Khalistani terrorism: Running after a mirage; end on the cards

Spare a thought for the committed, ageing Khalistani. Perhaps he’s looking out over the police tape after another gangland shooting in Surrey, British Columbia. Perhaps he’s a Dad in Brampton, Ontario, wondering why the referendum on independence never seems to end. They’re both entitled to some sympathy. Despite a worldwide campaign to vilify India as a fascist hellscape where Sikhs face an “ongoing genocide,” the Khalistan movement seems ever more frantic as it rushes headlong towards a brick wall.

Consider how this trajectory developed. In 2019, a New York lawyer, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, stepped forward as the voice of “Sikhs for Justice” to organise “Referendum 2020”, intended to show that the world’s twenty-five million Sikhs desire an independent state and seek to win it peacefully – with “ballots, not bullets,” as Pannun put it.

This seemed to mean that separatist Sikhs would turn their back on the failed terrorist tactics of their past.

Not for long. Instead, Pannun promptly contradicted himself. He soon arrived with an ambitious deputy named Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia, the modern heartland of the Khalistan movement. There, he announced that the Canadian headquarters of the referendum campaign would be named for “Shaheed Talwinder Singh Parmar.” In the history of bungled public relations, this surely deserves its own chapter. The poster boy for the referendum – and, yes, there were colourful posters galore – would be the worst mass-murderer in Canada’s history.

Talwinder Parmar, killed by Punjab police in 1992, was a Canadian citizen and psychopath who slaughtered 329 innocent civilians in the so-called Kanishka bombing – the in-flight destruction of Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985.

Canada’s official caution about confronting Khalistani propaganda hardly sits well with the parallel development of gang culture

So much for “ballots not bullets” – and this was not a temporary mis-step. Pannun soon doubled down, naming voting centres in Ontario for other terrorists in the Canadian pantheon of Khalistani heroes. At the same time, as they built their campaign internationally, a voting centre in Australia was named for the assassins of prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. Next, Pannun himself starred in a menacing video called “I Am Dilawar”, warning the then-Chief Minister of Punjab, Capt. Amarinder Singh, that any move against the separatists might result in the same fate as a previous Punjab CM, Beant Singh, met in 1995. Dilawar Singh was the suicide bomber who killed Beant Singh and 16 innocent bystanders.

Know the real face of the Khalistani Movement

Mass-murderers, assassins and human bombs – these were the chosen icons of the supposedly peaceful campaign. As the referendum stuttered forward through London, Toronto, Geneva and Melbourne, neither Pannun nor his followers seemed to recognise that they had made a strategic blunder.

Instead, Khalistanis in Brampton, Ontario waded into the next blunder. In a Martyr’s Day parade, a flatbed truck was adorned with an elaborate life-size diorama depicting the 1984 assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi. Stuffed figures of the two Sikh bodyguards who shot her were shown with outstretched weapons, while Mrs. Gandhi’s sari was daubed with plentiful red paint so that nobody would miss the point – the point that we remember this with pride, and we don’t hide it.

Those pictures inevitably flew around the world and caused an outcry in India. Indians demanded to know, why was this allowed? Why don’t the Canadians crack down? India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar had an answer: he said Canada‘s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was “constrained“ by “vote bank politics”.

Jaishankar had touched a nerve. Many Canadians agreed with him that Trudeau‘s Liberal government has been too gentle on Khalistani belligerence because of its alliance with the NDP, a Left-wing party led by a Khalistani sympathizer, Jagmeet Singh. Still, both Liberal and Conservative governments in Canada have long used the same response to repeated Indian complaints – namely, that Canadians have free speech and can’t be locked up for expressing an opinion. This time, though, Indians scoffed, insisting correctly that the assassination display was an endorsement of violence.

Belatedly, some muted disapproval did emerge from some Canadian politicians. Trudeau himself, though, contrived to stoke the fire by calling his Indian critics “wrong” to say he caters to any vote bank, adding that Canada takes terrorism “extremely seriously”, and always takes “serious action” in response to violence or threats of violence. That surprised anyone who saw the devastating findings of the judicial inquiry on the Air India bombing – by far the most significant case of terrorism in Canada’s history. It described the government’s many and varied failures, and those of its agencies, as “inexcusable.”

Meanwhile, the potential for looking beyond the free speech law to other laws on hate or incitement all remain wholly unexplored.

Criminals and Khalistanis-Insights into the secret life of a Khalistani potentate.

Canada’s official caution about confronting Khalistani propaganda hardly sits well with the parallel development of gang culture, the smuggling of guns from the U.S., and disdain for the law, all seen at frequent crime scenes in Ontario and British Columbia. Take one prominent example which spans the early years of the Babbar Khalsa terrorist group led by Talwinder

Parmar and financed by a wealthy businessman, Ripudaman Singh Malik.

Malik joined the BK himself and contributed a series of $10,000 cheques. He was acquitted at the Air India trial in 2005, but the case offered many insights into the secret life of a Khalistani potentate. It emerged that one of Malik’s footsoldiers was a young gangster, Mindy Bhandher, who merrily testified that he had a lucrative career in credit-card fraud and drug-smuggling. Mindy, in short, was Malik’s kind of people. He more or less adopted Mindy, but others he simply bought – like Satnam Kaur Reyat, wife of the bomb-maker in the Air India case, Inderjit Reyat. As soon as Reyat was arrested, Malik took his family under his wing, providing cash, free housing and free education for the Reyat children. Was this hush money, to keep the Reyats quiet?

In a strange and sudden ending to his murky life, Malik was shot dead in July of 2022, in one of British Columbia’s frequent gangland murders. Again, the Khalistan movement, which he once personified, seemed to be running in parallel with an epidemic of gangsterism. Malik had incurred the wrath of his old Khalistani friends by writing a gushing letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, thanking him for the wonderful things he’d done for the Sikhs. That must have seemed like treachery to his militant friends, and it may well have led them to wonder what else Malik might say about the Air India plot. Was he a man who knew too much?

Another worrying sign was Malik’s defiance of the religious authorities in Amritsar. He set up a business printing the Sikh holy book without a religious licence to do so. Some harsh language about Malik came from younger rivals, notably the president of the Guru Nanak temple – Hardeep Nijjar. There was a lawsuit between the two camps. Then, after Malik was eliminated, Nijjar was told by the police that his life was at risk. Now, the police and the public wonder if someone in the Malik camp took revenge on Nijjar, leaving him bleeding to death in his truck.

The answers are not yet available. What’s clear, though, is that gangs are ever-present in the news from British Columbia. Nijjar’s elevation to hero status began immediately. As the deputy of Gurpatwant Pannun in Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), Nijjar was quickly anointed as a martyr – and not just any martyr. Rather, he was a cause for which Sikhs around the world were asked to arise.

The killer posters target the diplomats 

SFJ promptly seized on a string of recent deaths in Khalistani ranks to declare that Indian death squads were to blame. The fact that evidence was lacking was no obstacle. In one case, the victim was shot in Lahore – where rumours called it a drug deal gone wrong. In Birmingham, England, another victim’s death was said by the hospital to be caused by leukemia. But Nijjar’s murder on June 18 was definitely a murder. Like Malik eleven months earlier, he was shot in a mafia-style contract hit featuring two masked men and a getaway car.

The police have made no arrests in the Nijjar case at the time of writing, and have announced no findings as to motive. But the Khalistani forces threw caution to the winds and flatly declared that Indian assassins had Nijjar’s blood on their hands. Soon, fresh posters appeared in which SFJ urged Sikhs to “Kill India” and to march on Indian embassies – in London, Washington, Ottawa, Rome and Melbourne – as well as consulates in San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto and Birmingham.

But what caused immediate and intense dismay in India was that the posters targeted and identified senior Indian diplomats serving in all these cities. They were all called “Killers” of “Shaheed” Nijjar, and each was named and pictured, as if to facilitate any attack.

So the Khalistanis had painted targets on the diplomats’ backs. This raised hard questions for free-speech advocates in all western countries. Free speech, surely, was not meant to include death threats, intimidation or incitement to do harm to diplomats or anyone else. Nor were the questions academic as the Khalistanis prepared to march to the embassies.

In the end, though, the turnout for the marches was modest and violence at a minimum. Only a few scuffles and burnt flags were reported. Of course, the notion that some flying squad of deadly diplomats had anything to do with the death of Nijjar seems absurd, and no shred of evidence has emerged to support it.

Khalistani movement – hard to see a silver hope  

Today, it’s hard to know how the Khalistan campaign lumbers on under the weight of these bizarre claims. But a reckoning is in sight. At some point, they would wish to declare the long-delayed referendum as a success – a rousing vote for Khalistan – enabling Pannun to go to the United Nations with the wind at his back. He hopes to win UN backing for a vote including the Sikh homeland of Punjab – something the Indian government has banned. It deems the idea unconstitutional and the precedent intolerable.

However, it’s hard to see even a sliver of hope for the Khalistanis even if such a vote in Punjab were allowed. In the last election, a tiny 2.5 per cent voted for the only separatist party on offer – Simranjit Singh Mann’s SAD(A). And that was a banner year for separatists. In the previous election, in 2017, they got a microscopic 0.3 per cent of the vote. The separatist army is not just over the hill. They’ve all gone for lunch.

It is rightly said, no doubt, that an independent state was not an issue in those elections. So what outcome could be expected if Punjabis were to vote on precisely that issue? As it happens, a very reputable pollster, Pew Research – asked that very question just three years ago. Here is what they found: 95% of Sikhs are “very proud to be Indians” – a figure rarely seen in polling anywhere, about anything. But note also what follows: that 70% of them believe that “a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh”.

That is a painful blow to the Khalistani leaders who routinely allege that they are the authentic voice of the Sikhs and that Sikhs are demanding their own country. No, they’re not. A final question arises, then: what is the endgame of this long march to Khalistan? At the moment, it seems hopeless.

What seems probable, then, is that the Khalistan mirage will keep shimmering on the horizon, ignored by most and pursued by a hardy band of dead-enders. Perhaps as the 2030s and ’40s approach, old campaigners will tell tales of the heady days when they managed to set Canadian and Indian politicians at each other’s throats over a Tweetstorm of posters. Ha ha! That was a good one!

But their own country? Don’t bet on it.