AMRITSAR - Hundreds of young Sikhs on Tuesday demanded a separate nation for their community as they observed the 22nd anniversary of the Indian army storming the religion’s holiest shrine to drive out Sikh militants.The rare chant of “Long Live Khalistan” - the proposed name of their would-be state - was heard in an around the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, after some 400 young Sikhs took part in prayers to mark the anniversary Tuesday.
The raid on the temple came in 1984 as an insurgency for an independent Sikh state was festering, with armed militants launching attacks in India’s Punjab to press their demands for the establishment of Khalistan, or “Land of the Pure” in the Punjabi language. The attack enraged Sikhs and led to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a few months later - an act that provoked anti-Sikh riots across much of northern India. The riots, in turn, further fueled the insurgency. Before it was brutally crushed in the late 1980s, the rebellion eventually cost more than 18,000 lives - including 329 people killed in an Air India jetliner explosion over the Atlantic Ocean blamed on Canadian-based Sikhs.
Since then, calls for a separate Sikh state have all but disappeared, except among the most fervent of the Sikhs - a minority religion that makes up about 2 percent of IndiaÂ’s 1 billion people.