A larger social-media fight rages behind the Golden Temple shrine to Khalistan militants.

This Thursday, the Central Sikh Museum in Golden Temple unveiled a painting of Dilawar Singh, the murderer of Chief Minister Beant Singh in 1995. It was accompanied with a tweet addressed to the desired audience.

New Delhi: According to legend, the coin arced through the air and landed as Dilawar Singh had predicted: Fortune had bestowed upon him the privilege to die a martyr.

An image of Dilawar Singh, the Punjab Police policeman who killed chief minister Beant Singh in August 1995, was added to the numerous Khalistan terrorists adorning the walls of Amritsar's Golden Temple earlier this week.

The estimated 12 million Punjabi diasporas in nations such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States will never visit this memorial to murderers.

Dilawar Singh put "a halt to atrocities and severe human rights abuses done against Sikhs," according to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which manages the museum and numerous Sikh holy institutions.

The social media fight in Khalistan
Overseas Khalistan separatists have traditionally honored deceased terrorists.

Sikhs for Justice (SJF) in the United States, for example, published an advertisement in 2019 honoring Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was responsible for the 1985 bombing of an Air India aircraft that murdered over 300 passengers, the majority of whom were of Indian descent.

The ad was distributed in advance of an SJF-organized 'Khalistan referendum,' which aimed to "liberate Punjab from Indian domination."

According to Terry Milewski, a Canadian author and journalist, honoring terrorists is a "key" aspect of Khalistan's cyber war.

According to the Khalistan Extremism Monitor (KEM), which is managed by the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM) in New Delhi, Twitter has become Khalistan propaganda's preferred weapon.

"Incidents like the 2020-2021 farmers' demonstrations, the December 2021 Ludhiana court bombing, and threat warnings by SJF and other pro-Khalistani groups created a lot of momentum on the platform," according to a KEM study acquired by ThePrint.

When Khalistani flags were discovered attached to the gates of the Himachal Pradesh legislature last month, Twitter was inundated with 35,000 Khalistani-related posts. The most popular hashtags were #Khalistan, #SFJ, and #Punjab.
This was more than Khalistan-related traffic in December 2021, when it peaked at over 20,000 tweets during farmer demonstrations and the Ludhiana court bombing.

According to KEM's reports, it's difficult to tell where this traffic is coming from. 76 percent of tweets could not be geolocated due to Twitter's privacy regulations. However, 6.36 percent came from India, while 2.06 percent came from Pakistan.

In several situations of pro-Khalistan propaganda, the Indian government has retaliated harshly. Despite the criticism of the Amritsar museum, the state and federal governments have been hesitant to intervene in the memorialization of Khalistan militants.