nationalobserver.com
March
15th 2018
Sandy
Garossino
Top:
Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi from World Economic Forum. Top right: Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau photo by CP (February 21, 2018). Bottom right: Canadian
Press file photo of Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan. Bottom left: NDP leader
Jagmeet Singh
So, the
Trudeau India debacle just keeps on spreading, and is now engulfing Jagmeet
Singh. This thing isn't over yet. Not by a long shot.
Unexpectedly,
Trudeau's India expedition ripped open the wounds caused by the 1985 Air India
bombing when it was revealed that Jaspar Atwal, convicted of attempted murder
for his role in a 1986 attack on an Indian politician, was photographed with
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau at a Canadian government reception in Delhi.
It was
all too much for Canadian media and the public. Prior to Trudeau's trip, Indian
media had unleashed a blizzard of criticism of
the Liberal government, essentially accusing it of complicity in Sikh
terrorism. On February 12, Outlook India said of the Trudeau visit: "A new
real threat of Khalistani terror, fuelled and funded by foreign gurudwaras
patronised by liberal white politicians, has revived memories of a
blood-drenched era of Punjab’s history."
For a
convicted terrorist to be found at a Canadian government reception in India was
unthinkable.
Fresh on
the heels of that news comes the coverage of Jagmeet Singh's appearances and
public statements regarding Khalistan.
Emotionally
and intellectually, this sent Canadians and our media reeling. We instantly
transported back to exactly where we were when Air India Flight 182 blew out of
the sky, killing all 329 aboard.
For
Canadians old enough to remember that bombing, with its ghastly media coverage
of cold little bodies being scooped from the sea, it's as if we are all trapped
in the amber of those days. It turns out, that after all these years, we have
not moved on. We won't ever move on. Killers walk our streets, free and
fearless. They are unforgiven and unforgivable.
That will
never change. It should never change.
For
Canada, the Atwal fiasco was so shocking that it eclipsed our own media's
ability to see the contemporary international context of these events, and to
be more skeptical about why this issue is suddenly front page news.
When the
Modi government's friendly media voices cast aspersions against Canadian
Liberals and Sikhs, we saw nothing else. We didn't see that he made the same
allegations against British Sikhs three years ago. Or that UK national security
experts investigated those claims and dismissed them. We didn't see that Sikh
violent militancy has not been a major security threat in Canada or India for
over 20 years (it exists, but at a low-level). We didn't see that the Indian
government, supposedly so fearful of Sikh militants, had zero problem with
Atwal.
We
certainly didn't see that Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has a
clear pattern of violent persecution of minorities, that he himself has been
implicated in extremist violence, or that his government routinely accuses its
political adversaries of terrorist sympathies as a political ploy. According to
the BJP, political foe Sonia Gandhi is responsible for terrorism.
Rahul Gandhi sides with terrorists.
Muslim Bollywood stars Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan are
terrorist sympathizers. British Sikhs are terrorists.
We didn't
see Modi's game, because we were the pawns.
Perhaps
the most striking feature of this controversy is the vast gulf that opened
between a largely Caucasian media's perception and that of South Asian
journalists who are much more familiar with key Indian subtext. Those voices
are routinely, and often very rudely, dismissed and shouted down by reporters in
social media.
By and
large, the major media reporters who dominate commentary on Sikh issues today
are Caucasian veteran journalists who covered Air India. Broadly speaking, they
have fixated on whether gurdwaras display pictures of militants. We'll get into
that.
Their
tunnel vision on posters, Air India and the events as they stood in 1985 has
obscured the larger arc of Indian politics that governs current events. If
Canadians are to make any sense of what's going on in the Sikh community today,
they desperately need the context of India's profoundly altered political
reality since its election of a Hindu supremacist in 2014.
No
coincidence that sudden inflammatory accusations arrived with the election of
Hindu extremist Modi
While
older Canadians have not moved on from Air India, the world has. The issues and
circumstances of Sikh militance and terrorism, separatism and the more evolved
movement for human rights and democratic freedoms in India have fundamentally
changed over the last thirty years. It is no coincidence that the suddenly
inflammatory accusations and rhetoric arrived with the election of Narendra
Modi, an extremist Hindu supremacist.
More on
Modi later, but keep this in mind. His own personal extremist background is so
serious that he was denied a diplomatic visa by
the U.S. government for many years. The ban on his travel to the U.S. was only
lifted after he was elected prime minister. Suddenly, the issue of Sikh
terrorism, which had been a closed file in India for over twenty years, turns
into a major diplomatic feud. And not just in Canada, but the UK too.
I've
followed the issue of Sikh extremist violence quite closely for over 30 years.
As a young prosecutor, I was working in the Crown office when Air India Flight
182 was bombed. Although I wasn't on assigned team, I was there during its
initial investigation. I vividly recall in the 80's when the Crown office was
informed of the worst law enforcement bungling in Canadian history: CSIS had
erased all the wiretap tapes—all evidence of phone calls and recorded
conversations were gone as evidence.
Everyone's
blood ran cold that day. In our bones, we knew then how this would all turn
out.
I later
married into a family of mixed Hindu and Sikh heritage, who immigrated to
Canada almost a century ago. We do business with India every day—with people of
all religions. We sponsor and host Indian artists, writers and political
figures who appear in Vancouver. One of those visitors now serves as India's
minister of state for external affairs.
So albeit
through a glass darkly, I've learned about the labyrinth of Indian politics
only enough to understand this: whatever you think you know about India, you
probably don't. Yet getting very basic facts right goes a long way in
explaining what's happened here. Media have a responsibility to widen their
sources and rely less heavily on individuals with a personal interest in local political
entanglements. Repetition of opinion from the same sources is not reporting.
Sikh
extremist terrorism, like the IRA and FLQ, burned out decades ago
If you go
to the same well every day, you'll get the same water. But not necessarily the
facts.
The fact
is, despite what most of the media has led Canadians to believe, Canada doesn't
have Khalistani terrorists under our beds or in our cabinets.
Overwhelmingly,
Sikh activism today centres on justice, human rights, democratic freedoms.
There is a something of a trend in some diaspora communities favouring a Sikh
homeland, but to be obtained through democratic means. There is no popular
support for violent militancy.
This
chart, published by the Journal of Punjab Studies at UC Santa Barbara, tells
the story. It tracks Sikh insurgency-related fatalities since 1981. Journalists
reporting on contemporary Sikh politics should be telling Canadians this one
fact: Sikh terrorism ended as a significant threat from this community by 1995.
More than 20 years ago.
This is
not the first time that the Modi government falsely raised alarm bells over
Sikhs abroad.
In 2015,
Modi himself made similar inflammatory claims
of dangerous radicalization among British Sikhs. Those allegations were
investigated and discredited by the UK Centre for Research on Evidence and
Security Threats (CREST). CREST found:
- "There is no threat to
the British state or to the wider British public from Sikh activism...
Instances of Sikh on Sikh violence are most often a consequence of a) the
contested nature of religious authority within the Sikh tradition, or b)
local power politics most often as a consequence of personal and familial
disputes."
Modi or
his henchmen have similarly accused a host of other real or perceived opponents
of terrorism or terrorist sympathies. [More on that later] For starters, Canada
has had no repeat incidents remotely resembling the Air India bombing. Indeed,
contrary to Western perceptions fanned by Modi, experts widely identify 1983-93
as the period of the violent insurgency, terrorism, and confrontation which
took an estimated 20,000 lives. A period which had a well-defined beginning and
end.
What you
need to know is that Sikhs comprise just a sliver of a minority in
Hindu-dominated India today—only 1.7 per cent out of a population of 1.3
billion. There are more Christians than Sikhs in the country, which is 80 per
cent Hindu and 14 per cent Muslim. Sikh extremist violence was not a
long-established pattern. It emerged quite suddenly in the 1980s in response to
specific events in India. It caught fire in 1984 then was resolved as a
significant public safety threat by 1993, over twenty years ago.
Just as
many Québécois hold fast to the dream of an independent Quebec and always will,
so do many Sikhs. It is especially common for millennials in the diaspora to
dream of a homeland to call their own.
Yet on
the ground in India itself, it is settled public opinion that Sikh separatism
is finished as a serious political project. The great majority of Sikhs there
are reconciled to a future within India. The Indian Sikh public today is far
more occupied with economic prosperity, education for their kids, human rights
and democratic freedoms than with violence or an independent state.
The
practical challenges of separatism simply proved too daunting an aspiration to
sustain.
Google
can tell you why Khalistani separatism died
Five
minutes on Google will tell you why the separatist movement died in India.
The tiny
landlocked Indian Punjab state, roughly the size of Maryland, resides in a
dangerous neighbourhood, packed between two nuclear-armed mortal enemies: India
and Pakistan. India's tiny Sikh population is overwhelmingly concentrated in
Punjab, but their majority there is much too small to achieve independence.
Sikhs form only 58 per cent of the region's 28 million inhabitants, and are
surrounded by an Indian subcontinent of 1.5 billion Hindus and Muslims. By
comparison, francophones in Quebec number almost 80 per cent of that province.
In this
globalized world, Khalistan wouldn’t last long enough for the ink to dry on its
declaration of independence. Years of violence and political instability have exacted
a heavy toll, and Punjabis know every rupee and drop of blood. They watched
their economy and civil society crumble during the insurgency, and have no
desire for a sequel. While separatist impulses and even radicalization persists
in some circles, the pro-Khalistani movement today has evolved primarily into a
human rights movement, pressed internationally by centrist and left-wing
activists in the diaspora. Human rights activists are very inconvenient to
authoritarian governments. Discrediting them as terrorists or terrorist
sympathisers is right out of the tyrant's playbook.
Those who
aspire to independence are not terrorists, nor are they even extremists. So
long as they are peaceful, they are as free in Canada as anyone to support a
religious homeland for their community, whether India likes it or not.
All of
this is what Sikhs and others tried vainly to tell Canadians over the din of
bombast by a media that has seems to have closed its ears to evidence. There
could hardly be a better argument for an Inclusion Rider in media
and journalism than the chasm between veteran Caucasian journalists with large
media platforms and younger journalists of colour who are generally published
in smaller outlets. Excellent analysis has come from many, notably Supriya Dwivedi of Global
News, the UK writer, Sunny Hundal, writing in
iPolitics, and Jagdeesh Mann in
Vancouver's Georgia Straight.
Media has
a special duty of care respecting claims that visible minority groups are a
threat
There's a
very painful human cost to getting a story like this so wrong. It tears at
Canada's social fabric when a community of colour is singled out for harbouring
or excusing terrorists. Fear is an extremely effective means of isolating and
excluding minorities.
We do not
need to fear our Sikh neighbours. If anything, we should hear them out, because
their story matters.
While
risk of radicalization is a persistent and legitimate concern to authorities,
it's important to keep the perception of danger in perspective. Minority
populations that are perceived as dangerous to the public are particularly
vulnerable to attack and abuse. Canada saw ample evidence of this during the
2015 election, which inexplicably featured the niqab (a face veil) as
a major campaign issue. Violence against Muslim women wearing the niqab,
or even the hijab (headscarf) spiked sharply over that period.
That's
why it's so important for Canadians to understand that in historical context,
the era of Khalistani terrorism flared white hot for a decade, then ended
almost as suddenly as it had emerged. Pro-Khalistani terrorism is not now and
has not been a major public safety threat in Canada, the UK or India for over
20 years.
As I
stated previously, to know why this issue has suddenly burst onto the scene,
it's important to understand Modi.
Modi,
Hindu nationalism, and exploiting Sikh politics
There is
no understanding the undercurrents of this issue without understanding the rise
of Narendra Modi, who was considered in diplomatic circles to be a
controversial and dangerous figure. Modi rose to power advocating an overtly
hard-line right-wing Hindutva doctrine of Hindu
racial purity and supremacy. Its closest parallel in the West is unvarnished,
state-sanctioned white supremacy.
Press
intimidation is central to the Modi governing style. All India was shocked by
the murder of journalist and well-known Modi critic, Gauri Lankesh, shot in the head on her doorstep
in prosperous middle class Bangalore. Lankesh was but one murder among many
that prompted the International Federation of Journalists to place India high
on its list of most dangerous countries for journalists. An editorial in the South
China Morning Post describes India's situation as the "murder of journalism"
itself.
In I
Am A Troll, a 2016 book, former BJP party
IT volunteer Sadhavi Khosla outlines explosive allegations that she was part of
orchestrated online campaigns of hatred, intimidation and harassment against
perceived government critics.
“It was a
never-ending drip feed of hate and bigotry against the minorities, the Gandhi
family, journalists on the hit list, liberals, anyone perceived as anti-Modi,”
said Khosla in the book. It was even claimed that in 2015 the troll team
targeted a corporate sponsorship of Bollywood star Aamir Khan, who had expressed
concern over rising intolerance under Modi. After sustaining a blizzard of
BJP-organized troll attacks, Khan's sponsor dropped his contract. The BJP
denies Khosla's allegations.
Sound
familiar?
Modi's
rule today is marked by the rise of Hindu mob violence against Muslims and
minorities. Mob lynchings, especially
of Muslims, have suddenly exploded in India, with little international
attention.
All of
the signs have been present from early days of Modi's ascent. On his path to
power in the 2014 general election, Modi’s greatest obstacle was his own record
as chief minister of the Gujarat state government during communal mob violence
that killed thousands—primarily Muslims. Credible accounts raised questions
about whether Modi tacitly condoned the murderous swarms, or maybe far worse.
These accounts, taken very seriously in diplomatic circles, led to the
suspension of his US visa.
Cars set
on fire in Ahmedabad, India, on February 28, 2002, during a riot in Gujarat
state. Photo by AP.
In a
classic act of political genius, Modi shielded himself from controversy by
accusing his opponent, Rahul Gandhi, of the same thing. In a pure, Donald
Trump-style, Crooked Hillary manoeuvre, Modi distracted from his own record in
the anti-Muslim killings by attacking Gandhi for his party’s complicity in the
anti-Sikh massacre of 1984. "You're the puppet," he would say. It was
brilliant. It was cold-blooded, exploitive. It worked.
It worked
because Modi trapped Rahul Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, in the web of
history and the events that destabilized India, plunged Punjab into chaos, and
blew a planeload of Canadians out of the sky off the coast of Ireland. It was
exploitive because Modi doesn't have the slightest intention of making Hindus
pay for their slaughter of Sikhs.
1984
The
prologue and clues for Canada's Indian misadventure lie in Modi's ascent on the
backs of Sikhs.There's no untangling that diplomatic debacle without
understanding 1984, the year that galvanized the pro-Khalistani rebellion
virtually overnight. India in the early eighties saw the emergence of a ruthless
and charismatic Sikh nationalist, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Then-prime
minister Indira Gandhi had once cultivated the religious zealot for her own
political purposes. Now Bhindranwale directly challenged her authority by
violently seizing and occupying Sikhism's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in
Amritsar.
In June
1984, Gandhi resolved to flush him out and imprison him. She authorized
Operation Bluestar, the Indian army's brutal assault on the temple. It was a
military, strategic, and political disaster of historic proportions. Operation
Bluestar, headed by Sikh members of the Indian army, not only killed
Bhindranwale and hundreds of his followers, it also killed hundreds of innocent
religious pilgrims. It would be as if the government authorized a massacre of
priests and visitors in the Vatican.
The
Golden Temple assault electrified the entire Sikh faith. By slaughtering
innocents along with Bhindranwale, Gandhi legitimized his cause and gave a face
to Sikh religious persecution.
Bhindranwale's
transformation from ruthless thug to religious icon and the face of Sikh
religious persecution was complete. He became Sikhism's own Che Guevara. That
is his power and symbolism within the Sikh communities. He is venerated today
not because of his violent thuggery, but because he represents resistance to
oppression and persecution.
Within
days of Operation Bluestar, Sikh
soldiers mutinied en masse from the Indian army in at least seven states.
Gandhi paid with her own life, assassinated on October 31
by her own Sikh bodyguards. The next day and for days after Gandhi's death,
India erupted in an orgy of murderous retribution by Hindus against Sikhs,
carried out mainly in the government’s seat in Delhi. While police looked the
other way, mobs of Hindu killers hunted Sikhs down in the streets. Thousands
were hacked to death or doused in kerosene and burnt alive, while unspeakable
atrocities were committed against women and children.
It was a
massacre, known euphemistically today as the "1984 riots."
Gandhi’s
own Congress Party voter lists and government school registration forms were
used to pinpoint and mark Sikh homes and businesses for targeted attacks. Congress
party government leaders and officials, particularly two high-profile public
figures who went on to successful political careers, were directly implicated
in planning and organizing the onslaught.
Counts of
the dead run from 2,000 to 8,000 or even higher. Many non-Sikhs were cut down
as they tried to intervene or offer sanctuary to their friends and neighbours.
At a rare
sentencing of low-level attackers in 2009, the presiding judge ruled:
“Though we boast of being the world's largest democracy and the Delhi being its
national capital, the sheer mention of the incidents of 1984 anti-Sikh riots in
general and the role played by Delhi Police and State machinery in particular
makes our heads hang in shame in the eyes of the world...”
To this
day, none of the state-level organizers have been convicted.
The
bombing of Air India in June, 1985, falling close to the one year anniversary
of Operation Bluestar, was a bloody answer to the slaughter that preceded it.
All the killers on both sides now walk their home streets free and fearless, a
repugnant affront to justice and their many victims.
Violence
begets violence begets violence. The militant Khalistani insurgency lasted
another eight years, eventually collapsing under its own weight. Ultimately, it
was crushed from outside and de-legitimized from within by its indiscriminate
violence and criminality.
Murders,
rapes, kidnappings, extortion and common corruption by both insurgents and
authorities were rampant. No one could be trusted. The whole thing was a tryst
with disaster that nobody wants repeated.
2014
election: "Lock them up!"
Yet Modi
found 1984 to be fertile ground in the national election of 2014. Promising
Sikhs justice and retribution for 1984, Modi consolidated the BJP alliance with
Punjab’s powerful pro-Sikh party, the SAD. Having reopened the wounds of 1984
for political gain, Modi now faces a growing chorus of calls, domestically and
internationally, to follow through. High profile demands have come for the 1984
riots to be recognized as genocide, and for perpetrators to be punished. TIME magazine called for
this recognition, as did the Hindustantimes editorial
board and so did Modi's own Home Minister.
So did
Modi's powerful Sikh political ally, the SAD.
But
having opportunistically opened the Pandora's Box of Sikh grievances for
political gain, the Modi government is now openly hostile to calls for justice.
To date the condemnation that has provoked the strongest and most emotional
response from India's leadership is Canadian criticism. An April 2017 motion by
the Ontario legislature condemning "the Genocide" of 1984 came as a
stunning diplomatic rebuke to India. As if its own cabinet ministers, allies,
judiciary and major media had not themselves condemned the events in 1984 in
exactly the terms of the Ontario government, the Indian government expressed
shock and disbelief: “We reject this misguided motion which is based on a
limited understanding of India, its constitution, society, ethos, rule of law
and the judicial process,” the external affairs department told the Hindustan
Times.
Notwithstanding
that this was an Ontario legislature motion, the Hindustan Times also reported that an
unnamed Indian official blamed Trudeau. "A senior Indian official said
this matter could have a negative impact on bilateral ties. Frustrated over the
lack of action by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s lieutenants, an official
said, “If they can’t manage their own party…they have to own the
responsibility."
Well,
whaddyaknow?
Diplomatic
trouble from UK and Canada
Meanwhile,
Sikh dissidents and activists in the UK have also upped the diplomatic pressure
on India by refusing the use of gurdwaras by
Indian diplomats over the 1984 issue. British PM Theresa May was
drawn into the fracas over allegations of torture by India
over its detention without charge of the British national, Jaggi Johal,
currently held on suspicion of murder. The hard line Modi, who has no love for
justice-seeking liberal Sikh dissidents, was already feeling pressure ahead of
Trudeau's visit.
Now
critics are attacking Modi's Sikh political allies as dupes for lending
their support to a leader who unapologetically espouses the very Hindu
supremacy that produced the bloodbath of 1984 in the first place. The last
thing Modi and his Sikh allies needed was for a charismatic and photogenic
Canadian prime minister to bring his entourage to the Golden Temple.
Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau visits the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India on
February. 21, 2018. Photo by the Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick
So
perhaps it wasn't at all surprising when Indian media took up the charge that
Canada nurtures terrorists. The surprise is that, instead of demanding
substantiation of such a shocking allegation, Canadian media widely repeated
and amplified it.
In India,
the retired Canadian terrorist Atwal can come and go at will. Muslims are
lynched in the streets. Critics are targeted by online mobs hired by their own
government's party. Journalists are murdered, or shot and left for dead.
Minority film stars are targeted and attacked. Political opponents are accused
of terrorism.
Why
should anyone be surprised that popular Sikh politicians from Canada get the
same treatment?
Yet only
someone with virtually no literacy in current Indian politics could suspect
Canadian Sikh politicians like the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and Defence
Minister Harjeet Sajjan of extremism. They are from different parties and hail
from different parts of the country. Of the two, Singh is probably more
supportive of an independent Sikh homeland, but this is decidedly not militant
or extremist.
Yet they
share one characteristic that's anathema to Modi and conservatives alike: they
are progressive liberals.
Singh,
like many other liberal and left-wing musicians, artists, scholars and
intellectuals, is a challenge to Hindu supremacy. His public statements on 1984
fundamentally aligned with those of Modi’s mainstream political allies in
Chandigarh and Delhi. For his part, Harjit Sajjan has made no public statements
whatsoever supporting Sikh independence. He had a distinguished career as both
a Vancouver police detective and decorated Canadian combat veteran.
It's an
absurd fiction that Modi fears violence from Sajjan or Singh.
India,
like every other country, is a mystery that never makes complete sense. As
Churchill astutely observed of Russia, "It is a riddle, wrapped in a
mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key." In India, that key
is stamped with a question: Cui bono—who benefits?
Turn that
key, and solve the riddle.
Sources: nationalobserver
