On Jan. 28, Californians will cast ballots in a historic vote on creating a new independent country.
Why is the first you’re hearing of it? Because the only Californians who can vote in the election are Sikhs. The proposed country would be in northern India.
But that’s no reason to overlook the most important election in the Golden State next year.
Indeed, the Khalistan Referendum is worthy of your attention for two reasons. First, it raises the questions of whether democracy is more likely to quell, or to inflame, violence during disputes over nationhood. Second, the vote is part of an ongoing experiment in how ballot measures might shape a new global system of democracy.
The Khalistan Referendum is a global election, held on different dates and in different world cities that are home to many Sikhs. The Jan. 28 balloting, which will take place in San Francisco, follows votes in London, Geneva, Rome, Toronto, and Vancouver.
The referendum itself is non-binding — even if the majority of voters favor independence, it won’t guarantee a new nation. But if the results show widespread support for independence among the diaspora, organizers will push for a Khalistan Referendum in Punjab itself.
The Khalistan Referendum was proposed by Sikhs for Justice, a U.S.-based group. Sikhism is a 500-year-old religion, fusing elements of Hinduism, Islam and other faiths. There are 25 million Sikhs worldwide, 80% of whom reside in India, primarily in Punjab. California is home to 250,000 Sikhs, most of whom live in the Central Valley or the Bay Area.
The referendum’s supporters argue that Sikhs, as targets of discrimination in India and elsewhere, need the protection of an independent Sikh-majority nation, which they would call Khalistan. But India has opposed the referendum, banning Sikhs for Justice in 2019 for “espousing secessionism.”
These claims are grounded in a longstanding violent conflict between the government and pro-independence armed insurgents that was especially deadly in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Indian government says the referendum could inflame violence. But its Sikh backers say that the referendum is a democratic tool for peacefully resolving conflict in Punjab, as provided for in the United Nations Charter, which grants all peoples the right to self-determination.
To convince the world of the referendum’s legitimacy, Sikhs for Justice asked an independent international committee of leading democracy scholars and practitioners to set referendum rules and oversee the voting.
The committee is neutral on the referendum question of an independent Khalistan. But many members are working to devise systems of worldwide elections so that people in every country can jointly decide policies on global issues.
I embedded with the committee chair, Dane Waters, the U.S.-born, Beirut-based founder of the Initiative & Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, during the referendum vote Oct. 29 in Surrey, British Columbia.
The atmosphere was tense. The Surrey-based Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and referendum organizer, had been assassinated in June. The Canadian government says it has credible evidence tying the assassination to India’s government. More recently, U.S. prosecutors charged a man, with ties to an Indian government employee, with attempting to assassinate a referendum organizer who is an American citizen.
The assassination has impacted the referendum. The international committee prefers to hold votes at neutral sites and had rented a Surrey public school. But after the Canadian government’s announcement that India was behind the Nijjar assassination, the school bowed out, citing security concerns.
The vote was instead conducted at Surrey’s gurdwara or Sikh temple, steps from where Nijjar was killed. A large police detail provided security. Outside the voting hall, Khalistan supporters played Punjabi music so loudly that it was hard interview voters waiting in long lines.
Inside, however, the event was quietly managed by British Columbia poll workers — all non-Sikhs hired through a third party. At each check-in table, one paid poll worker was paired with a Punjabi-speaking Sikh volunteer, who could translate for voters uncomfortable in English. Any Sikh could vote with a photo ID. Tens of thousands cast ballots.
Could the Khalistan referendum become a model for deciding whether breakaway states can form their own nations? Perhaps. It’s fitting that independence-minded California, will next host this democratic experiment.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column at Zócalo Public Square.
