California Sikhs are driving a separatist movement
STOCKTON, CALIF. >> This farming city in the Central Valley has made headlines for its financial struggles and its annual asparagus festival. But thousands of miles away in India, it is a symbol of terrorism.
To hear the Hindu-dominated media and government tell it, militants funded by the Sikh diaspora will stop at nothing to take over Punjab — the only Indian state where Sikhs are a majority — and turn it into a country of their own called Khalistan.
At the center of the separatist movement is the oldest Sikh house of worship in America: the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple, a collection of modest brick buildings located near a rail yard just south of downtown Stockton.
Congregants acknowledge that some Sikh groups advocate violence in the
push to create a breakaway republic where members of their faith can live without discrimination or fears that the Indian government will seize their farmland. But they say their own efforts are limited to peaceful protest and referendums to demonstrate support for Khalistan among the diaspora.
“We fight with the ballot not the bullet,” says Sukhwinder
Singh Sidhu, who lives in Stockton and owns a trucking company. “We want our own nation where we can control our destiny. We want to show that the majority of Sikhs want Khalistan, not India.”
The conflict exploded into public view in September when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused the Indian government of orchestrating the assassination of a Sikh activist who three months earlier was shot dead outside his temple in suburban Vancouver.
India denied the claim, but shot back that Canada was giving “shelter” to extremists and said the activist was the leader of an underground militant group.
Then in a federal indictment in November, the U.S. government said an Indian spy paid a hit man — an undercover law enforcement agent, it turned out — to kill a Sikh activist in New York.
At the Stockton temple, these developments have only fueled the drive for secession.
On a recent Sunday, hymnals blared as hundreds of men and women — farmers, gas station owners, truckers, tech workers and physicians — paraded around the temple grounds, singing, banging on drums and hoisting their holy book skyward.
They had come from Yuba City, Sacramento,
Modesto and elsewhere in Northern and Central California to celebrate the birthday of one of Sikhism's 10 spiritual leaders. The faith was established in the 15th century by a former Hindu who preached about the “oneness” of God, promoted gender equality and rejected the caste system.
But the day also paid tribute to two Sikh militants who were executed by hanging after they killed a senior Indian army official in 1986 in retribution for deadly state-sponsored violence against Sikhs.
Addressing the crowd, one fiery speaker praised the assassins as martyrs and their feat as a victory for God. He said that “freedom fighters” would one day prevail through the ballot box.
The congregants joined him in a chant: “Long live Khalistan!”
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In 1905, a 39-year-old farmer named Jawala Singh left his home in Punjab and boarded a ship heading east, eventually making his way to Panama and slowly on to San Francisco — an important hub for a growing diaspora.
Like thousands of other Sikhs, he was fleeing famine, malaria and British colonizers.
Looking for business opportunities, he and a Sikh partner leased a 500-acre ranch on the outskirts of Stockton and started farming potatoes. The venture was so successful that he became known as “the potato king.”
At the time, members of Northern California's Sikh community would gather to pray on the farm. Then in 1912, Singh led an effort to turn an old farmhouse in Stockton into a one-stop shop for job seekers, legal help for new immigrants and scholarships for Indian students at UC Berkeley. It became the temple that now sits at the end of Sikh Temple Street.