The Liberal Party normally manages to avoid having any internal differences come to public attention, so having a former Liberal cabinet minister come out and directly criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rather noteworthy:
Ujjal Dosanjh speaking at the 12th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas – Engaging Diaspora Connecting Across Generation, in New Delhi on January 08, 2014.
Photo by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (GODL-India) via Wikimedia Commons.
“A silent majority of the Sikhs do not want to have anything to do with Khalistan. They just don’t speak out because they’re afraid of violence and violent repercussions,” reports Ujjal Dosanjh, as a Sikh living in Vancouver, B.C.
The call for a separate Sikh homeland in Punjab, India — to be called Khalistan — has been brewing since the 1930s, when British rule in India was nearing its end. Although the movement now has marginal support in India, it has taken wings in Canada and escalated into the present derailing of relations between two friendly Commonwealth democracies, India and Canada.
Unlike many of his Sikh peers in Canada, Ujjal — a former NDP premier of British Columbia and a former federal cabinet minister under Liberal prime minister Paul Martin — isn’t afraid to speak out. He’s been extremely vocal, especially since 1985; that’s when the bombing of Air India Flight 182 by Khalistani extremists, killing 329 people, brought the separatist movement to Canada.
Ujjal, now 78, has faced death threats from extremists but remains unwavering in his determination to convince fellow Canadians that the overwhelming majority of the nearly 800,000 Sikhs in Canada do not support the Khalistani movement. “I’d say less than five per cent, less than five per cent,” he emphasizes.
[…]
While accountability for this violence is an imperative, the purpose of my conversation with Uijal is not to sift through the evidence and intelligence. What I want to understand is how we got to this place where Canada’s Sikh population, the largest Sikh diaspora in the world, has in effect been co-opted by the Khalistanis to the point where this obscure separatist movement has become a Canadian problem.
Without hesitation, Ujjal points to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
For two reasons, Ujjal blames Trudeau: “One, he’s never really understood the vast majority of Sikhs are quite secular in their outlook, despite the fact that they go to the temple,” he says. And the second reason: “Khalistanis are not a majority, and the fact nobody speaks against them is out of fear”. Through intimidation, Ujjal elaborates, Khalistani supporters control many of the temples in Canada. And it’s Trudeau’s fault, he asserts, “that Canadians now equate Khalistanis with Sikhs, as if we are all Khalistanis if we’re Sikhs”.
