US Sikh Coalition’s denial of terror betrays majority of Sikhs

Just over six months ago, President Joe Biden welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House for the Quad Summit. While the White House praised India’s democracy, Biden’s team embrace of apologists for Sikh terrorism sullied the meeting. Just hours before the Biden-Modi meeting, White House officials met a group of Sikh civil society activists, including some that include or provide cover for Khalistan extremists.

I and others criticised the Biden administration for giving any legitimacy to activists that legitimise, rationalise, and apologise for Khalistan terrorism. At its core, Khalistan extremists demand a separate state for Sikhs in India’s Punjab. Such a demand has no merit for several reasons: First, the lack of any religious basis for such nationalism. Second, the curious omission of Pakistan’s Punjab from the movement despite Pakistan having driven out its Sikh community in almost its entirety. Today, the greatest interaction between Pakistan and the Sikh community is in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)’s ties to Khalistan issue extremists. Third, the lack of any grassroots desire within Indian Punjab betrays Khalistani claims.

Many Americans are not aware of Khalistani terror because it has claimed few American victims, but Khalistani terror has been as pernicious as Hamas and Al Qaeda terror. In the first six months of 1984, Sikh terrorists killed nearly 300 people and injured more than 500 in more than 700 separate incidents. On October 31, 1984, Sikh bodyguards gunned down Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to avenge the death of militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had holed up inside Amritsar’s Golden Temple. On June 23, 1985, the number of deaths at the hands of Sikh terrorists more than doubled when Khalistan activists bombed Air India Flight 182, killing 329 people midflight.

More from Opinion

Sergio Gor’s senate hearing signals the future of Indo-American ties How Trump’s ‘War on Drugs’ buildup against Venezuela has a hidden agenda

In recent years, Khalistan militarism has increased, especially in the US and Canada. This is not organic but rather the direct result of the militant’s sponsors abroad. The ISI became enraged at the abrogation of Article 370, especially when the result was a return to normalcy, increasing security, and an economic boom in Jammu and Kashmir.

Many Khalistan militants also take advantage of American and Canadian naivete; they claim asylum under false pretences and act as anchors for other immigration, all the while laundering money to fund terrorism.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How army remains Pakistan’s biggest business house

60 years on, why 1965 India–Pakistan war still matters

On a day-to-day level, the chief victims of Khalistan militancy are fellow Sikhs. In 2019, the British government commissioned the Bloom Review to examine government engagement with various religious communities. The review, released in 2023, was comprehensive and found that Sikh militants were taking over gurdwaras, intimidating mainstream Sikh leaders and elders, and falsely claiming to speak on behalf of the broader community. Sometimes the loudest are not the most legitimate.

The Sikh Coalition, founded in 2001 as an advocacy group to defend Sikh civil rights in the US, increasingly fails the Sikh American community and Sikhs more broadly by trying to silence legitimate criticism of Sikh militancy.

I experienced this firsthand last year when the Sikh Coalition demanded I retract a Firstpost column criticising the White House reception of apologists for Khalistani extremism. It suggested falsely, criticism of Sikh militancy has “dangerous implications for our organisation and our community more broadly”. To demand retraction of articles is to treat the US Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees of free speech with disdain.

In recent days, the Sikh Coalition has attacked The Civics Alliance’s social studies standards for American grade schools because the 10th-grade curriculum mentions that discussion of post-independence South Asian history includes mention of “Muslim, Sikh, and Tamil terror”. Once again, the Coalition argued that acknowledging history and the problem of extremism endangers the Sikh community. This is nonsense.

Pretending extremism does not exist and, indeed, normalising it, endangers the community far more. The Civis Alliance should stand firm in the face of the Sikh Coalition’s indignation. No one should censor history because it hurts feelings. What next? No one should mention the September 11, 2001, and the November 26-29, 2008, Mumbai attacks because they might hurt the feelings of some Muslim organisations?

Indeed, the Sikh Coalition’s playbook of intimidation and denial is disingenuous, but it is not original. For decades, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has argued that any discussion of Islamist terrorism is Islamophobic and encourages discrimination, if not violence, toward America’s Muslim population.

The volume of CAIR’s protests masked both its acceptance of funds from financiers in Qatar as well as some of its own membership’s support for Hamas and other terrorist groups. Increasingly, however, American policymakers and journalists see through CAIR’s bombast, and American Muslims themselves turn their back on a group that too often rationalises violence.

Moral clarity matters. The problem was never the American Muslim community; it was a few militants within who sought to cloak themselves in the rhetoric of civil rights as they pursued a far different agenda. Sikh organisations should confront militancy in their midst, the danger of extremism, and the legacy of terrorism. The best way to ensure civil rights and communal safety is not to deny terror and silence valid discussion, but rather to stigmatise militancy and ostracise those who twist religion to justify terror.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.