Referendum Farce: Story Written in Karachi, Staged in New York

Rohan Giri

On April 29, 2026, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun announced a Khalistan Referendum voter registration drive from the Karachi Press Club. He was speaking via video link from New York. He was targeting Sikhs who live inside Bharat. The venue, the man and the medium together tell a story that his words never could.

There is a particular kind of political performance that is designed not to succeed, but to persist, not to achieve a goal, but to manufacture the appearance of. On April 29, 2026, Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) chief Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a man proscribed under Bharat’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act along with his organisation, delivered precisely such a presentation from the Karachi Press Club.

Speaking via video link from New York, he announced that SFJ would launch a phased voter registration drive for the purported Khalistan Referendum targeting Sikhs residing across all Bharatiiya states.

Beginning in Delhi, moving to Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and ending the registrations in Punjab itself. The sequencing was revealing. A movement that claims Punjab as its spiritual and political homeland does not begin its campaign there. It begins in Delhi, because it knows Punjab will not listen.

Bharatiya officials did not miss the significance of the venue. Pakistan’s establishment was openly offering its platform to an organisation that has called for violent attacks inside Bharat and the assassination of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The SFJ has glorified terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and treated perpetrators of the Air India Kanishka bombing in which 329 people were killed, as heroes.

That Pakistan now provides this group a podium at one of Karachi’s most visible press institutions is not coincidence. Pakistan is playing this game out in the open and is not even bothering to conceal its backing to a terrorist organisation. The brazenness is itself the message, a message directed not at Sikhs in Bharat, but at the ISI’s own operatives, diaspora handlers and global media amplifiers, telling them that the Khalistan project retains state-level patronage.

One has to look at trail of its failures in order to comprehend why Karachi has now again emerged as this campaign’s operational hub. In order to undermine and divert Indian government, the ISI started protracted proxy war by aiding the Khalistan movement in Punjab, as this timeline already makes clear.

Since 1980s, this tactic has never been formally discontinued. What has changed is the terrain. Operations for SFJ have become significantly harder in Canada and United Kingdom where governments have come under growing domestic and diplomatic pressure to scrutinise separatist activities more carefully.

With Western soil getting increasingly inhospitable, Rawalpindi has fallen back on what it controls directly. Offering Karachi Press Club to Pannun is a desperate move to rake up the movement in Bharat after multiple attempts have failed, as officials have assessed.

Timing of April 29 announcement was again not coincidental. That same week, Punjab Police dealt another significant blow to ISI – Khalistan terror network recovering a cache that included a rocket-propelled grenade, two packs of RDX, a metallic improvised explosive device, hand grenades, detonators, high-end pistols, wireless sets and timer switches which meant to be used in massive attacks across the state.

Director General of Police Gaurav Yadav confirmed the recovery was linked to an ongoing investigation into the Shambhu railway track IED blast case, as well as grenade attack on the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) office in Moga in 2025. This was not an isolated seizure. In prior weeks, Punjab Police had busted two separate ISI-backed Babbar Khalsa International terror modules recovering RPG launchers, additional IEDs, RDX and a fleet of vehicles with accused persons linked to Pakistan-based handler Harvinder Singh Rinda.

The farce of referendum announcement and arms consignments are not parallel stories. They are part of same story, one being propaganda arm and the other as operational arm of the same ISI-directed network.

Pannun’s remarks at Karachi press conference stripped away whatever pretence of a civic movement SFJ has had claimed till date. He also claimed that 1.8 million people had participated in the referendum worldwide (a figure that Intelligence Bureau officials dismissed as fabricated, noting that the SFJ has consistently fudged numbers in the past, putting out exaggerated figures to give the impression of traction for a movement that demonstrably lacks it). He pledged to back Pakistan to the fullest in the event of any future tensions with Bharat. He heaped praise on Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir, the same officer who, after Bharat’s Operation Sindoor in May 2025, was promoted to Field Marshal by the Pakistani government for his role in the conflict.

A designated terrorist, operating out of New York, cheering a Pakistani general from a Karachi press club, Pannun promised to stand with an adversarial state against Bharat. One must ask: who precisely is Pannun speaking for? The answer is not the Sikh community.

The referendum in itself carries no significance whatsoever. SFJ held the first phase of its unofficial and non-binding referendum exercise in London in October 2021. Since then, it has conducted similar theatrics in Canada, Switzerland and Australia, each time claiming record numbers that no independent body has verified.

Not one government has moved a single step towards recognising outcome. The reason is structural given that international law’s right to self-determination applies to peoples under colonial domination or foreign military occupation.

Bharat’s Sikhs meet neither criterion. They are full citizens of the world’s largest democracy, represented at every level of Bharatiya state from Parliament to judiciary, armed forces to highest office on the land. The legal and philosophical scaffolding for the farcical Khalistan referendum does not exist anywhere in serious jurisprudence. What SFJ produces instead is theatre, elaborate, expensive and entirely hollow.

Punjab’s own ballot boxes deliver most decisive verdict. The 2022 Punjab Assembly elections saw Aam Aadmi Party win 92 of 117 seats, majority 79 per cent on an agenda of governance, farmers’ welfare, and electricity. The demand for a separate Sikh homeland did not feature in that mandate.

The trauma of 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms and years of terrorism that hollowed entire Punjabi families has inoculated a generation against politics of secession. Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the apex body of Sikh religious governance directly elected by Sikh voters under Sikh Gurdwaras Act 1925 and described as Parliament of Sikhs has never endorsed SFJ’s agenda. Punjab has moved on. It is only in Karachi and New York that this particular ghost refuses to lie down.

Inside Bharat’s security establishment, the Khalistan project is understood as one prong of K2 Project. A coordinated ISI dual-front strategy to simultaneously fuel insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir so that Indian security forces remain perpetually stretched across both theatres.

Intelligence Bureau sources have confirmed that K2 is active with ISI aligning Khalistani terror modules with Kashmir-oriented groups, sharing financing through hawala networks and arms through drone corridors along the Punjab border. The voter registration drive must be read within this architecture. Every Sikh who registers with a foreign-backed, Bharat-banned outfit becomes a data point in an ISI-accessible database. And if that database grows even fraudulently it becomes the raw material for next round of propaganda, a claimed pan-Indian Sikh uprising that exists nowhere except in SFJ’s press releases and Rawalpindi’s wish-lists.

The threat is not merely physical. Agencies have been specifically warned to monitor a narrative and fake propaganda war perpetuated by SFJ including coordinated flooding of social media and encrypted chat groups with fabricated content depicting the suffering of Sikhs in Bharat.

More alarming still, SFJ has been exploring use of Artificial Intelligence to generate content showing Punjab as a state in distress under Indian governance. A manufactured visual reality designed for diaspora consumption and international amplification.

As one official noted soberly that there may be no traction on the ground but sometimes a spark is sufficient to set off a fire. Bharat’s intelligence agencies have said they will do everything necessary to prevent such fake campaigns from going viral.

Bharat’s response must be as layered as the threat. Legally, the UAPA architecture is firmly in place and judicially upheld by the designated Tribunal under Justice Anoop Kumar Mendiratta. The tribunal confirmed SFJ ban after reviewing evidence of radicalisation, terror financing, death threats against Prime Minister and Home Minister and attempts to incite Sikh soldiers to desert the Indian Army.

Every Western capital where SFJ operates like Ottawa, London, Washington and Canberra must receive sustained, credible intelligence briefings that frame it as political activity. Instead, it should be viewed as foreign-directed hybrid operation with documented links to a state that armed a bomber who killed 329 people over the Atlantic. That argument must be made, loudly and persistently.

The best answer to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun is not a dossier. It is the Sikh soldier on the Siachen Glacier. It is the Sikh farmer who feeds the nation. It is the Sri Harmandir Sahib, standing sovereign and sacrosanct in the heart of Amritsar, under Bharatiya protection. That story is true.

And no amount of AI-generated content from Karachi will ever overwrite it.

(Author is a research scholar at Amity University, Gwalior, working at intersection of socio-political research and media analysis. His writing engages with contemporary public narratives through a research-driven and analytical lens)