In what looks like the latest in an unending series, miscreants vandalised a park renamed after the Bhagavad Gita, in Brampton, Canada, to acknowledge the contributions of the local Indian community there. The Indian High Commission has promptly urged the Canadian authorities to take immediate action against the ‘perpetrators of hate-crime’, whose numbers are only increasing. Brampton East MP Maninder Sidhu, among other Indian/Hindu community leaders in the country, called it a ‘heinous crime’ that has ‘no place in our community’.
That way, it is anybody’s guess why External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar did not invite himself to Canada, if that’s what was required, while on a longish tour of the neighbouring US, where the ‘rare honour cordon’ offered to him at the Pentagon was followed almost immediately by the US Treasury ‘sanctions’ on Mumbai-based firm, Tibalaji for trading in petro-chemicals with Iran, using the China route. For, real trouble for India in the western hemisphere continues to brew in Canada, not because the government has an anti-India streak, but because of a liberal state approach to the illiberal, who have been exploiting it all along.
For the untrained mind, Air-India’s ‘Emperor Kanishka’ mid-air explosion along with the failed one of the kind at Tokyo’s Narita airport, also on June 18, 1985, was the first coordinated air-borne terror-attack, long before 9/11. The Kanishka blast, in which all 329 on board perished, would have been written off as the worst-ever air-accident had it not been for the death of two luggage-handlers while loading another Air-India flight at Narita.
What was even more appalling, and continues to be so for India and Indians is the way the Canadian government ignored New Delhi’s requests for probing the separatist pro-Khalistani elements, who were active long before the Indian government’s ‘Operation Bluestar’ to flush out well-armed Sikh terrorists holed up in the community’s holiest of shrines, namely, the Golden Temple, Amritsar, the previous year.
To date, the Canadian probe into the Kanishka blast remains a big joke, unacknowledged by the host-government and uncontested by India, or any of its so-called western friends, who fume at ‘state support/indifference’ to terrorism of every kind when it involves other nations.
More liberal than the most liberal
India has had no repeat of anything remotely close to such anti-India acts from Japan, or any other country barring Canada — that too next only to Pakistan. Across Europe, there are other nations that too swear by a pluralistic democracy, cushioned by their own interpretations of freedom of speech, expression and liberalism, conditioned also by their experiences during the Second World War.
Canada was/is far removed from the European theatre then and now, but that seems to have conditioned the nation to be more liberal than the most liberal. With the result, it seems, the nation has problems acknowledging and acting upon third nations’ concerns about activities nearer home affecting their sovereignty, security and internal security.
Sri Lanka’s is the case in point from India’s immediate neighbourhood, but the entire West, with the US in the lead, has been after the island-nation, using the UNHRC as a ploy and venue. The irony is that in Sri Lanka the minority ‘Tamil community’ in particular continues to have its grouses on matters of personal security, political freedoms and power-devolution, as promised as far back as 1987.
Their ranks too have swelled with the state-supported, if not sponsored harassment of Sri Lanka’s Muslim population, in recent years — accompanied by allegations of human rights denial to a section of the majority Sinhala-Buddhist population in recent weeks.
That is, however, not the case with India. Here, there are no voices of protest from the local Sikh community, for decades since the extinction of Khalistani terrorism. It cannot be attributed to any state-sponsored harassment of ‘terror’, as may be the case with some other nations — democracy, autocracy or outright dictatorship.
There is a genuine political space for every section of the society, as proved by repeated elections in the Sikh-majority Punjab state, alongside the rest of India. People in the state have exercised their franchise freely, and have voted in governments of every political shade, and also voted them out for proven anti-incumbency. Elections in Punjab, particularly, as they move away from the era of Khalistani terrorism of the eighties, have had nothing to do with communal identity or community harassment.
Shaky wicket for long
Yet, the Canadian government has allowed Khalistani groups that remain near-exclusive to the nation, other than Pakistan, to flourish and prosper, possibly at the cost of Ottawa’s continuing congenial ties with New Delhi, which has now been on a shaky wicket for long.
The latest was the Canadian government ignoring Indian requests for curbing a pro-Khalistan on-line referendum in September. This was accompanied by vandalism on Hindu temples, whose walls were found sprayed with anti-India slogans, in different parts of the country. Some were reported, others went unreported. A second referendum is on cards for November, and this again can test bilateral governmental ties.
There are independent attacks on people of Indian origin, including Sikhs, in hate crimes unconnected to religion. Prabhjot Singh Katri (21) was found murdered in his Turno apartment in September last year and Satwinder Singh (28), who went in as a student, died in a shooting rampage a year later, on September 12 this year. In April, Kartik Vasudev (21), another Indian student, died in a ‘random attack’ in Toronto. All these have been classified as hate crimes.
If perpetrators of these attacks mostly involved non-Indians, non-Sikhs, to be precise, at the height of the ‘farmers protest’ in India, centred on Punjab and Haryana, identifiable Khalistani fringe groups attacked Indian-Hindus in some parts of Canada.
Jobs to offer
Canada is home to all migrants from across the world, as the immigration laws and their application are not as stringent, say, as in neighbouring America, or in otherwise ‘conscientious’ nations in West Europe and Australia. The nation needs hands to work, and hence has jobs to offer. It is so in Australia, too, but the latter has become wary of political asylum-seekers of the Sri Lankan Tamil kind.
Indian Sikhs are among the earlier migrants to Canada, but others have also been immigrating in substantial numbers, mainly taking the legal route — as is the case with Australia, where too jobs are on offer — along with hopes of early citizenship. This, as also the frequent Khalistani attacks on Hindus, has thrown up a new class of Indians, calling themselves ‘Hindu-Indians’ in Canada.
It is another matter that Indians, including Hindus, in the country especially have also come from other parts of the world, including Africa, during the post-colonial turmoil in the previous century. Then there are Tamil-speaking Hindu migrants from Sri Lanka, who were accommodated but not necessarily absorbed, at the height of the ethnic crisis, war and violence in the island-nation.
No show for PS-1
Among them were illegal Sri Lankan Tamil migrants, who risked getting caught, quarantined in detention centres, only to challenge the local laws and their application to their case, in local courts, with the help and blessings of their friends and relatives who had already obtained legal status.
There is nothing to suggest that multiple Hindu groups bearing different nationalities have come together, to mount common politico-electoral pressure campaign on local parties and candidates in federal, state and county-level elections, as Khalistanis have been doing for long. Nor do they act as one, either because of differences or outright indifference, as the Sri Lankan Tamil groups, cutting across religious identities, have done through the past decades.
Here there are also other issues, unconnected to ethnicity or religion. It is said to be often based on commercial interests, and nothing more. Accordingly, the Canadian distributor of part one of Tamil film-maker Mani Ratnam’s magnum opus, ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ (PS-1) withdrew it from multiplexes without a single-show, after small cinemas that were minting money in the past, allegedly made it a habit of vandalising the screens — and getting away with it.
Incidentally, PS-1 is not the only Tamil film to receive such a treatment. This may owe to the fact that the strong Sri Lankan Tamil community patronise films in the language, made mostly in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. As Indian film-goers also point out, Hindi and Malayalam films have been spared since the turn of the century, when it all started.
Advisory offensive
Last month, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) ‘cautioned’ Indian citizens in Canada, and those travelling there as students, to be mindful of the recent incidence of hate crimes. This reportedly triggered a counter-offensive from the Canadian foreign ministry, which however has denied that the ‘travel advisory’ for their nationals not to venture close in the three Indian states bordering Pakistan has been there on the official website for long.
It is anybody’s guess why the Canadian foreign ministry did not remove the earlier advisory, if it considered it irrelevant any more. Likewise, if the advisory, when posted, concerned Indian states bordering Pakistan, the question arises if Canadian agencies were probing the Pakistani (ISI) connections of the Khalistani groups, as India has been making out since the ‘Kanishka blast’, but to little avail.
If nothing else, Canada can take its example from the American neighbour, which habitually used to ignore India’s warnings about ISI’s involvement with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but not certainly after 9/11. Leave aside the common threat that India and the US face from China, in their respective geo-political and geo-strategic spaces, there is an ever-increasing realisation in Washington that India does not fib on matters of serious concerns on the terrorism front. Canada can take a leave out of it.
Sharp increase
The consistently ‘sharp increase’ in anti-India hate-crimes in Canada has become a thorn in bilateral flesh, with politicians in that country, as in Scandinavian countries and Australia, using allegations of human rights violations in host-nations, which include India and Sri Lanka, among others as a cover for their supporting comparatively large domestic constituencies with such ethnic affiliations.
Pro-Khalistan leaders criticised Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for accepting the gift of a Kashmiri carpet from counterpart Narendra Modi at the G-20 summit in Germany, calling the latter a ‘tyrant’. Clearly, it was aimed particularly at wooing Kashmiri Muslims and other co-religionists in Canada.
What is not to be missed out is the counter pro-India campaigns involving non-Sikh Indian groups that rile the Canadian government not only on its criticism of the human rights situation in India, from time to time, but also on something as domestic as this year’s truckers’ strike in their host nation.
One such group even recalled the ‘gratuitous advice offered by Trudeau to the Government of India on how to handle those protests. The advice, sadly, that he has not followed himself. We urge Prime Minister Trudeau to follow the example of Prime Minister Modi in handling peaceful protests through democratic means” — indicating that there may be more to their concern than plain and simple Indian nationalist sentiments.
In December 2020, Trudeau had commented, “Canada will always be there to defend the right to peaceful protest. We believe in the importance of dialogue and that’s why we’ve reached out through multiple means directly to the Indian authorities to highlight our concerns.”
At the bilateral-level, after attending a pro-Khalistani ‘Khalsa Day’ celebration in Toronto in 2017 and following it up with liberal support for those illiberal groups, PM Trudeau received a cold welcome when he visited the famed Taj Mahal at Agra, along with his wife and three children, a year later.
What made the ‘diplomatic disaster’ also into a political controversy back home was when a local newspaper brought out that Jaspal Atwal, a pro-Khalistani youth leader convicted for the attempted assassination of a visiting Punjab cabinet minister on Vancouver Island in 1987, was on the prime minister’s entourage to India.
Episodic but endless
These are all episodic, where successive Canadian governments, independent of political and ideological affiliations of their successive elected leaderships, have not addressed India’s genuine concerns flowing from the ‘Kanishka blasts’, where local investigations were reluctant and tardy.
The situation has not improved over the past decades. With the result, before ticking off Western Europe and the rest over commercial deals and sanctions linked to Russia over the more contemporary Ukraine War, New Delhi should take a closer look at the nation’s Canada relations, as the unhurried drift on the other side is already a cause for serious concern, next only to the kind attacking to the Indian neighbour and for a reason.
Even China, the adversities for India are continuing for decades over reasons based on realities on the ground. But the sympathetic Canadian official approach to anti-India elements over euphoric ideas of democracy, liberalism and human rights have no link to realities, both domestic and bilateral – and can only be counter-productive, as for instance, 9/11 proved in the case of the US neighbour.
Maybe, it is time that the Indian government, starting with Prime Minister Modi, EAM Jaishankar and NSA Ajit Doval, expended more time on the nation’s Canada relations, to straighten out issues and solutions, before it became too late, to be able to arrest the drift, in every which way and in every sphere. That has been India’s experience elsewhere, over the past decades — and it cannot allow a repeat of the same, elsewhere, too.
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and commentator. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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