Khalistan National Council

The Khalistan movement is a Sikh nationalist movement, which seeks to create a separate country called Khalistān (Punjabi: ਖਾਲਿਸਤਾਨ, "The Land of the Pure") in the Punjab region of South Asia. The territorial definition of the proposed country Khalistan ranges from the Punjab, to parts of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan. Chandigarh is the proposed capital.

The Punjab region has been the traditional homeland for the Sikhs. Before its conquest by the British it had been ruled by the Sikhs for 82 years; the Sikh Misls ruled over the entire Punjab from 1767 to 1799, until their confederacy was unified into the Sikh Empire by Maharajah Ranjit Singh. However, the region also has a substantial number of Hindus and Muslims, and before 1947, the Sikhs formed the largest religious group only in the Ludhiana district of the British province. When the Muslim League demanded a separate country for Muslims via the Lahore Resolution of 1940, a section of Sikh leaders grew concerned that their community would be left without any homeland following the partition of India between the Hindus and the Muslims. They put forward the idea of Khalistan, envisaging it as a theocratic state covering a small part of the greater Punjab region.

After the partition was announced, the majority of the Sikhs migrated from the Pakistani province of Punjab to the Indian province of Punjab, which then included parts of present-day Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Following India's independence in 1947, the Punjabi Suba Movement led by the Akali Dal aimed at the creation of a Punjabi-majority state (Suba) in the Punjab region of India in the 1950s. Concerned that creating a Punjabi-majority state would effectively mean creating a Sikh-majority state, the Indian government initially rejected the demand. After a series of protests, violent clampdowns on the Sikhs, and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, the Government finally agreed to partition the state, creating a new Sikh-majority Punjab state and splitting the rest of the region into the states of Himachal Pradesh and the new state of Haryana. Subsequently, the Sikh leaders started demanding more autonomy for the states, alleging that the Central government was discriminating against Punjab. Although the Akali Dal explicitly opposed the demand for an independent Sikh country, the issues raised by it were used as a premise for the creation of a separate country by the proponents of Khalistan.

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