Satinder Pal Singh Raju, an organizer in the Khalistan movement, said he was traveling on Interstate 505 west of Sacramento when his truck came under fire.
(Gurpatwant Singh Pannun)
WOODLAND, Calif. —
Until recently, Satinder Pal Singh Raju was a mostly unknown figure in Northern California’s large and sprawling Sikh community.
From his home in the small city of Woodland, he worked as a trucker — a popular job for Sikhs — took care of his wife and kids and was a regular at Gurdwara Sahib West Sacramento, the temple where he’s prayed since emigrating from India nearly 19 years ago.
In his free time, he volunteered to travel Northern California and Canada to organize educational events and symbolic voting drives to establish a long-desired independent nation, Khalistan, that Sikh activists want to carve out of India’s Punjab region. India considers the decades-old global separatist movement to be a terrorist operation because of its territorial ambitions and violence committed by some of its offshoots.
On Aug. 11, when Raju was making a late-night food run with two friends, someone fired at his pickup truck as it traveled down Interstate 505 in rural Yolo County. At least four bullets struck his vehicle, police said. Raju and his friends — who are also Sikh activists involved in the separatist movement — were not injured, although their car veered off the road, coming to rest near a drainage ditch and a two-story stack of hay.
“They tried to kill me,” said Raju, 44.
In the last two weeks, news of the shooting has reverberated across Indian media and Punjabi-language radio shows in North America as fears grow 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 across Northern California have reported anonymous calls and text messages that threaten them in Hindi for pro-Khalistan activities.
There has been debate in the Sikh community about whether the attack on Raju and his passengers could be linked to broader transnational incidents in Canada and the U.S. in which authorities have accused the Indian government of being tied to the fatal shooting of a Sikh activist in British Columbia and a plot to kill another in New York.