A year after Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s death, mysteries remain about how he really lived

Addressing hundreds of congregants on a late summer day at Guru Nanak temple in Surrey, B.C., Hardeep Singh Nijjar called on Sikhs to join him in a cause that had animated most of his life: the creation of an independent Sikh state, in Northwest India, known as Khalistan.

Speaking in Punjabi, he invoked the use of weapons against Indian adversaries: “We will have to take up arms,” he said. “We will have to dance to the edges of swords.” He turned his ire toward Sikhs who support independence but prefer to achieve it through activism and politics: “Those who advocate peaceful methods, we need to leave them behind. What justice will we get this way?”

The language used in this August, 2021, sermon – one of a handful of such recordings obtained by The Globe and Mail – is an example of why Mr. Nijjar had long been labelled a dangerous enemy by India and, if Canadian authorities are correct, put him in that country’s crosshairs.

Just over a year ago, two gunmen unleashed a flurry of gunfire into Mr. Nijjar as he pulled out of that same temple’s parking lot, killing him. When, months later, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons to assert there was credible evidence connecting the Indian government to the assassination, it touched off a diplomatic firestorm. The slaying of Mr. Nijjar – and a subsequent plot foiled by U.S. authorities to assassinate Mr. Nijjar’s New York-based lawyer – has brought Indo-Canadian relations to its lowest point since the 1980s.

To Indian security officials, Mr. Nijjar’s calls for violence are more proof that Canadian authorities were ignoring the problem of Sikh extremism in this country. India has made many allegations against Mr. Nijjar, including blaming him for a 2007 bombing of a cinema and an attempted murder in 2021, but has failed to provide compelling evidence to support them.

To supporters of Khalistan, however, Mr. Nijjar simply leaned heavily into the warrior imagery prevalent in Sikh culture. Framing it as a call to actual violence, they say, is to play into the hands of India’s hyper-nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and his efforts to conjure up monsters abroad.

Although he was never convicted of any crimes, interviews with people who knew Mr. Nijjar reveal he was indeed steeped in Sikh extremism, including allegations that he organized weapons training in B.C. and was linked to a shadowy militant group called the Khalistan Tiger Force.

So was Canada harbouring a terrorist, as India has claimed? Or has India’s government inflated the threat posed by Mr. Nijjar, in an effort to boost political support? Unravelling that mystery is complicated by decades of mistrust between both states.

But although much about Mr. Nijjar and his aims remain in dispute, one thing is abundantly clear: his killing has ignited a long-dormant rift between Canada and the world’s most populous country, one that first broke into public view 40 years ago with the Air India bombing that killed 329 people, almost all of them Canadians.

It is equally clear that, once again, the often-explosive history between India’s Hindu majority and its Sikh minority has become Canada’s problem, too.

I. Childhood

The faded, pink clay home belonging to the Nijjar family is set amid the lush, green paddy and wheat fields of Punjab’s Doaba region.

There, Mr. Nijjar had what in northern India would be considered an ordinary, middle-class, rural childhood, says Moninder Singh Bual, a close friend. “Canadians, though, would consider it barely surviving.”

Sikh grievances with Delhi simmered throughout Mr. Nijjar’s early years. The seeds of discontent had been sowed decades earlier, with Britain’s messy, clumsy, rushed exit from the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Many Sikhs felt that while Muslims had been given Pakistan and Hindus granted India in the partition, Sikhs had been left stateless, subjugated, dependent on Delhi.

The situation came to a head on June 5, 1984, when prime minister Indira Gandhi ordered the storming of the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a militant messiah and the leading figure of the Khalistan movement, had holed up inside with 200 Sikh fighters as India came cracking down on their demands for autonomy.

The site of Sikh spiritual power was reduced to rubble in the ensuing battle, code-named Operation Blue Star. At least 2,000 people were killed, including Mr. Bhindranwale, and an unknown number of innocent worshippers.

Five months later, Ms. Gandhi was shot and killed by her two Sikh bodyguards seeking vengeance. Her assassination triggered retaliatory killings of thousands of Sikhs by Hindu mobs, some hacked to death, others burned alive.

The shock and horror of the violence left ordinary Sikhs feeling besieged in their own country. It radicalized many of them and contributed to a surge in support for Khalistan.

In 1991, the insurgency’s bloodiest year, more than 6,000 people were killed.

Because Punjab has no mountains or forests to serve as hideouts, militants hid among the populace. They knew which families could be trusted as they moved from village to village under the cover of night.

In interviews with The Globe, friends of Mr. Nijjar said he would regale them with stories about how Sikh fighters stayed nights at the family farm where they were protected and cared for.

As a boy, Mr. Nijjar would bring bowls of hot food to militants hiding in the bush in the evening, gathering empty platters the following morning, Gurkeerat Singh Sidhi, a family friend, recalls Mr. Nijjar telling him. (In a statement issued via Mr. Bual, Mr. Nijjar’s parents, who declined to speak to The Globe, dispute that their family home was used as a safe house.)

Mr. Nijjar told associates in B.C. that he was inspired to join the fight by Anokh Singh Babbar, a founding member of Babbar Khalsa, the militant group behind the Air India bombing. Indian police also accused the explosives expert, who was killed by police in 1987, of murdering 100 people using bombs fitted in radios.

II. The bombing

Mr. Nijjar spent hours listening to the soft-spoken Mr. Babbar, a frequent visitor to the farm, and watched him as he fingered his prayer beads, his rifle resting in his lap.

Another of Mr. Nijjar’s confidantes, Gurdeep Singh Deepa, a rising star in the Khalistan movement, came from the nearby village of Heran. Mr. Deepa rose quickly up the ranks of the Khalistan Commando Force, notorious for the ferocity of its attacks. In 1991, KCF militants boarded a train, separated Sikhs from Hindus, then slaughtered 125 Hindus, many of them children. Mr. Deepa’s brother, who lives in Surrey, confirmed Mr. Nijjar’s close friendship with his brother.

But Mr. Bual insists that Mr. Nijjar – who was then in his mid-20s – never graduated to a full-scale combat role in Punjab, and never formally allied with the Babbars or the KCF while in India.

What no one disputes is that Mr. Nijjar fled Punjab shortly after a bomb shook the state capital of Chandigarh on Aug. 31, 1995. The explosion tore through the bulletproof white car belonging to Punjab’s chief minister, Beant Singh, killing the 73-year-old and 17 others.

Three days after the blast, Mr. Nijjar was hauled into a police station in Phillaur because he knew several of the bombing’s architects, Mr. Nijjar told friends in Canada, though he denied this was the reason for his arrest when later asked by Canadian immigration officials.

In Phillaur, his interrogators hung him upside down and tied his arms behind his back, Mr. Nijjar later wrote in an affidavit supporting his Canadian refugee claim. Police electrocuted him, beat him with a wooden stick and threatened to kill him, he added. Twenty-one days later, Mr. Nijjar escaped into the Ludhiana suburbs.

Weeks after Beant Singh’s murder, he fled Punjab.

III. Canada

In February of 1997, Mr. Nijjar landed in Toronto, according to immigration records filed in court. He was carrying a forged passport with the traditionally Hindu Brahmin name of Ravi Sharma, his beard shorn and his hair cut short to further obscure his Sikh identity. He was 19, he said. Friends say he was actually 25 at the time, five years older than the date listed on his B.C. driver’s licence and Canadian passport.

Mr. Nijjar told officials that he had spent the 18 months following his detention in Punjab in hiding. Friends in B.C. told The Globe that, in fact, he fled to Europe, where his two brothers now live.

He adamantly denied any involvement in the insurgency to Canadian officials – but that ended up working against him.

Immigration adjudicators concluded he didn’t have a well-founded fear of persecution in India given he’d said he wasn’t involved in the militancy, and denied his refugee claim.

Records show that he applied for permanent residency, listing his wife Harjinder as his sponsor. Immigration lawyer Richard Kurland suggests Mr. Nijjar was likely granted citizenship after becoming a permanent resident, noting the gap in time between his application and citizenship “aligns perfectly with processing times and public policy.”

IV. Two worlds

Living in Canada didn’t stop Mr. Nijjar from becoming a target of India’s. The government of then-prime minister Manmohan Singh – the first Sikh to hold the job – began accusing the young father of a range of crimes, including co-ordinating the 2007 bombing of a cinema in Ludhiana, Punjab’s largest city. The blast killed six and injured 42.

At the time of the cinema bombing, Mr. Nijjar was running a small plumbing firm and agitating for Sikh rights. He’d put his two little boys, Balraj and Mehtab, in a Sikh private school and had recently brought his mom and dad, Surinder and Piara, to live in his family’s rented Surrey home.

Mr. Nijjar was never tried or convicted in the bombing case. Four others did go to trial, but were acquitted for lack of evidence. There’s not a single mention of Mr. Nijjar in the 4,200-page court transcript and evidence submissions reviewed by The Globe. Defence lawyer Jaspal Singh Manjhpur also told The Globe the Canadian’s name didn’t come up at any point in the trial. When asked about this discrepancy, India’s High Commissioner declined to comment.

Some security experts are skeptical that Mr. Nijjar, despite his fiery speeches, presented the danger the Modi government claims. Dan Stanton, a former intelligence officer in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said Indian intelligence officials have a reputation for torqueing evidence to fit with political objectives, and Canadian law enforcement doesn’t trust their information.

“They’ve created a threat on paper,” he said. “To me, it’s a good strawman, if you want to present that you have these great external threats in these ‘weak’ liberal democracies like Canada, and you need to go out and neutralize them.”

If India had credible evidence that Mr. Nijjar was co-ordinating terrorism from Canadian soil, the RCMP would have arrested him a long time ago, Mr. Stanton said.

Canada has had an extradition treaty with India since 1987, but Ottawa has grown increasingly hesitant to use it. There have only been six extraditions since 2004, the last one in 2019. Last summer, a Parliamentary committee recommended Canada end its treaty with India over concerns that prisoners there could face human-rights abuses and torture.

That has left India with little outlet for its suspicions about the company Mr. Nijjar kept.

In 1995, Jagtar Singh Tara, a radicalized Sikh separatist, was convicted and sentenced to life in India for his role in the suicide bombing that killed Beant Singh, who was himself blamed for the deaths of hundreds of Sikhs. Mr. Tara, a tall, bearded figure with piercing dark-brown eyes, famously escaped from jail in 2004 by digging a 94-foot tunnel by hand, and went to Pakistan, where India alleges he spent years directing the Khalistan Commando Force, and a splinter group, the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF).

Mr. Tara and Mr. Nijjar spent time together in Pakistan and Thailand before Mr. Tara was rearrested in 2014. Photos of the pair on a rooftop of a gurdwara in Pakistan in 2013 have been widely circulated in Indian media; another photo, in which Mr. Nijjar is wearing the same shirt as on the rooftop, shows him brandishing an AK-47.

The Globe geolocated the photo of the pair to a holy site outside of Lahore known as a place of pilgrimage for politically motivated Sikhs. The daughter of a Sikh man from Surrey shown standing beside Mr. Nijjar confirmed that her father was with him and Mr. Tara.

Mr. Tara and two other militants convicted of orchestrating Beant Singh’s assassination formed Mr. Nijjar’s “circle,” Moninder Singh Bual told a pro-militant Sikh site, The Undying Morcha, this fall. “They were his confidantes – his people.”

Mr. Tara’s lawyer Simarjeet Singh told The Globe Mr. Tara appointed Mr. Nijjar to take over the KTF’s leadership after his arrest, but declined to elaborate. When asked about this, Mr. Bual said it’s not the first time he’d heard the story. In 2015, a meeting was held at Guru Nanak with 25 to 30 senior community leaders to discuss the allegation Mr. Nijjar was directing the KTF. Mr. Nijjar told those gathered he knew several people involved with the KTF, but was not “dumb enough” to take charge of an alleged terrorist organization from within Canada.

“We thought: if this goes viral, we’re going to have to issue a statement,” Mr. Bual recalled, but added the story was never picked up by Canadian media.

Mr. Nijjar and his lawyer, New York-based Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, kept in contact with Mr. Tara while he was on the run. The lawyer says he flew to Thailand at Mr. Tara’s request in 2014 to assist in his legal fight and prevent his extradition back to India, but was unsuccessful. Indian officials denied The Globe’s request to interview Mr. Tara from prison.

Mr. Pannun says he was concerned Mr. Tara would be tortured if he were extradited. Mr. Tara, in his view, is not a terrorist because he didn’t target civilians, and only turned to violence once all other avenues for justice for what he calls India’s Sikh genocide were exhausted.

“This was a generation of Sikhs who had been almost wiped out by the extrajudicial killings ordered by Beant Singh, and they wanted to put an end to it,” he said. “This isn’t terrorism.”

Mr. Tara is similarly unrepentant. He called Beant Singh a “butcher” and said he had no regrets for the killing.

“These warriors … were true heroes,” reads a confession letter Mr. Tara submitted to an Indian court in 2018, translated into English. “We didn’t care then, nor do we now, whether the government, its puppet judges, or the sell-out media label us as heroes or villains. Our mission was to stop the oppression of Sikhs.”

The next relationship of Mr. Nijjar’s to inflame India was one he forged in British Columbia.

In spring of 2016, Mandeep Singh Dhaliwal, a Surrey plumber, was on one of his frequent visits to Punjab when he was picked up by police. Five days later, Indian newspapers ran screaming headlines about the wilds of B.C. being the site of a Khalistani terror training camp.

Police in Mullanpur Dakha allege that an informant came forward to report that Mr. Dhaliwal had plans to carry out “terrorist activities” in Punjab.

Mr. Dhaliwal told police in the tiny rural community he had been sent by “Hardeep Singh Nijjar,” to attack “leaders of sects,” according to an application to remand him into custody obtained by The Globe. He said he was working with another militant and had been planning to retrieve “firearms and ammunition from Pakistan.”

This winter, The Globe spoke with two people close to Mr. Dhaliwal. They described him as gullible and fanatical in his support for Khalistan. At the time of his arrest, Mr. Dhaliwal was living in the basement of the Surrey home belonging to his sister, who sponsored his permanent residency. They said Mr. Dhaliwal, who was close to Mr. Nijjar, was planning to target leaders of Shiv Sena – a far-right Hindu sect linked to Mr. Modi’s political party – whose leaders were attacked several times in Punjab that year. (The Globe has chosen not to name the men, who fear potential repercussions to their safety.)

One of the men said he attended arms training with Mr. Dhaliwal in 2015. The other man, a confidante of Mr. Dhaliwal’s, was told in detail about the training. The two sources told The Globe that, in all, five orthodox Sikh men in their 20s and 30s, led by Mr. Nijjar, undertook weapons and GPS training, learned to communicate securely and did target practice at three sites in the Lower Mainland. They said the training, which occurred over the better part of a year, did not resemble a “camp,” as Indian media have described it. (Viral footage depicting a Sikh man shooting an AK-47 in a B.C. forest was unrelated, both men said.)

In June of 2016, India’s National Investigation Agency took over the case against Mr. Dhaliwal. He was charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy. He told media in Punjab he was tortured while in NIA custody. Mr. Dhaliwal’s lawyer, Jaspal Singh Manjhpur, told The Globe in an interview that police spent months investigating his client but found “nothing incriminating” and “no evidence of a training camp.” The lawyer said the allegations were “blown out of proportion by Indian media.”

Mr. Dhaliwal’s trial recently began. He is in custody on an unrelated matter – allegations that he threatened leaders of a Hindu paramilitary organization.

In a letter addressed to Mr. Trudeau at the time, Mr. Nijjar denied that he was involved in terrorist training in B.C., calling them “baseless and fabricated.”

Mr. Nijjar was questioned by the RCMP about the alleged training, two people close to him told The Globe – one of three times he was questioned by police in Canada – but he was never charged.

That same year, Mr. Nijjar’s business and personal bank accounts were frozen, says Mr. Bual. By then, he had been placed on Canada’s so-called No Fly list, and barred from air travel. His bank sent him a letter explaining that he was considered a threat to national security, and that it was calling in his debts, forcing Mr. Nijjar to borrow money from friends to repay his business loans, and seek a mortgage from private sources.

The crux of India’s allegations against Mr. Nijjar are often based on anonymous confessions or sworn statements from people in Indian custody, which groups such as the World Sikh Organization of Canada say are obtained through torture and can’t be considered credible. Those confessions allege Mr. Nijjar directed murders and extortions in Punjab from British Columbia, targeting non-Sikhs and affluent businessmen in the region. Indian investigators say Mr. Nijjar promised visas and legal help to Indians who followed his instructions in Punjab.

India also claims Mr. Nijjar was connected to yet another Sikh plumber from Surrey: Arshdeep Singh Gill, a 26-year-old who came to Canada from Punjab in 2018. India alleges Mr. Gill runs a criminal network that has close ties to the Khalistan cause, but Mr. Nijjar’s lawyer and friends dispute the alleged link between the pair.

Mr. Gill is the reported head of the Dalla Lakhbir gang, accused of using Canada as a base for a violent extortion ring in Punjab. He’s recently toned down his flashy lifestyle and gone into hiding, according to his family, but occasionally surfaces to give interviews to Indian media, often discussing his rivalry with other gangs.

Wire-transfer records and WhatsApp messages filed in Indian court show Mr. Gill, alias Arsh Dalla, along with his wife, sent tens of thousands of dollars via Western Union and other money-transfer services to men India alleges are part of an extortion and weapons-smuggling network. India alleges Mr. Gill co-ordinated the attempted murder of a Hindu pandit priest from Mr. Nijjar’s village in 2021, under direction from Mr. Nijjar.

One of the accused in that case told police Mr. Gill called him on WhatsApp from Canada in January, 2021, and “told us that as per the order of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, you have to kill a priest namely Kamaldeep Sharma,” according to sworn statements filed in court. The priest was accused of sexually assaulting women in the village, according to the confession. But the priest, in an interview in Punjabi, told The Globe the attempted murder, a shooting, was a dispute over land and he did not believe Mr. Nijjar was behind the attempt on his life.

Mr. Gill, who attended Mr. Nijjar’s temple, could not be reached for this story. In an interview this past April with a Punjabi journalist, he denied supporting the Khalistani militancy, but said he killed a Hindu leader who desecrated a Sikh holy book.

The Globe was unable to corroborate any links between Mr. Nijjar and Mr. Gill’s group.

But Mr. Nijjar’s friends and associates have not tried to hide the fact that he had underworld associates.

His lawyer Mr. Pannun confirmed Mr. Nijjar was warned about the plot to kill him in a phone call from a gang member in the days before his death. The man who called was a Sikh who was sympathetic to the Khalistan cause, the lawyer said. Mr. Pannun says Mr. Nijjar told him about the conversation when he called on June 17, 2023, the day before he was gunned down, to warn his friend of a similar plot against him.

If not for an FBI informant who helped foil a plot to assassinate the lawyer in June, 2023, U.S. officials say Mr. Pannun would also be dead, killed in a murder-for-hire that leads back to India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.

V. Politics

The bright yellow flag of Khalistan flies high above the strip malls and sweet shops of Surrey’s Cloverdale neighbourhood, signalling the political fealty of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara. Significant power and prestige comes with controlling the temple, a federally registered charity, which brought in $3.7-million in donations in 2022, and has assets worth $18-million, according to federal tax records.

As Mr. Nijjar was settling in Surrey in the early 2000s, the influence of orthodox, pro-Khalistan Sikhs was waning, paralleling the downfall of the militancy in Punjab. Initially, Mr. Nijjar attended Dasmesh Darbar, a more orthodox gurdwara.

After the Air India trial ended in 2005, a hush fell over the community; for 10 years, no one spoke of Khalistan, explains Gurkeerat Singh Sidhu, a youth leader from Abbotsford, B.C.

Mr. Nijjar and Mr. Bual set out to lift the taboo on Khalistan.

In 2018, Mr. Bual assumed the presidency of Dasmesh Darbar, which holds the largest Vaisakhi parade – celebrating the creation of the Khalsa, an order of baptized Sikhs – outside India. One year later, Mr. Nijjar took the helm of Guru Nanak. He bought a second and third home in Surrey, real estate assets now worth more than $5-million. The two men accepted the leadership roles with the explicit goal of returning the issue of Khalistan to the forefront of community concerns, says Mr. Bual.

The first change Mr. Nijjar made at Guru Nanak was to hang portraits of Sikhs martyred for Khalistan in the dining hall, shocking some congregants, says Mr. Bual.

Inside the temple, photos of Indian discrimination and brutality are now paired with dozens of Khalistan flags. A portrait of the late Talwinder Singh Parmar – who two Canadian inquiries concluded was the mastermind of the Air India bombing, and who was killed by Indian police after fleeing Canada – hangs in the dining hall. He is also depicted on a massive billboard outside, along a major Surrey thoroughfare.

Last fall, Mr. Parmar’s widow, Surinder Kaur, led a temple crowd to cheers of: “Long live Talwinder Singh Parmar!” Around the same time, masked men led congregants to shouts of “Long Live the Khalistan Tiger Force” from the temple roof.

The increasingly fervent pro-Khalistan position at the temple provoked discomfort and fear among some attendants and has become an outright threat to India, given the long involvement of Sikhs in Canadian political life.

The number of Sikh immigrants to Canada has more than doubled in the past 20 years, and in the last general census in 2021, Statistics Canada reported 770,000 people identifying as Sikh in the country – the largest Sikh population outside India. Politics are deeply interwoven into the religion, which calls on Sikhs to serve politically and spiritually; one is said to feed the other in an endless loop, a concept known as Miri-Piri.

Sikhs are among Canada’s most politically organized communities, and temples like Guru Nanak frequently draw Canadian politicians hunting for votes. Currently, Liberals hold all nine federal ridings in which Punjabi Sikhs predominate, plus 11 more in which the South Asian population is significant.

All political parties have courted the Sikh vote, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper was the first Western leader to congratulate Mr. Modi following his 2014 election. Mr. Modi was the first Indian leader since 1973 to visit this country, a high-point in bilateral relations.

But the relationship soured after the election of Mr. Trudeau, says political scientist Shinder Purewal, who teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver. Mr. Trudeau’s offhand comments – that he had more Sikhs in his cabinet than Mr. Modi, or lecturing Delhi on the rights of peaceful protestors – may have played well with Canadian Sikhs, but were not appreciated by Delhi.

Amid concerns about religious radicalism in 2019, Canada’s Public Safety Department listed Sikh extremism as among Canada’s top five terror threats. But Sikh MPs and high-profile members of the community reacted with outrage, characterizing the report as an attack on Sikhs and an invitation to hate crimes. The Liberal government excised all mentions of “Sikh extremism” and the religion itself from the report.

In the meantime, India’s demands that Canada crack down on financing by supporters of Khalistan went ignored, said Omer Aziz, a former foreign policy advisor in the Trudeau government. Because the Sikh community helped deliver the majority, their clout was being factored into policy making: “It came up in every meeting, in every talking point, in every pull-aside,” Mr. Aziz told The Globe.

Indian government officials push its concerns and grievances about the Khalistan movement unfettered in the Indian media, but in reality, the violence connected to Sikh separatism is nowhere near what it once was. In the late 1980s and early 90s, thousands were killed every year in fighting between Sikh militants, police and Indian government forces. The violence dropped off dramatically, with no deaths linked to the struggle between 2008 and 2015, according to the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management and South Asia Terrorism Portal, and only three or fewer deaths each year afterward.

The Modi government is often accused of inflaming religious tensions to shore up political support from the country’s Hindu majority.

Mr. Nijjar’s allies say India has created a sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at making anyone who supports Sikh independence into a terrorist. In India, lawyers like Mr. Pannun can also be classified as “terrorists” under a new law enacted in 2019 that prohibits advocating for the dissolution of the Indian state, something Mr. Pannun openly admits he’s trying to do.

Using this law, India has filed more than a dozen terror cases against him and used the same law to officially label Mr. Nijjar a terrorist in 2020.

“India thrives on the confusion it is creating,” said Mr. Pannun, a dual Canadian-American citizen who still owns a home outside Toronto. “India wants us to disappear.”

Since Mr. Pannun and Mr. Nijjar met in 2008, they began planning and promoting a global Khalistan referendum campaign – which, while not binding for India, is being used by the Sikh diaspora in the West to put pressure on New Delhi. The referendum started by focusing on Sikhs living outside India – especially in the large diaspora communities in Canada, Australia, the U.K., Italy and the U.S. Mr. Pannun aims to bring the result to the United Nations as proof of Sikhs’ right to their own country.

Mr. Pannun has spent years trying to counter India’s narrative. In 2016, the lawyer helped clear Mr. Nijjar from an Interpol watch list, and helped him co-operate with Canadian investigators probing Indian allegations he was involved in terrorism in Punjab.

Some moderate Sikhs bristle at the suggestion that Mr. Nijjar or Mr. Pannun and their group of separatists speak for them, however.

“He’s not representative of anything in Punjab, India,” said Ujjal Dosanjh, former premier of British Columbia and federal Liberal cabinet minister, who lived in Punjab until he was 17.

“I go back frequently, and I saw absolutely zero support for his ideas.”

In his view, Mr. Pannun and his supporters “spread hate” and sow divisions among the Indian diaspora with their anti-India rhetoric.

Mr. Dosanjh accuses his former Liberal colleagues of using free expression as an excuse not to probe too deeply.

“They’ve seen AK-47s in posters paraded around Surrey and Brampton – and they’ve said nothing.”

Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma dismisses the referendum as the work of a few thousand “goons” living outside India and not representative of what the majority of Sikhs in Punjab want. He described Mr. Pannun and Mr. Nijjar as people who were inflaming tensions within India, making them a danger to national security.

“Any of these guys who are trying to propagate hatred, trying to divide countries, trying to dismember sovereign nations, they have to be taken down,” he said. “That is our definition of terrorism.”

It’s not a definition Canada – or many other democracies – share.

Things appear to be changing in India. In a stunning turn, Mr. Modi lost his majority in last month’s elections. He will be forced to govern by alliance, a major humbling for the South Asian strongman.

In Punjab, meanwhile, the same discontent and ethno-religious fault lines that led to the turmoil in the 1980s persist.

Agriculture is under severe stress, the result of policies that encouraged monoculture and high farmer debt. Unemployment is high, especially among Punjab’s young, who make up one-fourth of the state’s population; among them, drug abuse is rampant.

In another surprise, last month’s elections elevated a jailed Sikh separatist to Parliament. Amritpal Singh, a self-styled preacher – whom Mr. Nijjar supported, according to two sources – took more than twice as many votes as his nearest opponent, suggesting support for Khalistan may be growing once more.

In his final weeks, Mr. Nijjar spoke often of his death, friends say.

“It was like he knew something was coming,” one of his closest friends, Malkit Fauji, told The Globe. In dreams over those weeks, Mr. Nijjar was often visited by friends who had been killed during the insurgency in Punjab, friends told The Globe.

Mr. Fauji was on a field adjacent to the gurdwara grounds the night of the shooting. One minute, he was kicking around a soccer ball in the glow of a warm June evening. The next, an explosion of sound filled the air: gunshots, shattering glass, pounding footsteps.

When it stopped, Mr. Nijjar – who had been like a father to Mr. Fauji – lay slumped against the driver’s door of his silver Dodge Ram. He had been ambushed leaving the temple parking lot, late to Father’s Day dinner. In all, 32 bullets punched through his face, arm, neck and chest.

Mr. Fauji took off after the two hitmen who had targeted Mr. Nijjar, gravel ripping into his bare feet. Before escaping into a waiting getaway car, one of the gunmen reached back, levelling his pistol at him – but didn’t shoot. He had fired so many rounds that Mr. Fauji could smell the acrid bite of gunpowder coming off the gun.

As the hit squad peeled off in a silver sedan, Mr. Fauji limped back to Mr. Nijjar’s truck, breathless, in shock, shaking. His friend’s blood was painted across the dash, the steering wheel, the roof – even the notebook that Mr. Nijjar never left home without.

Mr. Fauji felt a sudden urge to reach for it. Police stopped him. The pickup was now a crime scene. The diary was evidence.

Four men have since been charged in the killing.

For pro-Khalistan Sikhs, convictions may bring some solace, but the larger goal of establishing their own country remains. “Justice for us is Khalistan,” says Mr. Bual. “This is a fight for generations of Sikhs to come.”

Months before his death, Mr. Nijjar told congregants that “the blood of martyrs is never wasted.” Those who die for the cause, he said, “will be counted and avenged.”

With a report from Sandeep Singh

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