TORONTO: Sikhs For Justice (SFJ), a pro-Khalistan secessionist organisation, has declared that the Khalistan Referendum will take place on September 18 this year in Toronto, Canada, a city known for hosting one of the largest and most diverse Sikh diasporas.
The advocacy group SFJ announced that the Canadian phase of the Khalistan Referendum would begin on September 18 from Toronto, Ontario, despite concerns from Indian premier Narendra Modi’s government about the current Canadian government giving space to pro-Khalistan sovereignists. The Sikh community in Canada will decide whether or not Punjab, which is governed by India, should be an independent nation.
To honour the young pro-Khalistan Sikh who returned to India from Canada to take part in the then-ongoing armed struggle for Khalistan in the wake of the Indian Army’s June 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the Khalistan Referendum voting centre in Toronto is named after “Shaheed Harjinder Singh Pahra.” Indian forces extrajudicially executed Pahra and tens of thousands of Sikh youths connected to the martyred Sikh in 1988 during a staged police encounter.
According to well-known Sikh leader and SFJ General Counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who referred to the voting on September 18 as the “Journey From Khalistan Rocket To Referendum,” the vote is “the most potent weapon of this century through which we will balkanize India and liberate our beloved Punjab to honour our gurus.”
The SFJ unveiled a map of the regions designated for secession from India through Khalistan at a press conference in this city that was well-attended by journalists and news outlets. The SFJ’s map includes the pre-1966 Punjab regions, including Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and the Sikh majority areas of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, and declares Shimla as the future capital of the Sikh homeland of Khalistan.
According to the SFJ, the referendum will be conducted in several phases, with voting taking place in Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Surrey, among other cities across the nation.
The Punjab Referendum Commission (PRC) www.punjabreferendumcommission.org, a group of eminent non-aligned authorities on independence referendums and direct democracy, is in charge of overseeing the voting in the global Khalistan Referendum.
Despite India’s protests, the UK, Switzerland, and Italian governments have permitted the Khalistan Referendum to proceed since it began on October 31, 2021, from London. More than 400,000 Sikhs have cast ballots as of this writing.
During the referendum events held in the various European cities, tens of thousands of Sikhs turned out to cast their votes and raised unisonant slogans in support of the establishment of an independent state of Khalistan for the millions of Sikhs living in the world.
