Khalistan Referendum vote held in Brampton, Canada

Who: Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) and its general counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who ran the vote; the Punjab Referendum Commission, which SFJ says supervised it; India's Ministry of External Affairs, whose spokesperson Arindam Bagchi spoke for Delhi; and the Government of Canada.

What: On Sunday 18 September 2022 SFJ held the first Canadian round of its Khalistan Referendum at the Gore Meadows Community Centre, a publicly owned centre in Brampton, Ontario. Voters were asked: "Should Indian governed Punjab be an independent country?" (The Tribune dates the vote to 19 September; reports published beforehand give the 18th.)

Geo News, relying on SFJ and local observers, reported that people queued from 7 am, that voting ran from 9 am to 5 pm, that by noon the queue stretched about five kilometres to the nearest highway, and that police closed the highway for three hours. Organisers and local observers estimated more than 110,000 voters. The Tribune repeated the claim of 1.1 lakh but said videos showed only about 1,000 people milling around a building in Brampton. No independent count exists. Geo also reported that the campaign called for Shimla to be the capital of a Khalistan.

Where: Gore Meadows Community Centre, Brampton, Ontario, near Toronto.

Why it mattered: It put the referendum on Canadian soil and made Ottawa answer for it. On 22 September Bagchi called the vote a "farcical exercise held by extremists and radical elements" and said India had sent three diplomatic messages with little action from Ontario. Canada's reply, as The Tribune reported it, was that its citizens have the right to assemble and voice their views peacefully and lawfully, that it respects India's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and that it does not recognise the referendum. India was not satisfied and served a demarche in October, ahead of a second Ontario vote that SFJ planned for 6 November.

Brampton set the pattern for later Canadian rounds, including the two Surrey votes of 2023. Hardeep Singh Nijjar, shot dead in Surrey in June 2023, was described by The Canadian Press as an organiser of the referendum in Canada.