What is Sikhs for Justice, the group India wants designated as Foreign Terrorist Organisation in the US

What is Sikhs for Justice?

SFJ was founded in 2007 by Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US-based attorney believed to be in his early 50s. According to its website, SFJ seeks to achieve “self-determination for the Sikh people in their historic homeland” in “Indian held Punjab”, and “establish a sovereign state, popularly known as Khalistan”.

“SFJ was formed with the overt recognition that the wanton use of violence had been the Khalistan movement’s Achilles heel,” Terry Milewski, Canadian journalist and the author of Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project (2021), told The Indian Express in 2023. Pannun’s motto was “ballots not bullets”, Milewski said.

Born in the 1960s in the village of Khankot, on the outskirts of Amritsar, Pannun grew up in Punjab during the heyday of the Khalistan movement and militancy in the state. He graduated in law from Panjab University sometime in the 1990s, and then moved to the US.

He has been active in the movement for Khalistan in the Sikh diaspora in the US and Canada since the early 2000s. But it was in 2018, with the announcement of the so-called “Khalistan Referendum”, that he emerged as the leading pro-Khalistan figure that he is today.

A farcical referendum

The “Referendum 2020”, which is still ongoing, is perhaps the most significant exercise undertaken by SFJ thus far. Its website says that “the campaign aims to ascertain the will of the Sikhs… with regards to secession of Punjab from India…” adding that the results will be presented before the UN while seeking an official, UN-supervised referendum on the matter.

While Pannun and SFJ claim to have received a resounding response during this exercise, experts say that the process is “farcical”, to say the least.

“The rules and identification requirements are farcical,” Milewski had said. “I have a friend in London who logged on online to register to vote, put down Angelina Jolie as his name, and was successfully registered for the vote. Pannun and his ilk put up random, unverifiable numbers hailing the referendum’s success,” he said.

Also of note is the fact that the referendum specifies succession of only Indian Punjab, not the Pakistani province which is four times as large, and the historic homeland of the Sikh people. The birthplace of Guru Nanak, the progenitor of the Sikh faith, lies in Pakistani Punjab (Nankana Sahib) as does the site of his death (Kartarpur Sahib). And the great Ranjit Singh ruled his Sikh Empire — which Khalistanis constantly harken to — from Lahore.

This is in line with how the secessionist movement, propped up and funded by Pakistan, has always viewed Khalistan’s borders to be. As Milewski put it: “Right from the beginning, it seems to have been a politically designed border, a bit of a hatchet job — expansive and ambitious, but only on the eastern side of the Radcliffe line.”

Doublespeak on violence

SFJ’s rhetoric lies in stark contrast to its claims of “turning a page” with regards to political violence.

“Having waxed eloquent about ‘turning a page’, what does Pannun do… He named the campaign headquarters for the ‘referendum’ in Canada, Shaheed Talwinder Singh Parmar Voter Centre,” Milewski said. Parmar was the mastermind of the 1985 Air India bombing, which killed 329 people. This was the worst incident of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001.

“And this is not a one off … terrorists have been an absolutely essential part in SFJ’s iconography … SFJ has completely contradicted themselves,” Milewski said.

Pannun has himself repeatedly threatened violence. According to the Centre’s submission to an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) tribunal — the tribunal upheld the Centre’s decision to ban SFJ in January — Pannun’s outfit has repeatedly threatened India’s political leaders (including Prime Minister Narendra Modi), government officers, and even their family abroad.

“Pannun had instigated the protesting Indian farmers to arm themselves and fight the Indian forces and stated that the weapons would reach them from across the border. SFJ has also claimed to have prepared a list of children of police officers and politicians who are studying in foreign countries to take revenge…” the Ministry of Home Affairs submitted to the tribunal.

What is the significance of a possible FTO designation?

India refers to Pannun as a terrorist, and has banned SFJ under the UAPA. The Home Ministry’s 2019 notification that issued the ban says: “In the garb of the so-called referendum for Sikhs, SFJ is actually espousing secessionism and militant ideology in Punjab, while operating from safe havens on foreign soils and actively supported by inimical forces in other countries.”

There are dozens of cases against Pannun and his organisation in India, including three sedition cases in Punjab. But given Pannun is a foreign citizen on foreign soil, New Delhi has been unable to impede SFJ’s activities. This is why the FTO designation by the US could be significant.

Put simply, such a designation would cripple Pannun’s US-based organisation. It is not only unlawful for a person in the US to provide “material support or resources” — a term that has been interpreted rather broadly — to a designated FTO, American financial institutions may be required to block all transactions involving assets held or controlled by an FTO.

There are some 77 listed FTOs at the moment, including the likes of Al Qaeda, ISIS (and its multiple offshoots), Hamas, Indian Mujahideen, and Jamat ud Dawa.