In 30 Seconds
The demand this series traced from its emigre origins through its armed decade and its electoral burial did not vanish with the militancy; it changed jurisdictions. The Khalistan question’s present form is a campaign of symbolic referendums conducted among diaspora congregations, a designated organisation at its centre, episodic violence and legal proceedings at its edges, and, within Punjab itself, a political marginality punctuated by episodes that test how marginal. Assessing the question today, without the inflation official commentary applies or the innocence its organisers claim, closes the series’ account of the demand itself.
The Referendum Campaign
The campaign, organised by the US based Sikhs for Justice under Gurpatwant Singh Pannun and branded Referendum 2020 before running years past its title, has conducted non binding votes among diaspora communities since 2021, in London, Canadian cities including the Surrey gurdwara later made notorious by the Nijjar killing, Australian and European venues, and continuing rounds through the mid 2020s. The organisation is banned in India as unlawful, Pannun stands designated a terrorist there and was the alleged target of the plot in the US indictment this series’ previous article noted, and the votes themselves are, by design, plebiscites of the willing, unaudited, unsupervised, and confined to a diaspora fraction; their organisers cite turnouts in the hundreds of thousands cumulatively, their critics note the numbers’ unverifiability, and both descriptions can be true of an exercise whose product is imagery rather than mandate. Within Punjab the campaign has no legal presence and, by every electoral and survey measure, no mass constituency.
The Amritpal Episode
The question’s domestic test came in 2023, when the preacher Amritpal Singh, styling himself in Bhindranwale’s image, built a following around deaddiction campaigning and revivalism, stormed a police station with armed supporters to free an aide, and was arrested after a weeks long manhunt and detained under the National Security Act in Assam. The sequel was the era’s ambiguities in miniature: from prison in 2024 he won the Khadoor Sahib parliamentary seat by a landslide, a result read by alarmists as separatism’s return and by closer analysts as Punjab’s familiar sympathy vote against detention without trial, the same instrument this series’ TADA article examined, converting grievance into ballots. His subsequent political vehicle has remained a marginal force in state politics, and the episode’s sober lesson matched the series’ finding throughout: Punjab’s electorate will punish the state’s excesses at the polls and still decline, in every general test, the separatist project itself.
The Violence at the Edges
The question’s violent residue persists at low intensity: the targeted killings and terror modules Indian agencies attribute to the exiled networks and their Pakistani hosting, the drone consignments of weapons and drugs across the border fence, gangster militant convergences in which the era’s iconography brands ordinary crime, and abroad, the vandalism of missions and temples that accompanies the referendum calendar. Punjab Police’s registers and the designations lists of Western governments both grew through the 2020s, and the assassinations within Pakistan of aged era figures suggest, as this series noted in its ISI article, that the file remains active on every side. None of it approaches insurgency; all of it feeds the mutual inflation, separatist spectacle and official alarm, that keeps the question performatively alive.
The Assessment
Stated with the series’ discipline: the Khalistan demand today commands a diaspora campaign of genuine persistence and no verified scale, a domestic constituency that Punjab’s voters have again and again declined to supply, a violent fringe with state sponsorship across one border, and a symbolic potency, on all sides, out of proportion to every measurable base. It survives, this batch has argued, on the unfinished accounting, each unaudited cremation ground and untried massacre supplying the campaign its texts, and it would be answered, as the series’ final article will argue, not by the next designation or the next referendum round, but by the assembled ledger neither Delhi nor the campaign has reason to want.
