Shooting of Khalistan activists raises fears among Californian Sikhs

Until recently, Satinder Pal Singh Raju was a largely unknown figure in Northern California’s large and sprawling Sikh community.

From his home in the small town of Woodland, he worked as a truck driver – a popular job among Sikhs – cared for his wife and children and was a regular visitor to Gurdwara Sahib West Sacramento, the temple where he had worshiped since emigrating from India nearly 19 years ago.

In his spare time, he volunteered to travel throughout Northern California and Canada to organize educational events and symbolic campaigns to create the long-sought independent state of Khalistan, which Sikh activists want to carve out of India's Punjab region. India views the decades-old global separatist movement as a terrorist operation because of its territorial ambitions and the violence perpetrated by some of its offshoots.

On August 11, as Raju and two friends were out shopping for food late at night, someone shot at his pickup truck as it drove along Interstate 505 in rural Yolo County. At least four bullets struck his vehicle, police said. Raju and his friends – also Sikh activists in the separatist movement – were not injured, although their car veered off the road and came to rest next to a drainage ditch and a two-story haystack.

“They tried to kill me,” said 44-year-old Raju.

Over the past two weeks, news of the shooting has reverberated through the Indian media and on North American Punjabi-language radio broadcasts. Fear is growing among Sikhs in California over recent threats against them because of their political activities against the right-wing, nationalist Indian government. In recent months, Sikh leaders of several temples in Northern California have reported receiving anonymous calls and text messages threatening them in Hindi over pro-Khalistan activities.

There is debate in the Sikh community about whether the attack on Raju and his fellow passengers is connected to larger cross-border incidents in Canada and the United States, where authorities accuse the Indian government of links to the fatal shooting of a Sikh activist in British Columbia and a murder plot in New York.

India has denied all allegations.

Local police in Woodland and the California Highway Patrol, which responded to the 911 call, did not comment on the motive for the shooting and did not release information about it until August 22, 10 days after the incident. In a statement, the FBI said it “continues to work” with the CHP on the investigation and “takes all acts of violence seriously.” The Indian Embassy in Washington, DC, did not respond to questions from The Times.

Activists in the crosshairs

The Sikh Coalition, a U.S.-based civil rights group, said in a statement that while the Yolo County incident was being investigated, it “underscores the ongoing threat of transnational repression in India.”

The activists targeted in the Canadian and New York cases belonged to a group called Sikhs for Justice, which promotes non-binding referendum votes around the world that allow the Sikh diaspora to express support for Khalistan, which means “land of the pure” in Punjabi. This year's votes in Sacramento and San Francisco attracted tens of thousands of Sikhs.

In May, Canadian police arrested three Indian nationals living in Alberta in connection with a shooting on June 18, 2023, in which Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar – a close friend of Raju – was killed outside his temple.

The three suspects – as well as a fourth alleged accomplice who was arrested earlier – went on trial this month on charges of premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The trial has been postponed until October. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police – Canada's national police force – has not said how it found the men. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadian intelligence agencies were reviewing “credible allegations” of possible Indian government involvement.

India said Canada had not provided any evidence to support its allegations of government involvement, instead accusing Canada of providing “shelter” to extremists.

In November, the US government filed an indictment alleging that India paid a hitman – an undercover agent with ties to the Drug Enforcement Agency, it turned out – to kill a Sikh activist in New York who is a lawyer and spokesman for the Sikhs for Justice organization. In the indictment, the US accused an unnamed Indian official of working with a known international drug trafficker to hire the fake hitman for $100,000. The dealer was arrested in the Czech Republic and extradited to New York in June. He has pleaded not guilty in federal court ahead of a trial in September.

India said its investigation into the US allegations found that “rogue” agents from the Research and Analysis Wing, India's intelligence agency, were operating without government authorisation.

Sikhs vow to continue

The activists reject the denials and declare that they remain steadfastly committed to their commitment.

“They are lying,” said Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs For Justice who is supporting Raju's case. Pannun is the New Yorker who the U.S. government says India wanted to kill.

“If a bullet and death are the price we have to pay for Khalistan, then this is what awaits us as Sikhs,” said Pannun, who produces YouTube shows railing against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi from his office in Astoria, Queens.

Now he turns his attention to Raju, who has become something of a hero in the close-knit community of Sikhs fighting for Khalistan.

For Raju, the shooting was a validation of his activism.

“What else can we do but keep going?” he said. “We can't stop now. We can't be afraid.”

Not all of his fellow activists agree with Raju's claims that there may be an Indian plot against him.

“We don't really know what happened. It could be something else,” said Bobby Singh, a 24-year-old Khalistan organizer from Sacramento who knows Raju from local pro-Khalistan rallies. “Still, we are demanding a full investigation.”

Decades of dispute

There are about 500,000 Sikhs in the United States, the third largest population outside India after Britain and Canada. About half of U.S. Sikhs live in California, where their presence in the Bay Area, Stockton, and Sacramento dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While the most passionate Khalistan activists, such as Raju, are a small group, support for the movement is widespread among Sikhs in the United States, with posters and prayers at temples regularly mentioning the Sikh nation they envision.

Many, like Raju, cite modern Indian history as the reason for this.

The boy, now 44, grew up in the city of Jalandhar in Punjab when the conflicts between the Sikhs and the Indian government reached their peak.

In 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a siege of separatists occupying the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism's holiest site. In response, her two Sikh guards murdered her. Mobs rampaged in Delhi, killing Sikhs, often with government approval. Some estimates put the deaths in the tens of thousands. In another incident a year later linked to the violence, militants blew up an Air India plane over the Atlantic, killing 329 people.

Raju says he has friends and family back home who witnessed the violence of that time, and he knows people in India who have suffered decades of persistent discrimination against Sikhs.

That – and the opportunity to work and live in America – brought him to California at 25. Raju moved to Woodland to be with his family and got a job as a trucking driver. He quit briefly to run a Punjabi grocery store before returning to the trucking industry ten years ago. For most of his working life, Raju has been traveling on Interstate 5, hauling dry goods from California to Oregon and Washington state.

Growing activism

“I wasn't very political,” he said. That was until 2016, when friends from the West Sacramento temple recruited him as a volunteer for Sikhs for Justice. The growing group had ambitions to launch pro-Khalistan campaigns in Sikh population centers from London to Australia.

Raju was tasked with educating Sikhs about the process – a way to show Sikhs' global support for the nation they want to create – and helping at polling stations in California and Canada. Through WhatsApp groups and in-person meetings, he met Sikh activists who were traveling around the globe to support the cause.

It was a part-time hobby until last year, when his friend Nijjar was shot dead before the elections in the region.

“I was in mourning,” Raju said. He took a break from truck driving and spent three months in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver, Canada, to organize the referendum. When Sikhs gathered in San Francisco for a Khalistan vote in January, Raju was there. He was also in Sacramento when a vote was held in April. Raju was in Calgary, Canada, until voting there ended last month.

Unlike some better-known activists, Raju has never been threatened, but he suspects that his increased visibility through his travels – including photos of him posing with Nijjar – put him on the radar of opponents of his work.

The night of the shooting

On August 11, he said, he was at home in Woodland during the day with two friends from the Khalistan movement who are less committed than he is and who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for their safety. Raju had spent the day playing with his young children before speaking to his colleagues late into the night.

Hungry, they hit the road and headed south on I-505 to Vacaville, where BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse was open until midnight, Raju said.

His friend was driving Raju's Dodge Ram 1500. Raju was in the passenger seat and the other friend was in the back seat. At around 11:30 p.m., they noticed a car, possibly a white Honda Civic, following them closely, Raju said.

The Honda pulled into the passenger side of the truck, Raju said, and someone – he didn't see who it was – started shooting. The three friends ducked and the car rolled into a ditch. Raju said they got out and hid briefly behind hay bales that were still visible Thursday afternoon.

“I am grateful that I survived,” Raju said. “Our religion is a religion of peace. But we also have to fight for our rights. That's why we will continue.”

Kaleem reported from Los Angeles and Garrison from Woodland. Editor Richard Winton contributed reporting.