Until recently, Satinder Pal Singh Raju was a virtually unknown figure in the large and sprawling Sikh community in Northern California.
From his home in the small town of Woodland, he worked as a truck driver (a popular job among Sikhs), cared for his wife and children and was a regular visitor to Gurdwara Sahib West Sacramento, the temple where he has worshipped since emigrating from India nearly 19 years ago.
In his spare time, he volunteered to travel around Northern California and Canada to organize educational events and symbolic voting drives to establish an independent nation, Khalistan, which Sikh activists want to create out of India's Punjab region. India considers the decades-long global separatist movement a terrorist operation because of its territorial ambitions and the violence committed by some of its offshoots.
On Aug. 11, as Raju was making a late-night grocery run with two friends, someone fired shots at his pickup truck as he was traveling on Interstate 505 in rural Yolo County. At least four bullets hit his vehicle, police said. Raju and his friends, who are also Sikh activists involved in the separatist movement, were unharmed, though their car veered off the road and came to rest near a drainage ditch and a two-story hay stack.
“They tried to kill me,” said Raju, 44.
Over the past two weeks, news of the shooting has reverberated in Indian media and on Punjabi-language radio programs in North America, as fears mount among California Sikhs about recent threats against them because of their political activity in opposition to the right-wing, nationalist Indian government. In recent months, Sikh leaders at several temples in Northern California have reported anonymous calls and text messages threatening them in Hindi for their pro-Khalistan activities.
There has been debate in the Sikh community over whether the attack on Raju and his passengers could be linked to wider transnational incidents in Canada and the United States, in which authorities have accused the Indian government of being linked to the fatal shooting of a Sikh activist in British Columbia and a plot to kill another in New York.
India has denied all the allegations.
Local law enforcement in Woodland and the California Highway Patrol, which responded to the 911 call, have not commented on a motive for the shooting and released information about it on Aug. 22, 10 days after the incident. In a statement, the FBI said it “continues to cooperate” with the CHP on an investigation and “takes all acts of violence seriously.” The Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to questions from The Times.
Activists in the crosshairs
The Sikh Coalition, a US-based civil rights group, said in a statement that the Yolo County incident, while under investigation, “underscores the continuing threat of transnational Indian repression.”
The activists targeted in the Canada and New York cases belonged to a group called Sikhs for Justice. The organization promotes nonbinding referendums around the world for the Sikh diaspora to express support for Khalistan, which means “land of the pure” in Punjabi. This year’s rallies in Sacramento and San Francisco drew tens of thousands of Sikhs.
In May, Canadian police arrested three Indian nationals living in Alberta in connection with a shooting on June 18, 2023 that killed Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a close friend of Raju, while he was outside his temple.
The three suspects, as well as a fourth alleged accomplice who had already been arrested, appeared in court this month charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The trial was delayed until October. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada’s national police force) did not disclose how it found the men. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said Canadian intelligence agencies were investigating “credible allegations” of possible Indian government involvement.
India has said Canada has not provided any evidence to support its allegations of government involvement. Instead, it accused Canada of giving “safe haven” to extremists.
In November, the U.S. government alleged in a federal indictment that India paid a hitman — an undercover agent with ties to the DEA, it turned out — to kill a Sikh activist in New York who is a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs for Justice. In the indictment, the U.S. accused an unnamed Indian official of working with a known international drug trafficker to hire the fake hitman for $100,000. The trafficker was arrested in the Czech Republic and extradited to New York in June. He has pleaded not guilty in federal court ahead of a trial in September.
India said its investigation into the US allegations found that “rogue” agents from the Department of Research and Analysis, India’s spy agency, were operating without government approval.
Sikhs vow to continue
Activists downplay the denials and say they remain steadfast in their commitment.
“They are lying,” said Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and spokesman for Sikhs For Justice, which has been promoting Raju’s case. Pannun is the New York resident whom the U.S. government says India tried to kill.
“If a bullet and death is the price to pay for Khalistan, that is what we will face as Sikhs,” said Pannun, who produces YouTube shows from his office in Astoria, Queens, where he rails against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He has now turned his attention to Raju, who has become something of a hero in the tight-knit community of Sikhs organising for Khalistan.
For Raju, the shooting has emboldened his activism.
“What else is there for us but to keep going?” he said. “We can’t stop now. We can’t be afraid.”
Not all of his fellow activists agree with Raju's allegations of a possible Indian plot against him.
“We don’t really know what happened. It could be something else,” said Bobby Singh, a 24-year-old Khalistani organizer in Sacramento who said he knows Raju from local pro-Khalistan protests. “Still, we demand a full investigation.”
A struggle that lasts decades
In the United States, Sikhs number about 500,000, the third-largest population outside India after the United Kingdom and Canada. About half of American Sikhs live in California, where their presence in the Bay Area, Stockton and Sacramento dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While the most ardent Khalistan activists, like Raju, are a small group, support for the movement is widespread among Sikhs in the United States. Posters and prayers at temples regularly mention the idea of a Sikh nation.
Many, like Raju, point to modern Indian history as the reason for this.
Now 44, he was a child growing up in the Punjabi city of Jalandhar during a peak of conflict between Sikhs and the Indian government.
In 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a siege of separatists occupying the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest site. In response, her two Sikh guards assassinated her. Mobs rampaged through Delhi, killing Sikhs, often with government approval. Some estimates put the deaths in the tens of thousands. In another incident a year later linked to the violence, militants blew up an Air India flight over the Atlantic, killing 329 people.
Raju has friends and family back home who saw the violence of that time, he said, and he knows people in India who faced persistent discrimination against Sikhs for decades.
That, and the opportunity to work and live in the United States, brought him to California when he was 25. Raju moved his family to Woodland and got a job as a truck driver. He briefly left his job to run a Punjabi grocery store before returning to trucking a decade ago. For much of his working life, Raju has been on Interstate 5, hauling dry goods from California to Oregon and Washington state.
Growing activism
“I wasn’t very political,” he said. That was until 2016, when friends from the West Sacramento temple recruited him as a volunteer for Sikhs for Justice. The growing group had ambitions to launch get-out-the-vote campaigns for Khalistan in Sikh population centers from London to Australia.
Raju would be tasked with educating Sikhs about the process (a way to show global Sikh support for the nation they want to found) and helping with polling stations in California and Canada. In WhatsApp groups and in-person meetings, he met Sikh activists who were traveling around the world in support of the cause.
It was a part-time hobby until last year, when his friend Nijjar was shot dead ahead of elections in that region.
“I was in mourning,” Raju said. He took time off from transportation to spend three months in Surrey, Canada, a suburb of Vancouver, to organize the election referendum. When Sikhs gathered in San Francisco in January to vote in Khalistan, Raju was there. He also joined in Sacramento, when a vote was held in April. Raju was in Calgary, Canada, until voting there concluded last month.
Unlike other high-profile activists, Raju has never received any threats, but he suspects his increasing visibility through his travels, including photos in which he posed with Nijjar, put him on the radar of those who oppose his work.
The night of the shooting
On August 11, he said, he was at his home in Woodland with two friends from the Khalistan movement who are less involved than he and asked not to be identified for fear of their safety. Raju had spent the day playing with his young children before talking late into the night with his companions.
Hungry, they hit the road to drive south on I-505 toward Vacaville, where BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse was open until midnight, Raju said.
His friend was driving Raju's Dodge Ram 1500. Raju was in the passenger seat and the other friend was in the back. Around 11:30 p.m., they noticed a car, possibly a white Honda Civic, following them closely, Raju said.
The Honda pulled up to the driver's side of the truck, Raju said, and someone — he didn't see who it was — started shooting. The three friends ducked and the car rolled into a ditch. Raju said they got out and briefly hid behind hay bales, still visible Thursday afternoon.
“I am grateful to have survived,” Raju said. “Our religion is peace, but we also have to fight for our rights, so we will continue.”
Kaleem reported from Los Angeles and Garrison from Woodland. Staff writer Richard Winton contributed reporting.
