Veni vidi vici. Amritpal Singh Sandhu came, saw, conquered — and promptly disappeared. The whirlwind journey of the wannabe Bhindranwale has taken many by surprise and, even as we speak incessantly about him, journalists are piecing together his origin story. It was previously rumoured that he was UK-based but it has since been established that he was with a Dubai-based family business before he decided to take the political plunge, returning to the homeland and taking over the organisation, Waris Punjab De.
By all accounts, Amritpal Singh-the-revolutionary was born on social media and has been catapulted to infamy by television media. The lack of detail surrounding his past is, I would argue, by design and supports the myth-making around him. For Punjabi communities on both sides of the border, identities are often forged abroad and through the aspiration for emigration, which is seen as a rite of passage, a means to come of age and gain respectability in the eyes of the community back home. What the young men do abroad to survive and/or thrive is of less importance than forging the success story.
Diasporic Indians of different persuasions and linguistic affiliations are invested in presenting a success story back home but job profiles and hierarchies are often part of this narrative. Desi communities, especially those who work in the IT sector, are eager to show off their “model immigrant” identity and less inclined to build solidarities along racial/community lines. However, IT professionals are often more successful in retaining their privileges from back home and are not required to make as many adjustments to settle in foreign lands.
While there are certainly numerous Punjabi immigrants in the high-income bracket, experiences for a majority, at least in the first generation, are markedly different. Many only find blue-collar jobs with gruelling hours and, despite facing discrimination due to race and religious symbols, often build solidarities across ethnic and racial lines. Their experience of exploitation and discrimination, which they often refrain from sharing back home, shapes their political consciousness in many ways. The slain artist Sidhu Moosewala, for example, learned from the African American hip-hop and rap genres during his time in Canada.
As in the case of Moosewala, the Punjabi and, particularly, the Jat Sikh identity in the diaspora is shaped through their twin location as a powerful local elite at home and an underprivileged class outside India. While the narratives of exploitation, not infrequently at the hands of relatives and kin groups, are not front and centre when interacting with communities back home, the resentment, as well as the confidence that survival under difficult circumstances engenders, provide young Punjabi men with the requisite social capital to intervene in key political debates. For example, in one interview, Amritpal Singh explained that his time abroad helped him observe events back home as an outsider and better understand the situation. Privilege notwithstanding, Punjabi emigrants see themselves as underdogs due to their experiences abroad.
According to most experts, calls for Khalistan are stronger in the diaspora than they are in India. In 2021, over 30,000 people participated in the first referendum on Khalistan, held in the United Kingdom. News of this historic event spread worldwide, with subsequent referendums held in Australia, Switzerland (where people from France, Germany and Italy converged), Italy and the largest one yet in Canada. Given that they are often citizens of other countries with roots that extend beyond one generation, the return of most participants to a proverbial Khalistan in the subcontinent seems unlikely. The question of Khalistan is connected to the diasporic identity and one’s own links to the homeland.
For many in Punjabi communities, both Sikh and non-Sikh, the invocation of home is in linguistic and even in local farm, family and kinship terms. For the successful like Moosewala, adding their village name allows the entire community to partake in their success while, at the same time, underlining that they have achieved a level of success that sets them apart within their own circles.
This is something they share with the Indian diaspora at large but the idea of homeland takes varying forms. The Indian diaspora is primarily composed of those who come from varying levels of privilege — in terms of land ownership (as for many Punjabis), degrees from elite academic institutes (as for many upper caste individuals), and, not infrequently, both. If not outright discrimination, their experiences in the diaspora are forged by dislocation and relative disempowerment as compared to the social capital they have at home. And yet they feel the pressure to present a success story that necessitates the invisibilisation of factors that actually made them who they are today. Struggle and hard work are romanticised while exploitation and discrimination are seen as weaknesses.
For Punjabi men and women who have successfully established themselves in the diaspora, the nature of the job is not as important as its availability — they even benefit from the respectability afforded to blue-collar jobs in the West that are not granted in India. They only need to present success in the form of disposable income, ostentation of the family/village home and spectacle weddings to seek acknowledgement and acceptance as credible voices.
A majority of the Indian diaspora is not critical of the situation back home for this reason. Their identity depends on a stable sense of homeland and on the community’s acknowledgement of their success story. For young Sikh men like Amritpal who do not find themselves represented in the Indian nation, now more so than before, that sense of homeland is notional. Khalistan may or may not come to fruition but it holds the same place that the Hindu Rashtra does for the Hindu diaspora. It is the source of identity that years and even a lifetime, in the case of the second generation, in another country is not able to provide to the diasporic groups.
The writer is an anthropologist and the author of Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India. This article is partly based on observations from research on South Asians in Europe, which was supported by the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
Waris Punjab De head Amritpal Singh 
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