Khalistan movement in Canada: Mainstreamed, delinked from its violent history
Under pressure from an influential pro-Khalistan lobby in the country, separatist activity in Canada is being delinked from the terrorism it spawned
As murdered Khalistani figure Hardeep Singh Nijjar was honoured as the chief of the Khalistan Tiger Force or KTF during a memorial event at the Guru Nanak Singh Gurdwara Sahib that he headed, it was yet another pointer to the twin phenomena of the movement being normalised in Canada and its links to terrorism being erased.
Videos of the memorial event on Thursday underscored India’s contention that Nijjar headed a group seeking to foment violence in India. He was declared a terrorist by India but none of the charges against him or the group he was associated with, the secessionist Sikhs for Justice or SFJ, have been tested in a Canadian court.
However, what has become evident is that under pressure from an influential pro-Khalistan lobby in the country, separatist activity in Canada is being delinked from the terrorism it spawned.
In the past eight years, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has issued a statement each year to mark the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism, on the anniversary of the bombing of the Air India flight 182, the Kanishka, by Khalistani terrorists.
On June 23, 1985, the terror attack claimed 329 lives. However, even as the statements acknowledged this “remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Canada’s history”, the term Khalistan never figures in them; nor does it appear in the speeches given in the Canadian parliament to commemorate that day. As a family member of a victim of the tragedy told HT last year, “It is as if the word is forbidden.”
“The 1985 Air India bombing has been declared ‘a Canadian tragedy’ and ‘the largest mass murder in Canadian history,’ yet, in many newspaper and scholarly articles offering Canadians a quick refresher on the Khalistan movement, the 1985 Air India tragedy is not even considered worth a mention,” Professor Chandrima Chakraborty, director of McMaster University’s Global Peace and Social Justice Program and Centre for Peace Studies, said. She has been instrumental in creating an archive of the event at the university, keeping alive the documentation gradually vanishing from Government websites.
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“Stunned at the Indian government’s alleged violation of international law, we are forgetting that the Khalistani movement in Canada is of grave concern to those who have followed the Air India saga closely, including many Canadian Sikhs who lost loved ones in the bombing,” she added. She was referring to the statement made by Trudeau in the House of Commons of “credible allegations” of a potential link of Indian agents to Nijjar’s killing on June 18 in Surrey, British Columbia.
“Khalistan movement had stayed within the corridors of a selected few Sikh temples, occasional seminars and marking important events related to 1984 and the post-1984 era. However, the rise of the referenda movement has given it a new impetus,” Shinder Purewal, professor of political science at the Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, said. He was referring to the so-called non-binding Khalistan referendum being held by SFJ.
The delinking of the Khalistan movement from terrorism began in earnest in 2018. In December that year, Public Safety Canada released the Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada. It included, for the first time, Sikh/Khalistani terrorism. As the executive summary stated, “Furthermore, Shia and Sikh (Khalistani) extremism also remain a concern because while their attacks in Canada have been extremely limited, some Canadians continue to support these extremist groups, including through financing.”
Within days, a furious backlash from interested groups led to the Government cowering. By April 2019, the terminology was dropped and the entire section originally titled Sikh/Khalistani extremism was called Extremists who Support Violent Means to Establish an Independent State Within India. The sections where the references occurred earlier -- in this section and in the executive summary -- were also sanitised.
In the five years since, it is portrayed as mainstream activism divorced from the reality of its violent antecedents.
