Khalistan 2020 referendum details to be revealed in livestream event

The Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) team have announced that details around the much discussed Khalistan 2020 referendum will be revealed in a livestream this week (18 November).

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, General Counsel of SFJ, announced the event via Youtube, explaining the formation of a Punjab Referendum Commission (PRC), a group of experts that will oversee the referendum process. You can watch the announcement video, in which Gurpatwant Singh speaks Punjabi, here.

In the video, Gurpatwant Singh explains, “We are ready for the Punjab independence referendum. Question arise about how the referendum will be conducted. We have created a five member commission. They are international experts on self determination, who were involved in writing the procedures and were international observers for referendums for Bougainville, Catalonia, Kurdistan and Somaliland. Their first meeting will be held on 18th November live on social media. Discussion will involve the referendum voting plan, including which country the voting will start from and an announcement of the date for voting.”

Note, the above is a translated summary of information taken from the four minute video linked above.

The PRC group that will reveal more information on 18 November and overseeing the referendum includes respected American political advocate Dane Waters, who has worked on six different presidential campaigns. Waters stated in a video for SFJ that the other members of the commission will give a collective of “125 years of global experience with direct democracy and best practices”.

SFJ representatives, including Pannun, were in Barcelona for Catalonia’s historic attempt at an independence referendum, a move which was violently stopped by the Spanish government. It is believed but not yet confirmed some of the leads behind the Catalonia campaign could involved in the PRC.

The SFJ campaign has international support from the Sikh community, with thousands taking part in events from Australia to the USA and beyond. In 2018 a UK SFJ event saw approximately 30,000 supporters come to a rally in support of the referendum in central London, Trafalgar Square. Voter registration events for the referendum are still being held around the world. More info on this can be found at https://referendum2020.org/.

The SFJ movement has been labelled a terrorist movement, despite the fact their agenda is entirely democratic. Indian laws make even discussion of separatism a criminal offence. In July of this year Gurpatwant Singh was openly named as a wanted terrorist in India, based on the much decried UAPA laws. These laws have allowed property belonging to Pannun in India to be seized, even though he is not in the country and the role of these properties in the Khalistan referendum campaign is unclear. UAPA has been highlighted as a means for Indian authorities to legally breach human rights of activists that speak against the state. Read more on this topic via Sikh Siyasat news here- https://sikhsiyasat.net/misuse-of-uapa-tactics-of-nia-under-question-after-witness-interrogated-by-nia-dies-mysteriously/.

India has also continually banned SFJ websites and/or social media profiles from being accessed in the so-called “biggest democracy in the world”.

You can watch the livestream event via the SFJ Facebook page here, from 1pm (UK time), 6.30pm (India time), 8am (East Coast USA time) and 5am (West Coast USA time).