Harvard International Review Removes Article on Sikh Separatism After Backlash

The Harvard International Review removed an article criticizing the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement on Feb. 22 after the piece drew a wave of backlash from Sikh readers, including a complaint from Harvard’s Sikh chaplain.

The article, initially published Feb. 15 and titled “A Thorn in the Maple: How the Khalistan Question is Reshaping India-Canada Relations,” argued the Khalistan movement lacked widespread support and echoed allegations from the Indian government that key leaders were terrorists.

When complaints began to pour in, the HIR’s editors-in-chief asked the article’s author, Zyna Dhillon ’28, to make changes. Dhillon refused, writing in an email that the article already reflected the “balance” that she wished to achieve.

“I think the HIR buckled down under pressure and the decision to remove the article was, in my opinion, a knee-jerk reaction,” Dhillon wrote in a statement.

The magazine’s editors-in-chief, Sydney C. Black ’27 and Elizabeth R. Place ’27, wrote in a statement that the article was removed “temporarily” but would not be reinstated “unless the author chooses to make the edits we have determined are necessary.”

“When we receive complaints about a published article, we review both the article and the critiques,” wrote Black and Place, who is a Crimson Editorial editor. “If we determine that any criticism may have merit, we temporarily remove the article from our website, to facilitate further research and a more detailed review.”

They wrote that the article did not meet their standards for neutrality, describing Dhillon’s article as an “opinionated style of journalism rather than the analytical reporting HIR has published for nearly 50 years.”

The Khalistan movement advocates for a separate Sikh state, which would exist in what is now the Punjab region of India and Pakistan. The movement reached its height in the 1970s and 1980s — a period that saw thousands of deaths from secessionist attacks, a government crackdown, and anti-Sikh riots after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.

Today, the Khalistan movement is not mainstream in Punjab but is strong among segments of the Sikh diaspora. Dhillon’s article argued that the strength of Sikh nationalism in Canada has inflamed tensions between Canada and India, which outlaws the Khalistan movement.

When Canadian Khalistan movement leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused “agents of the government of India” of planning his death. The Indian government denied the allegations.

On Feb. 16, one day after Dhillon’s article was published, Black and Place emailed Dhillon, asking to discuss comments from a reader who thought the article focused on violence in the Khalistani movement without contextualizing the movement’s suppression. The editors wrote that Dhillon had “a couple of options to consider” but did not threaten to remove her article.

“You can keep the article as is, as it’s already well-structured and persuasive,” Black and Place wrote. “Alternatively, you might consider adding a few sentences or a paragraph to provide more background on how the Khalistani movement originated and evolved.”

But six days later, on Feb. 22, Black and Place wrote to Dhillon again to notify her that the article had been removed in response to a four-page complaint from Harpreet Singh, Harvard’s Sikh chaplain.

Singh denounced Dhillon’s argument as “a dangerous equivalency” that conflated “all Khalistan activism with ‘terrorism.’” He accused Dhillon of presenting uncorroborated data from the Indian government and downplaying global and Punjabi support for Khalistan.

Black and Place wrote in their Feb. 22 email that they would republish the article if Dhillon made two changes: removing Indian government statistics on deaths caused by Sikh militants, which they wrote could not be independently verified, and adding a sentence confirming whether Khalistan supporters had harassed Indian diplomats in Canada. The editors also met with Dhillon in person to discuss the article.

Dhillon refused the proposed changes. She wrote in a statement that she thought an additional set of proposed edits — including the statement that “India defines terrorism broadly” — would have “actively pandered to the pro-Khalistan critics of the article.”

She added that she would have found the proposed changes more credible if they had come before the editors began receiving reader complaints.

In an interview, Dhillon — who is from Punjab — said she thought the HIR’s proposed modifications arose because its editors were “perhaps not intimately familiar with the context of the Khalistan movement.”

“They seem to think that me presenting the Khalistan movement in a certain way is a matter of my opinion, rather than what is like the actual situation on the ground,” Dhillon said.

Black and Place wrote in their statement to The Crimson that the HIR had begun “instituting stronger editorial checks on all reporting in order to improve content and coverage” and was building out its faculty advisory network “in order to deepen our expertise on complex regional issues.”

—Staff writer Sophia Y King can be reached at sophia.king@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophia_kingg.

—Staff writer Anneliese S. Mattox can be reached at anneliese.mattox@thecrimson.com.