The India Canada situation is just the beginning of something that is about to become far worse, mostly because neither country has an incentive to back down. Indeed backing down could be suicidal. The question is how did we get here and what do we do from now on?
The first problem is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself, facing a massive inflation crisis, especially rising house rents. This means he has to double down on identity absent economic well-being.
The second problem is that Bharat has no reason to back off or back down. Now that Trudeau has escalated the situation, if Bharat backs down publicly it essentially green-lights several things. First, it’ll go out as a signal of Bharat’s weakness, emboldening foreign governments and terrorists. This leads to two – the fact that foreign governments will feel much more comfortable reducing security for our diplomats, taking our security concerns lightly and very possibly developing their local terror affiliated vote-banks. Third, foreign terrorists themselves will treat it as Bharat’s limitation and be encouraged to change their modus operandi – preferring to use developed NATO countries as bases instead of weak, failed states like Pakistan.
The final player who isn’t going to let this die a quiet death are the Khalistani protagonists, whose survival depends on this crisis worsening. I narrate this from personal experience as a Tamil in Melbourne during the final phases of the Sri Lankan civil war. I had to consciously hide all appearances of being Tamil, because once the community got to know, LTTE enforcers were informed and the extortion to fund their war effort would start. If you refused, they would dig deep enough to find relatives in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka and threaten them.
CRIMINAL NETWORKS
This seems to be exactly what is happening in Canada. Like all terror fronts, there is a significant overlap with organised crime. New immigrants who go there are more dependent on community networks to find jobs and accommodation and it is these same community networks that are completely under the control of criminal extortionists in the name of Khalistan.
Imagine you’re a new immigrant from rural Punjab – socially awkward, uncomfortable with the language, landing in a first-world country for the first time. Your dependence on your community and family networks increases substantially from where you grew up so far. Essentially, community becomes everything to you. Khalistanis know this and extract their pound of flesh. In return for acclimatising you, you have to attend their rallies, vote in their referendums and pay them a small fee every month.
TRUDEAU’S POLITICS
What’s worse is that Trudeau’s party, instead of cracking down, has invested heavily in these criminal networks precisely because of the level of social control they wield and how they can bring voters out and terrorise them into voting for Trudeau. The criminality in the community is hidden under the banner of relativism, where it’s racist for a white police to interfere in “community affairs” and thus suits Trudeau’s “multiculturalism” because he can essentially have a paramilitary shock force that exists in a legal lacuna that the police are too scared to touch for dread of “cultural misinterpretation”.
“If you’re talking about reputational issues and reputational damage, if there’s any country that needs to look at this, I think it is Canada and its growing reputation as a safe haven for terrorists, for extremists, and for organised crime. And I think that’s a country that needs to worry about its international reputation”-Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson, MEA
The “community leaders” of course know there is no Khalistan battle to be fought – but they’re addicted and dependant as their wealth, social standing and political influence is based on this extortion. These “leaders” are also deeply in cahoots with organised crime in Indian Punjab. The same drug smuggling, gun running gangsterism is what we’ve seen transplanted to Canada.
DEAL DIFFERENTLY
If Bharat is serious about solving this problem, we need to change tack. We can’t refer to this as the Khalistan problem, but as a problem of Transnational Punjabi Crime Cartels. Why? Because in Canada, criminals use the facade of political beliefs to mask their activities. You can be extradited for a crime but you can’t be extradited for your political beliefs. They conveniently conflate the two. When we seek their extradition on political grounds, we simply won’t get it and we play directly into Trudeau’s hands. What we also need to be doing is a large scale cancellation of PIO/OCI cards, a targetted seizure of assets owned by Canadian liberal politicians and finally the shutting down of Canadian consulates in Punjab, which act as a front for organised crime.
The need of the moment is proactivity – proactivity demands divide and rule, not consolidating our enemies. As it is, our first goals have been achieved. We’ve given the Canadian conservatives a powerful weapon to attack Trudeau with in the upcoming elections. Now we need to break up the Khalistani organised crime network operating in Canada pretending to be a political movement.
