Four events stand out in the minds of those who lived through the era: In June 1984, Indira Gandhi, who was India’s prime minister at the time, ordered her troops to enter the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in Sikhism, to flush out militants who had taken refuge inside. The military operation, which was called Operation Bluestar, was successful—in that the face of the Khalistan movement, as the separatist movement was called, was killed in the operation. But Sikh religious sentiments were incensed by the violation of the holy site, which was damaged in the assault. Less than five months later, Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards shot her dead at her home. A massacre of Sikhs across India followed, and in parts of the capital, New Delhi, government officials oversaw the killings. (The issue remains sensitive in India because some of those people who oversaw the killings are still active in politics.) There was still more to come: In June 1985, an Air India flight from Toronto to Delhi blew up over the Atlantic, killing all 329 people on board. Investigators later found that the plot was hatched by Sikh militants in Canada as retaliation for the storming of the Golden Temple.

The Indian state ultimately crushed the Khalistan separatist movement—brutally. Those Sikhs who might have been sympathetic to the cause were integrated into the political mainstream. By the 2000s, the rebellion, Operation Blue Star, Gandhi’s assassination, and the bombing of the Air India plane were no longer as much of a driving force in Indian, or indeed Punjabi, politics. India even had a Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh, the respected economist, who was one of the architects of the country’s economic liberalization program. But if the Khalistan movement was no longer part of the political conversation in India, it remains a potent political issue in Canada.

Sikhs had migrated to Canada for decades, but the numbers swelled during the Indian government’s crackdown on the separatist movement in the 1980s. The community is still relatively tiny—about 1.4 percent of Canada’s 36 million people—but Sikhs are a significant presence in British Columbia (about 5 percent of the population) as well as in Ontario and Alberta (about 1.5 percent of the population in each province.) Many Sikhs are influential in Canadian politics and public life, such as Defense Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan and Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the left-leaning New Democratic Party. Some, but by no means all, of these Sikhs still support an independent Khalistan. More importantly, they vote—and are a key voting bloc in the country’s elections; so much so that any serious Canadian politician who visits India goes to the Golden Temple and prays. (Punjab is the largest source of Indian immigrants to Canada.) The issue of Khalistan has come up during previous visits to India by Canadian leaders, but with less of a dramatic impact in either country.