Police training bill brings geopolitics to California’s senate

By Aneela Mirchandani

As a California senate bill aimed at police training winds its way through committees, lawmakers find themselves grappling with geopolitics from half a world away. Emotions were raw at a pair of recent hearings where members of the public brought up decades-old trauma from ethnic conflict in India, some amid tears, in their testimony. 

If passed, California senate bill SB 509 would require the Office of Emergency Services (OES) to develop training protocols to enable local police to recognize, and respond to, incidents of “transnational repression”—when authoritarian governments use threats and violence to silence dissidents abroad. It is supported by the California Police Chiefs Association.

Opponents say it risks indoctrinating local police with dual loyalty tropes, thus painting diaspora community members who exercise their First Amendment rights as being “proxies” of foreign governments.

Authored by California senator Anna Caballero, the bill is due for a hearing at the appropriations committee later this month. It has already passed two committees. It has been co-authored by assembly members Esmerelda Soria and Jasmeet Bains—whose similar bill last year, AB 3027, never made it out of committee. 

The FBI has recognized transnational repression as a potent threat. Among the examples on the FBI’s public information page: a murder-for-hire plot targeting an Iranian dissident, and a secret police station run by a New Yorker on behalf of the Chinese government. Some incidents, while less dramatic—such as online harassment by troll armies run by foreign governments—also count under this rubric.

SB 509 would require the Specialized Training Institute to come up with an awareness protocol for law enforcement by July 2026. The protocol would inform personnel on the techniques authoritarian governments frequently use to coerce exiles into silence: including cyberstalking and digital surveillance. It would familiarize them with the countries that use such techniques and the dissident communities at risk.

“The Iranian regime still targets dissidents here on US soil,” said Hamid Yazdan Panah of Immigrant Defense Advocates, an Iranian refugee himself, at the Public Safety committee hearing on April 1. “These threats are far more common than most people realize.”

While the text of the bill does not mention any countries by name, its origin lies in California’s Central Valley, home to a large community of Sikhs who have felt targeted by India, their country of origin. 

“The impetus [for the bill] came from the community in the Central Valley,” said Caballero in last week’s hearing before the committee on Governmental Organization. “The Sikh community has been very concerned about this issue, and in fact assembly member Jasmeet Bains was the subject of terrorist threats.”

Bains, the author of last year’s AB 3027 from which the current bill is largely derived, is a member of the Sikh community. All three authors of the bill represent communities in the Central Valley.

The Sikh community’s concerns exploded in 2023 when the Department of Justice accused an agent of the government of India of orchestrating an assassination plot on a Sikh dissident in New York, which was foiled by the FBI. In the same year, the former prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, accused the Indian government of the murder of a Sikh activist in Surrey. Both incidents were highlighted in the AB 3027 fact sheet released by Bains’s office last April as examples of transnational repression they aim to train local police on.

The main opposition to the bill comes from Hindu and even some Sikh members of the Indian diaspora who fear being accused of being proxies of the Indian government.

“SB 509 lacks the adequate guardrails […] necessary to prevent OES trainings on transnational repression from being politicized,” said Samir Kalra, managing director at the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group that is opposing the bill, at the hearing on April 8. “This bill would label anyone who criticizes or uses digital technology to track the activities of terrorists or separatist movements as being ‘radicalized by state sponsored propaganda’.”

Kalra’s testimony hinted at the decades-old faultline that continues to divide the Indian diaspora.

In the 1980s, a militant Sikh separatist movement raged in northern India, causing the death of thousands, including the assassination of India’s prime minister and the bombing of an Air India flight, killing all 329 people on board. The movement demanded the creation of a new nation called Khalistan broken out of India’s northwest. 

Thousands of Sikhs were also killed, particularly during a three night long revenge-killing pogrom in Nov. 1984. One of the members of the public speaking in favor of SB 509 at the April 1 hearing testified to having witnessed the murder of his family during that pogrom.

Today, the Khalistan movement has been vanquished within India’s borders. However, it survives among the diaspora in the form of a referendum for Sikhs, organized by the separatist group Sikhs For Justice (SFJ). SFJ has tried to reinvent the Khalistan cause in the modern era as an UN-friendly independence movement. 

Several Sikh members of the public who lined up to support the bill at the hearing on April 1 noted they were associated with SFJ, thus were Khalistan supporters. 

Despite the reinvention, occasional violence by Khalistan supporters has kept fear alive among targeted communities. This includes incidents of arson at the Indian consulate in San Francisco in 2023, and recent vandalizations of Hindu temples with anti-Hindu, pro-Khalistan graffiti. The Indian government has repeatedly accused SFJ members of orchestrating terrorism within India.

For opponents of SB 509, the separatist ideology from where it springs remains front and center. 

One of the members of the public who spoke against the bill, Geeta Sikand, broke down in tears during her testimony. “In 1984, my uncle was shot dead by the supporters of the ideology of this bill,” she said. “Please don’t let it pass.” 

Sikand is the VP of communications at Americans 4 Hindus (A4H), a PAC that opposes SB 509. “We oppose [transnational repression] by any country,” A4H said in a statement emailed to AsAmNews. “[But] the description of the bill is vague. There is fear in minority communities, including the Indian and Hindu community, about its implementation and unfair targeting of minorities.”

In an email to AsAmNews, Kalra acknowledged that their concerns spring from the sponsorship of the bill.

“Our concerns are based on the actions of SB 509 supporters themselves,” he said, “who have repeatedly amplified unfounded, racist allegations of Hindu American individuals and organizations being ‘Indian agents,’ solely on the basis of those Hindu Americans expressing opposition to violent pro-Khalistan extremism, including acts of terror, hate crimes, and online harassment.”

This conception of the transnational repression bill can be traced to the threats faced by Bains, the author of AB 3027, due to her advocacy on issues of Sikh justice. Last year, she told Reuters of an incident when four men, appearing to be of Indian origin, threatened her verbally in her office. Since then she has been targeted by threatening text messages and stalking. 

However, it is not clear that those threats were state-sponsored, and thus instances of transnational repression that SB 509 tries to address.

JP Deol, a Bay Area civil rights attorney of Sikh descent who supports SB 509, disagreed that the origin of the legislation should matter.

“I see it as being a good thing for immigrants of various backgrounds,” Deol said in a phone interview with AsAmNews. “Yes, it came up in the Khalistan and India context, but it’s certainly not limited to that. By the way, if it were limited to that, I would oppose it.”

It is not as clear-cut as that, said Kalra over email. He worries that the mandated training would privilege the political views of Khalistan supporters, thus turning education into a form of indoctrination, and inculcate law enforcement with xenophobic sentiments about the Indian immigrant community. 

“If the intent of this bill is to truly train law enforcement on transnational repression in all its forms,” Kalra said, reflecting the concern some have about the separatist movement’s links with crime, “it should include language about transnational repression by transnational organized crime and terror networks.”

Ultimately though, Deol said, SB509 is not a criminal statute and has limited power.

“My opinion is, this bill is designed to make other countries think twice about using proxies and agents to harass people either in person or online,” he said.