- Thursday, February 27, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
IN the wake of the diplomatic row between India and Canada over Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s claims about New Delhi’s involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Khalistan separatist leader designated a terrorist by the latter, in Surrey in British Columbia in June, it has been reported that the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned at least three prominent Sikh leaders in America that were lives were in danger.
Sixty-nine-year-old Pritpal Singh, a US citizen who works as a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee, told The Guardian that the American domestic intelligence agency had called him and two others just days after the elimination of Nijjar, a Canadian citizen. He was gunned down by unidentified persons outside a gurdwara.
The FBI, which warns citizens if it learns that their lives are in danger (under a legal protection called “duty to warn”), initially cautioned Singh that it believed on the basis of unspecified intelligence that his life was at risk. The agency provided Singh with more specific inputs.
The Intercept reported the case first.
“I was visited by two FBI special agents in late June who told me that they had received information that there was a threat against my life,” Singh was quoted as saying by The Intercept.
“They did not tell us specifically where the threat was coming from, but they said that I should be careful.”
The two other individuals, who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons, told The Intercept that the FBI also visited them around the same time they met Singh.
The three are not the only ones. Sikhs throughout the US have been warned by the police about potential threats, The Intercept report cited Sukhman Dhami, co-director of Ensaaf, a California-based nonprofit group that emphasises on human rights in India, particularly in the Sikh-majority province of Punjab, said.
Singh told The Guardian that “such intimidation of Americans is a form of transnational repression by the Indian government”.
“Transnational repression not only threatens individuals but also undermines our democratic institutions, curtails individual rights and freedoms, and challenges the national security and sovereignty of the United States,” he was quoted as saying.
The FBI also warned Amarjit Singh, a 70-year-old New York-based journalist and commentator who said he was first alerted of a possible threat against his life on June 22, four days after Nijjar was killed.
Singh told The Guardian that he was contacted by the security agency while he was returning from a protest against Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in Washington, during a state visit in which US president Joe Biden hailed the US-India relationship as “stronger, closer, and more dynamic than at any time in history”.
Moninder Singh, a spokesperson for the British Columbia Gurdwaras Council, was one of five people – including Nijjar – who the Canadian authorities warned last year that their lives faced imminent risk.
“We were never told what the risk was or where it was coming from. But we assumed it was India, because of our activism and outspokenness,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“We expect them to attack us in the media, or character assassination, so this was shocking.”
