How Canada selectively harbours radical Khalistanis – Firstpost

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Two North American governments—American and Canadian—invoke the freedoms of expression and religion as tests of a country’s democracy. In defense of these freedoms, they deploy diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, and the threat of coercive measures. Presumably then, violence against the media or religious minorities in their own country would invite outrage and strong action.

But, no: the September attack on a Calgary journalist and a series of attacks on Hindu temples disappeared in a trickle of bland condemnations. In Canada, this is surprising only to those woefully or willfully unaware of the long history of intimidation of the press and anti-Sikh-extremist voices in Canada. Some of the incidents recounted in this piece go back decades, but, sadly, they form a part of the chain of events unfolding today.

When Tara Singh Hayer, a Punjabi-language journalist and publisher, was shot and killed in Surrey in 1998, he had been a marked man for over ten years. He was sympathetic to the Khalistan cause—a separatist movement seeking to carve a Sikh state out of India—but opposed the violent targeting of civilians to support it. A shooting ten years earlier had left him paralysed, and a few months before that a bomb was discovered in his office. Hayer’s family—including his former British Columbia MLA son, Dave Hayer— testified that, despite the prior attempts on his life, it was difficult to get the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to take the threats seriously.

A later enquiry found that the RCMP’s efforts to protect the journalist were half-hearted; and no one was ever charged with his murder. Hayer’s killing kept him from testifying in a trial related to the bombing of Air India flight AI 182 (called Kanishka) in 1985—the largest terror attack Canada has seen to date.

Even his written and videotaped testimony was posthumously ruled inadmissible by the judge, saying it would be a ‘highly contentious matter consuming many months and with the potential of significantly diverting the trial’. Two decades after the mass killing, the Canadian establishment had discovered a sense of urgency. The two men Hayer was to testify against were acquitted in 2005.

Seventeen years later, in 2022, Ripudaman Singh Malik, one of the two men acquitted due to Hayer’s testimony being set aside, was taken off a no-fly list and visited India. He praised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and received permission from the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), an influential body that manages Sikh gurudwaras in India, to print copies of the holy text, Guru Granth Sahib. Pro-Khalistan leaders unleashed invective and threatening rhetoric against Malik. He was eventually gunned down in 2023. Two contract killers were arrested and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The prosecutor refused—despite the Mallik family’s public appeals—to reveal who had hired them.

Canadian authorities, it appeared, weren’t overly keen to publicly identify or prosecute the conspirators. The man Mallik was in a bitter dispute with and who had made a public call in 2021 to ‘ teach Mallik a lesson’, was Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Nijjar himself was shot dead in June 2023. Alert observers of Indo-Canadian affairs would note that the Canadian government’s ongoing response to his killing is more energetic and shrill.

More about the Nijjar case later, but this pattern of dealing with Khalistani violence extends backwards to the investigation of its most shocking atrocity, the Kanishka bombing. An official commission that looked into the farcical investigation that followed found ‘ erased wiretaps, warnings that went ignored, interagency turf wars, and witnesses scared into silence’.

For a conspiracy that killed 329 people— including women, children, and the elderly—and crew members, the Canadian legal system convicted a grand total of one man: Inderjit Singh Reyat, that too on a manslaughter charge. He was sentenced to five years. Reyat confirmed that one Talwinder Singh Parmar had ordered the bombs that brought down Kanishka and killed two baggage handlers loading an Air India flight in Narita Airport, Japan. This was corroborated by Canadian intelligence officers who followed Reyat and Parmar to a test bombing three weeks before the actual bombing. It’s hard to ignore the fact that while Parmar—who was conveniently dead by this time—was named in the case, doing so diverted blame from most living conspirators. But then, it is tempting to ask whether Parmar—had he been alive—would have been in any danger at all in Canada.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau—Justin Trudeau’s father—refused to extradite Parmar to India to stand trial for killing two policemen. While the Indian charge had prevented Parmar from entering the USA, Canada was happy not just to grant him entry but Canadian citizenship as well.

In Canada, Parmar preached ‘killing 50,000 Hindus’, and issued warnings that ‘Indian planes will fall from the sky’. This was less than a year before the Kanishka bombing. In 1986, while still in Canada, Parmar was charged with a plot to blow up India’s parliament but walked free on a technicality. Perhaps Parmar and his associates made Canadian authorities chronically error-prone, or perhaps protecting his victims wasn’t motivating enough for them to do the paperwork.

A visiting Punjab cabinet minister—whose presence was equally uninspiring to the Canadian police—was shot on Vancouver Island in 1986. The gunman, Jaspal Atwal, was sentenced to 20 years but was released in just 4 years; he then became a Liberal Party activist. Atwal was also charged, though not convicted, of assaulting Ujjal Dosanjh, an anti-Khalistan voice who later became British Columbia’s (BC) premier and a federal Liberal cabinet minister. Atwal was in the news again in 2018, embroiled in a controversy when the Canadian High Commission in India invited him to an event with Justin Trudeau.

The Canadian establishment’s seeming concern for pro-Khalistan criminals, while already well-established, then spread to dead criminals as well. The use of Parmar’s name in criminal cases having served its purpose, his stature was fully restored. Journalist Terry Milewski has pointed out that Parmar, though declared guilty by an enquiry judge, (Reyat’s) defence, and prosecution of leading the Kanishka plot, is openly revered by some Sikh extremist groups.

Moreover, Canadian political parties openly associate with these groups and defend their reverence of Parmar. In 2007, the Liberal Premier of BC and other politicians attended Vaisakhi events with Parmar depicted on floats. Later incidents, like depictions of the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Sikh terrorists, invited platitudinous condemnation from Canadian officialdom but no strong words or action.

To return this blood-soaked story to the dramatis personae we began with, Ripudman Singh Malik was one of the two acquitted as a result of Tara Singh Hayer’s death and the bomb-maker, Reyat’s, claimed that he knew no other conspirator. But his tussle with Hardeep Singh Nijjar, his praise for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his official recognition by the SGPC likely flipped him to the side of the victims of pro-Khalistan violence—the side that Canada seems uninterested in protecting. It was no surprise then that he was killed or that the Canadian government shows little interest in investigating the conspiracy behind his killing. Just as it wasn’t eager to protect Tara Singh Hayer or investigate his killing.

An interesting contrast is provided by the Canadian government’s response to Nijjar’s killing in 2023. Trudeau’s government escalated the issue to the point of breakdown in Indo-Canadian diplomatic relations. In violation of the Geneva Convention, Indian High Commission officials were named ‘persons of interest’ in the investigation, and its diplomats were surveilled. As a result, India and Canada both expelled an equal number of diplomats. It would appear that Nijjar, like Parmar, belonged to a special category: one that the Canadian establishment is actually concerned about. Nijjar—like Parmar—was wanted in India, yet Nijjar immigrated to Canada and became a citizen, just as Parmar had.

Even as operating space and likely political cover drew the likes of Parmar and Nijjar to Canada, innocuous lures like economic activity and safe, vibrant communities drew Indian Hindus and Indian-origin Hindus from countries as diverse as India, the Caribbean, and Surinam. They assimilated into Canadian society even as they cherished being part of the Canadian-Hindu community.

Indeed, they even forged strong social ties with moderate Sikhs in Canada. Ironically, though, in a country that celebrates multiculturalism, they were attacked and intimidated by a small group of extremists, and the government of their adopted home allowed it—if not abetted and covered up for it—in the name of multiculturalism.

It is in the light of this history that the recent attacks on Indian-origin media persons and Hindu temples must be viewed. It is a history that makes the concluding dialogue of a classic movie, Chinatown, most apt. It alludes to the racist tendency—especially amongst the political classes—of allowing thugs to oppress minority communities. These thugs are protected and promoted as long as they are loyal to mainstream elites. By the end of the film, the protagonist, Jake Gittes, comes to realise that beneath the veneer of order and sophistication, much of 1930s America runs on such thuggery. Similarly, until we see the Canadian establishment’s attitudes change, Indo-Canadians and Hindus will find meaning in the line: ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Canada.’

The writer is the published author of two novels (Penguin, India and Westland, India) based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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