It’s a busy Saturday at the Sacramento Gurdwara Bradshaw at the edges of the city surrounded by fields and strip malls. In front of the new, gleaming white temple, a crowd of people are dressed in their finest for a wedding. The morning worship is piped in through loudspeakers.
Walk around the back of the domed building and you encounter a sea of bright yellow flags emblazoned with bold, blue letters spelling out a word: Khalistan.
Khalistan doesn’t exist on any map, but it is an imagined homeland for some Sikhs who dream of their own nation separate from India. The calls for an independent state have grown more urgent among Sikhs in the wake of last year’s foiled assassination attempt of a Sikh activist on U.S. soil. The Justice Department charged an Indian national in the plot.
Sikhs are an ethno-religious group who come originally from what is now the Indian state of Punjab. There are an estimated half a million Sikhs in America, many of them based in California.
A long line of truck cabs and cars snake across the Gurdwara parking lot — trucks because Sikhs make up an increasing percentage of truckers in America. This caravan is getting ready to take to the streets of Sacramento and its sprawling suburbs — a rally on wheels to get out the vote ahead of Sunday’s referendum.
The question on the ballot: Should there be an independent Khalistan?
After stops in Europe and Canada, the nonbinding Khalistan referendum is rolling out in the U.S. The first vote was in San Francisco at the end of January. Organizers say it was so popular that they scheduled a second vote for the end of March.
The backstory
The fight for Khalistan…
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