regime, and he has millions of Hindus behind him.