{"id":43283,"date":"2018-05-01T03:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-05-01T07:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43283"},"modified":"2018-04-30T18:19:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T22:19:28","slug":"sikh-separatists-and-even-terrorists-are-being-protected-by-the-federal-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/05\/01\/sikh-separatists-and-even-terrorists-are-being-protected-by-the-federal-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Sikh separatists (and even terrorists) are being protected by the federal government"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s no reason that Canadian Sikhs can’t agitate for their fellow Sikhs in India to create a separate country in the Punjab, but that freedom must not include active support for terrorists. The Canadian government is looking particularly bad on this front, and it isn’t just because of Justin Trudeau’s farcical adventures on his recent trip to India. None of the major federal parties want to appear to be anti-Sikh, as Sikh voters cluster in several key swing ridings around the country, and any criticism of the terrorists is spun as an attack on all Sikhs. At Quillette<\/em> Terry Milewski<\/a> details the government’s unwillingness to deal with the problem:<\/p>\n

The Sikh faith, created in what is now northern India by the 15th-century Guru Nanak, remains obscure to many in the West. Turbaned Sikh men are sometimes confused with Muslims, and some have been assaulted by confused thugs following Islamist terrorist attacks. Like the United States, Britain and other Western countries, Canada has been home to emigrant Sikhs for generations\u2014the vast majority of them living peaceably in their adopted homeland.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, however, a powerful spasm of separatist militancy shook India and spread to the Sikh diaspora. In June, 1984, two months before the Madison Square Garden convention, Prime Minister Gandhi and her government set out to end a killing spree by Sikh militants who had turned the Sikhs\u2019 holiest site \u2014 the Golden Temple at Amritsar \u2014 into an armed camp. The Indian army wrecked the temple complex and took many lives. Revenge came on October 31, 1984, when Gandhi was gunned down in her garden by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Hindu mobs immediately took revenge for the revenge, slaughtering thousands of Sikhs in hellish reprisals that were aggravated by official complicity. The police looked the other way. The horrors of 1984 won\u2019t be forgotten by either side.<\/p>\n

Soon, Canada and its Sikh community were dragged into the thick of the struggle. In June of 1985, Parmar\u2019s Babbar Khalsa placed suitcase bombs on two planes leaving Vancouver. One brought down Flight 182, a massacre that remained, until 9\/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of aviation. The second bomb, intended to destroy another Air India plane simultaneously, exploded on the ground at Narita Airport in Japan, killing two baggage handlers. The reverberations from the attack were so profound in Canada that even today, 33 years later, a striking emblem of the Khalistani dream survives: a large \u201cmartyr\u201d poster honouring Talwinder Parmar, sword in hand, permanently fixed to the exterior of an important Sikh gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. Tens of thousands gather beneath it each spring for an annual Sikh parade. In American terms, the poster is equivalent to a public veneration of Osama Bin Laden.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Today, the parents who lost their children [on Air India Flight 182] are old, the orphaned children have their own children and the Sikh struggle for independence is moribund in India. Last year, in fact, Sikh voters overwhelmingly supported a united India and were key to the election of the Congress Party \u2014 the party of Indira Gandhi \u2014 to govern the Sikh homeland of Punjab. Support for Congress was especially strong in majority-Sikh districts. And Punjab\u2019s Chief Minister is a strongly pro-unity Sikh, Amarinder Singh, who has alleged separatist influence in the Canadian government.<\/p>\n

Harjit Sajjan, a Sikh who is Canada\u2019s Minister of National Defence, firmly denied the claim. And on Justin Trudeau\u2019s visit to India this year, Singh agreed to a photo-op including Sajjan. But the Chief Minister let it be known that he\u2019d handed over a list of Canadians he suspects of fundraising for Punjab\u2019s few remaining separatist Sikh militants.<\/p>\n

The listed suspects amount to a tiny subculture among Canada\u2019s 450,000 Sikhs, the vast bulk of whom seek no return to the bloody 1980s and 1990s, when the battle for Khalistan took some 20,000 lives in India, most of them Sikh. But the hardliners are a well-organized political force, still raising the cry of \u201cKhalistan Zindabad!<\/em>\u201d \u2014 long live Khalistan \u2014 in some Canadian gurdwaras where \u201cmartyred\u201d Sikh assassins are memorialized as models for the young. These include the two bodyguards who machine-gunned Indira Gandhi. Khalistani fervour is alive on social media and a 2018 tweet from \u201cGeorge\u201d (@PCPO_Brampton) declared: \u201cIndira\u2019s assassins are HEROES. Sikhs should glorify them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The endurance of such attitudes in Canada reflects the weak record of its justice system in deterring violence. For years, it seemed, Canadian courts were where terrorism cases went to die.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s no reason that Canadian Sikhs can’t agitate for their fellow Sikhs in India to create a separate country in the Punjab, but that freedom must not include active support for terrorists. The Canadian government is looking particularly bad on this front, and it isn’t just because of Justin Trudeau’s farcical adventures on his recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,23,53,11],"tags":[173,114,662,257],"class_list":["post-43283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-india","category-politics","category-religion","tag-assassin","tag-separatism","tag-sikhism","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bg7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43284,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43283\/revisions\/43284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}