Joe Rubin
Thu, October 19, 2023
Bobby Singh looked at his ringing cell phone and noticed the caller on the other end was the FBI. He wasn’t surprised.
He answered the phone and the agent on the other end informed Singh that he might be in imminent danger. That, too, did not surprise him.
Just two days earlier, Singh, who is a Sacramento Sikh rights activist, had heard devastating news. A man he considered a mentor, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was slain by masked gunmen outside a gurdwara — a Sikh place of worship — near Vancouver, Canada. Nijjar was a leader of a movement to create an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking in parliament, would later say that Canadian intelligence had found “credible evidence” that “agents of the government of India” had carried out the assassination. The increasingly Hindu nationalist government of India, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had labeled Nijjar a terrorist and sought his extradition for years.
The June 18 assassination and growing tension between Sikhs and the Modi government are of particular concern in the Central Valley and Bay Area, home to a large Sikh population. California elected officials of Sikh descent, including Elk Grove’s Mayor and a member of the California Assembly, told The Sacramento Bee that the assassination of Nijjar is part of a worrying trend of transnational repression that they believe can be traced to the Government of India.
For Singh, the assassination was especially personal.
Singh, whose parents immigrated from India in the 1980s, befriended Nijjar at a Sikh activist conference in Toronto in 2019. Nijjar and the young activist communicated frequently via texts and phone calls.
“It was just so shocking. It’s something I am still coming to terms with,” Singh said. “We all have to carry on his work.”
Singh says that two days before Nijjar was cornered by a vehicle and shot with dozens of bullets, he told Singh in a phone call he was being followed. Singh said that Nijjar told him he strongly suspected India.
Three days after the shooting — and just a day after he received the call from the FBI concerned for his safety — Singh received this text, which he shared with The Bee: “Just a head up for you. You’re next in the USA. We have all the tools ready to fix the problems.”
The text message was sent from a masked cell phone number. The chilling message, which Singh shared with the FBI, concluded with a nationalist Indian slogan, “Jai Hind,” which translates to Victory to Hindustan.
The threat to Singh is just one of a number of troubling instances that have been shared with The Bee following Nijjar’s assassination.
On June 24, two days after Dr. Pritpal Singh, founder of the American Sikh Caucus Committee, was warned by the FBI about concerns for his safety, security footage showed an SUV taking cell phone images in front of Singh’s Fremont home.
In August, after Sikh American Assemblywoman Jasmeet Kaur Bains championed a resolution declaring a massacre of at least 3,000 Sikhs in Punjab province in 1984 a genocide, Bains said that four Indian men visited her Bakersfield office and threatened her. Bains told The Bee she filed a complaint with Bakersfield Police and the California Highway Patrol.
On Sept. 7, according to a gurdwara in Stockton, California known for being an important center of Khalistan activism, a man claiming to be a representative of the Indian government visited the gurdwara and told a priest that there would be immigration and other consequences if the gurdwara did not back off its pro-Khalistan activism. According to the gurdwara, the man asked for and received phone numbers for board members of the gurdwara.
On October 15, a man was arrested at a gurdwara in Fremont, California after he allegedly tore down posters memorializing Hardeep Sing Nijjar. As police took the man away in handcuffs, he could be heard in a cell phone video filmed by a bystander yelling, “Khalistan is a terrorist organization.”
The Indian Consulate in San Francisco and the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. did not respond to inquiries from The Bee.
Bobbie Singh-Allen, Elk Grove’s mayor and the first elected Sikh woman mayor in the United States, told The Bee that it is hard to know, given the current tense climate, what is state-sponsored harassment and what is simply a byproduct of polarization created by the Modi government.
“You want to support your community,” Singh-Allen said, “but these days you have to look over your shoulder and wonder what the consequences will be.”
A Washington Post investigation last month into a “digital campaign by Hindu nationalists to inflame India” concluded that, “They have perfected the spread of inflammatory, often false and bigoted material on an industrial scale.”
Singh-Allen said that she has felt the flames of hatred directed toward her numerous times, including when she spoke out against a three-day shutdown of the internet in her native Punjab in March. The shutoff was justified by the Indian government as a necessary part of a manhunt for a Sikh separatist.
“Can you imagine our government blocking forms of communication to the outside world while looking for one person?” Singh-Allen wrote on Facebook.
The mayor told The Bee that men she suspected of having connections to the Indian government confronted her at a conference in Los Angeles
“A few aggressive men cornered me, and asked, ‘why am I against India’?” she recalled. “I’m not against India, I’m against the world’s largest democracy not behaving like one. Anytime a Sikh speaks up, they are labeled suspicious.”
The Sacramento State activist Bobby Singh was not the only person to receive a call or be paid a visit by the FBI following the assassination of Nijjar.
The Bee learned of at least a half-dozen such outreach efforts in California including one to Dr. Pritpal Singh’s home in Fremont. According to Dr. Singh, he was visited by agents who told the founder of the American Sikh Congressional Caucus they had a “duty to warn.”
Tipped off by FBI concern, Singh reviewed security footage and discovered a person on June 24 (six days after the assassination of Nijjar) in a black SUV in front of his gate taking cell phone photographs for several minutes. He provided the footage to the FBI.
Dr. Singh said he suspects that the SUV was sent by the Indian government.
“We will not be intimidated by India’s transnational repression threatening individuals on U.S soil.,” he said. He added that he believes it’s important that Congress “receives a full briefing from the intelligence community on the threats posed to Americans by the rogue Indian state.”
Little Punjab
While Sikhs make up two percent of the overall population in India, about 40 percent of Californians of Indian descent are Sikhs, or an estimated 250,000, with the majority living in the Central Valley and Bay Area.
So many Sikhs have settled in Yuba City, an hour north of Sacramento, the city is informally referred to as Little Punjab. An annual Sikh festival in November, Nagar Kirtan, draws hundreds of thousands.
While Sikh leaders say they are concerned about several incidents in California, none raised more alarms than the Sept. 7 visit to the Stockton Gurdwara by a mysterious visitor.
The Gurdwara, the oldest Sikh house of worship in the United States, provided The Sacramento Bee with security footage showing a man entering the gurdwara on foot and ultimately, gurdwara leaders say, delivering a message to a priest: Either back off pro-Khalistan activism or face consequences. Afterward, the man could be seen on the security video making a call on his cell phone. Minutes later he was picked up by a 2023 Cadillac Escalade.
The Gurdwara says it has alerted the FBI. It’s not known if the man was officially representing the Indian government. The FBI declined to comment on any investigation into Indian intelligence operations in the United States.
According to the President of the Gurdwara, Ravinder Singh Dhaliwal, the visit followed mysterious phone calls he received with similar warnings to curtail Sikh activism.
“What’s ironic,” Dhaliwal said, “is that our Gurdwara in the early 20th century played a pivotal and historic role in India’s Independence movement from the British. Now it seems the government of India is attacking our fundamental rights of free expression.”
Dhaliwal said that during the visit with one of its priests, “this visitor claimed that the visit was part of an Indian government’s operation to keep a watch on all gurdwaras in the U.S. This man told the employee that the Indian Government can influence the employee’s legal status.”
According to Dhaliwal, the priest provided the visitor with a list of board members of the Gurdwara, including their phone numbers.
Jasjit Singh, a Sacramento Unified School District School Board Member and practicing Sikh, said that the Stockton incident was particularly chilling because Nijjar was slain outside a gurdwara.
“Gurdwaras are open to anybody regardless of religion, race, creed, sexual orientation,” he said. “That openness and acceptance is part of being a Sikh.
“But when you put on the hat of the Indian state, especially after the killing of Hardeep, what is being described is not the visit of an average person, it’s state business, used to intimidate and strike fear into community members.”
Intelligence experts said that Sikhs in California have reason to be concerned.
“After Mr. Nijjar was killed in British Columbia, Sikhs in Canada were saying, Oh, ‘it’s India, it’s India.’ And then all of a sudden you find out it almost certainly was India,” Dan Stanton, Former Executive Manager of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told The Bee.
Stanton added, “If they can do this in Canada, they can do this anywhere, I’m certain U.S. officials are taking concerns of the Sikh diaspora very seriously.”
For the moment U.S. officials, who seek India’s cooperation on the international stage in the Middle East, China, and Ukraine have only made relatively reserved statements on the Nijjar killing, though behind the scenes assisted Canada with intelligence.
“We’re very concerned about the allegations that have been raised by Canada, by Prime Minister Trudeau,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said at a news conference last month. Blinked added, “we have been in close contact with Canada about that and at the same time we have engaged with the Indian government and urged them to work with Canada on an investigation.”
India under Modi, who was first elected in 2014, has long been concerned about Sikh activism in California. In 2016, officials from the Indian Consulate in San Francisco made the unusual move of visiting every member of the Fresno City Council, stalling a resolution recognizing the 1984 coordinated killing of thousands of Sikhs as a genocide. After a nine-month delay, the resolution ultimately passed.
Seven years later, Bains, a family physician who became the first South Asian woman elected to the California Assembly in 2022, described a toxic backlash when she introduced a resolution in the assembly in March recognizing the 1984 mass killing of Sikhs as a genocide.
After the resolution passed, Bains said she received numerous anonymous threats to her safety. Then in August, four Indian men paid a visit to her office.
Bains thought the meeting was just a typical get-together with constituents, but things derailed when one of the men uttered a racist trope.
“Sikhs were created to protect Hindus,” Dr. Bains recalled one of the men telling her. I told him “that is offensive, my identity is much larger than that as a Sikh American.”
The same man, according to Bains, began yelling and pointing his finger at her, telling her, “I will do whatever it takes to go after the person behind this. This is an open challenge to you Doctor Bains.”
Bains says she filed complaints with both the Bakersfield Police and the California Highway Patrol, which protects California legislators. She said because the incident happened in a state office, she believes several laws were broken.
Bains said she would like to see more forceful statements of concern from U.S. officials about the Nijjar killing and the general atmosphere that Sikhs are facing.
“When the Canadian Prime Minister spoke out, I think that there was a collective feeling amongst California Sikhs that we were absolutely right to think this way,” she said. “The concern is now that we have proof, why isn’t more being done to protect Sikh activists within America?”
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