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It's 8 PM on June 18, 2023 in Surrey, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver.

It's a cool evening, cloudy skies, and worshippers are leaving the city's Guru Nanak Goodwara, a large whitewashed Sikh temple on the city's south side.

Among them, Hardip Singh Nizar, a Canadian national born in the Indian state of Punjab with a straggily salt and pepper beard and gibbous eyes.

Husband, a father to two sons and a plumber.

But it's not his work on bullcocks or backflows that's won the

yard notoriety over the years. Outspoken and passionate, he's been instrumental in

a Sikh separatist movement that has been pissing off the government of his

ancestral home in huge doses.

See, Nijar isn't just any Sikh activist.

He's a member of Sikhs for justice, a US-based group that advocates for an independent state for Sikhs who make up around 2% of the Indian population.

They call this country, Kalistan.

And Nijar has been toiling away for years to bring members of the Sikh diaspora together to call for it, including

a 2020 referendum that strained ties between diplomats in Delhi and Ottawa.

Indian officials, working under the authoritarian Prime Minister Noremodi, have labeled Nijar a terrorist,

...