Much is being said across
the world about the massive controversy between India and Canada that was
triggered by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement in his
parliament, accusing India and its law-enforcement agencies of the targeted
killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar; a wanted criminal with a Interpol arrest
warrant in his name, who was given safe haven by Canada in-spite of his
association to terrorists activities.
The news agency
Associated Press calls him ‘a plumber who was an activist for the formation
of a Sikh homeland’. That would be the same as calling the al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden a civil construction engineer. The fact is that Nijjar was a
terrorist, a drug distribution gangster and was involved in extortion and
murder. Credible evidence to these facts had been provided by the Indian Govt
to the Canadians repeatedly; and these reports were absolutely ignored. But, we
the readers, know all of this from the media.
What we are not fully
aware of is the role played by the Canadian law-enforcement and Intelligence
organizations, specifically the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) which is
the equivalent of the Indian CBI, and the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service (CSIS) which is the equivalent of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) and
R&AW, rolled into one.
Prior to 1984, security
intelligence in Canada was the purview of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP). However, during the 1970s, there were allegations that the RCMP’s
Security Service Division, the predecessor to CSIS, had been involved in
numerous illegal activities. These illegal activities included and were not
restricted to assault with a weapon, manslaughter, rape, theft, breaking and
entering without a warrant, sexual harassment of convicts, sexual and mental
harassment of female RCMP employees, a pattern of lying to the Canadian Govt
officials and other assorted offenses. For details, click this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_excessive_police_force_incidents_in_Canada/
The Canadian Press in its
report of 19 September 2023 has stated that the slain terrorist Nijjar was
meeting the Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers “once or twice a
week” including one or two days before his June 18 killing, with another
meeting scheduled for two days after his death. The question is why? Why were
the Canadian spy agency officials in regular meetings with a known fugitive
from justice?
Spy agencies recruit
criminals (accused or convicted) based on three parameters; greed, revenge and
ideology. Njjar would have been ideal for all three categories; the need for money
for his activities, revenge against India and propagating the ideology of
Khalistan. But what was the advantage that CSIS was hoping to attain? Being a
professional agency, it can be assumed that they were building cases against
Khalistani terrorists and the Punjabi-Canadian narco-gangs operating within
Canada; while in reality their political masters are shielding Khalistani operatives
from prosecution within Canada and offering them safe haven and an unrestricted
license to operate their divisive agenda. The requirements of the
political vote-bank support from the radical Sikh community clearly surpasses
the safety and security of the Canadian nation and its people.
Therefore, the role of
CSIS can be construed to be two-fold. One, would be to have an insider man in
the Khalistani movement, who could give advance information about threats to the
Canadian society within country, and the second could be a puppet to use in
foreign policy strategy of the Canadian Govt. The former could be considered as
standard operating procedure of any intelligence agency and would not be
considered abnormal. However, it is the second reason that raises warning flags
for India.
Historically, Canada has
been known to be weak in matters of law-enforcement, military operations and
counter insurgency. Being isolated from most of the world by two oceans and
protected militarily by their immediate neighbor to the South, the USA; Canada
is looked up as a non-dependable and passive member of the global power
structure of the Western countries. In August 2005, the deputy Director of
Operations of the CSIS, Jack Hooper had testified before the Canadian Senate
Committee on National Security and Defense, and had explained to the
politicians of that committee, that Canada has a problem with terrorists in
general and with home-grown terrorists in particular. His statements were met
with disbelief by the Members of Parliament, and it was openly speculated in
the media that Hooper was vastly exaggerating. This reaction reflected Canada’s
attitude towards terrorism; as somebody else’s problem, and not their concern.
But the reality is ugly.
Whether Canadians realize it or refuse to accept it, Canada has from a long
time back, become a source of international terrorism and an operational base
for global terror; a country where the world’s deadliest extremists’ movements
are active and thriving. According to the 2016 report of CSIS, there are a
number of terrorist’s groups operating in Canada; engaging in fund-raising,
procuring arms and ammunition, spreading propaganda, recruiting followers and
planning cross-border terrorism.
Armenian terrorists were
the first to recognize Canada’s potential as a safe haven, followed by the
Khalistanis from India, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Palestine factions
and the Hezbollah. By 1998, every major terrorist group in the world was
operating in Canada. The Canadian Senate Sub-committee on security and
intelligence reported way back in 1999, that Canada had become a ‘venue of
opportunity’ for terrorists. So, what are these terrorist organizations doing
in Canada? The answer is, everything.
They have established
their own international support network to raise funding for terrorism and
spread their ideology through every media channel. With offices throughout
their regions of influence; socially acceptable activities that support their
organizations with money, false passports and IDs, information, media outreach;
and most importantly, their craving for credibility. Canada is the land of opportunity
for terrorists seeking funding to finance their campaigns.
The Khalistan movement in
particular, depends on the Punjabi and Sikh diaspora for funding and support,
in part due to its tightly knit community structure. Added to this, job
opportunities are plenty in Canada and the welfare system is generous.
Immigrants are entitled to all the rights of Canadian citizens. As an added
advantage to terrorist organizations, until December 2001 it was absolutely
legal to collect money in Canada for terrorists’ groups. Canada’s
anti-terrorism law now prohibits this, but its enforcement is proving to be a
difficult task since the law is not retroactive, which means that it cannot be
used to prosecute terrorists for crimes committed before it was enacted.
The other type of
fund-raising is through criminal activities. Terrorists groups in Canada are
involved in bank fraud, migrant smuggling, human sex slave trafficking, loan
frauds, extortion, theft, money laundering and drug distribution. This has
resulted in Canadian terrorists killing people across the world.
The 1993 World Trade
Center bombings in New York, the suicide bombings in Israel, political killings in
India, the 1985 bombing of Air India’s flight that killed 329 people, the 1996
Colombo truck bomb that killed over 100 civilians, and the Bali bombing of 2002
are some of the known terrorists attacks linked back to Canada. The singular
reason why terrorists have unrestricted advantages in Canada is the Canadian
government’s long-standing reluctance to confront the challenges of terrorism. As
important as this is, its equally important to understand the complacency of the
Canadian society towards terrorism. The Canadian society worries more about
their government infringing heavily on their human rights and civil liberties.
This complacency affects its politicians too. In its handling of terrorist
groups operating in Canada, the government has missed opportunities to shut
down their activities and has constantly display an astounding level of
indifference to countries affected by terrorism. The Canadian branch of Babbar
Khalsa (which is internationally designated as a terrorist organization) was
allowed to be registered as a charity organization and to issue tax exemption
receipts to financial donors.
The Liberal political
party of Justin Trudeau as well as the other political parties of Canada have
avoided any public discussion on the role of terrorists in their country. In
their logic of sound political strategy, to take a stand against terrorism was to
risk losing the support of those groups who buy influence on the promise of
delivering the support of ethnic vote-banks. One such influencer group is the
New Democratic Party (NDP) which currently gives crucial support and stability to
Justin Trudeau’s government. Incidentally, the NDP was formed in 1961 and had
supported the minority government formed by Pierre Trudeau’s (Justin Trudeau’s
father’s) Liberal Party from 1972 to 1974. The Khalistani influence started on
October 1, 2017, when Jagmeet Singh, won the leadership vote to head the NDP.
He is the first person of a minority group to lead a major Canadian federal
political party on a permanent basis. He is also a self-declared hardline
supporter of the Khalistani movement.
The biggest danger to
Canada today is the single-minded focus of its activists, politicians and a
large section of the academia, on the rights of those accused of terrorism,
without any regard to the right of Canadian citizens to defend themselves from
the threat of terrorism. A foreign security official once stated publicly that,
“Canada is a land of trusting fools”. Canadian intelligence authorities
have been disrupting terrorists’ groups frequently. But, after being caught the
worst that happens to these accused terrorists is deportation. And even then,
most of those ordered out of the country never leave. Under the Canadian legal
system, they are allowed to appeal multiple times against deportation.
CSIS has been
investigating Sikh extremism since August 1984, after the Sikh youth group
ISYF, aka the Dashmesh Regiment, had allegedly complied a hit-list of moderate
Sikhs in Canada. However, the surveillance tactics of the CSIS left a lot to be
desired; and due to their lack of adequate resources, low interest to
investigate every scrap of information received and inter-agency bickering with
the RCMP, resulted with their on and off surveillance of Talwinder Singh
Parmar, whose extradition was sought by India since May 1982. Even with
actionable information received in advance of the possibility of an attack
against Air India, the CSIS was unable to stop it. After this tragedy, they
could never convict Parmar for the planning and carrying out the bombing of Air
India’s “Kanishka” airplane, and it was left to the Indian authorities to
terminate Parmar permanently in an encounter in Jalandhar, Punjab on 15 October
1992.
The very same policies
that made Canada the safe haven for international terrorists also assisted in
the formation of the Punjabi–Canadian organized crime gangs. These Punjabi
origin gangs of Canada are today among the top 5 organized crime hierarchy
across that nation. The Dosanjh gang of brothers Ranjit and Jimsher Dosanjh,
Rajinder Singh Sandhu and Suminder Singh Grewal of the Hell’s Angels, and
Gurmit Singh Dhak were some of the early gangsters who developed deep ties with
the Khalistani terrorists in those early days of the terrorist–gangster unity. In
recent times, a major drug bust conducted in April 2021 broke up an
Indo-Canadian trafficking network primarily based in Brampton, Ontario. Of the
28 arrested, the majority were India-born Punjabi men. Police seized $2.3
million worth of drugs.
The main trade of the
Indo-Canadian crime groups are murder-for-hire operations, along with arms
trafficking, racketeering, extortion, assassinations, and the trafficking of
cocaine, heroin, MDMA, methamphetamine and cannabis.
Indo-Canadian crime syndicates, are
funding secessionist groups, including Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), in a bid to
rekindle the Khalistan movement in India. Crime syndicates like Dhaliwal and
Grewal gangs, involved in drug trafficking and operating out of the Canadian
state of British Columbia, are linked to SFJ leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannu. The
US based pro-Khalistan SFJ group was banned by the Indian government in July
2019 for its anti-Indian activities. The SFJ, which also has links with
Pakistani establishments, has been pushing for a referendum for
self-determination by the Sikh community in support of Khalistan. Several key
activists of SFJ have been identified in India and as of now over a dozen cases
have been registered against each of them.
Pakistan’s spy agency the
Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) has turned several chiefs of Sikh
terror groups into drug smugglers. It is an established fact that the ISI is
using Khalistani terrorists to smuggle narcotics and provide funds to terror various
groups for anti-India activities. Recently, the Peel Regional Police in Canada
arrested more than a dozen people on different charges including mail theft.
Most of the arrested individuals are of Punjabi origin. The investigators
claimed that the accused parties were stealing mail by breaking into Canada
post mailboxes or simply grabbing it from roadside residential mailboxes. They
would target cheques, credit cards, and identification documents and often
altered and deposited the stolen cheques into various banks before withdrawing
the funds.
The Sunday Guardian reported in August
2022, that an attempt for a large-scale revival of the Khalistani movement was
being coordinated from Pakistan with the involvement of narco-terrorists in
India and Canada.
It is speculated in foreign intelligence agencies that the
Indo-Canadian criminal network has entered and is deeply entrenched within the
Canadian law enforcement agencies including the RCMP and CSIS. Pro–Khalistan
elements are now exercising significant influence inside Canada’s government
offices because of the electoral power that some in their community wields in
that country.
Apart from
the radical elements, descendants of Pakistani Army officials, who migrated to
Canada in the latter part of 1900 and are now naturalised Canadian citizens,
are occupying crucial posts in different offices in Canada and are contributing
in nurturing, protecting and expanding the narco-terrorism ring that operates
from Canada, and which has now become the biggest hub for sending drugs to
European countries and the United Kingdom.
The deaths of three Khalistani leaders
in rapid succession in countries other than India; with two manifest killings
and a third that has been brought into dispute, have created a storm of speculation
regarding the possibilities of covert operations by India’s external
intelligence agency, R&AW. Most of this commentary is devoid of context,
and its tone and content are based entirely on the sentiments and affiliations
of the media ‘analysts’.
While the death of three Khalistani
extremists in widely dispersed locations abroad over a relatively brief period
of 45 days is certainly surprising and may call for close police scrutiny, it does fit
into a broader context of narco-criminal alliances, and their activities have
seen numerous incidents of violence, including killing of each other’s members,
in the past. While the possibility of covert operations by state agencies
cannot automatically be ruled out, the sudden acquisition of capability and intent,
and its abrupt operational usage in multiple cases, does not fit into the
profile of a non-violent, slow acting intelligence agency of long-standing.
A careful study of the past deaths of
Khalistani terrorists and Indo-Punjabi gang members show a different picture.
On November 19, 2022; a prominent Pakistan-based operational commander of the
Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), Harvinder Singh aka Rinda, died at a
military hospital in Lahore, allegedly due to a drug overdose. Rinda was among
the foreign based ‘masterminds’ of the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) attack on
the Punjab Police Intelligence Headquarters at Mohali in Punjab on May 9, 2022.
The incident has also been linked to several gangsters abroad, crucially
including Lakhbir Singh aka Landa in Canada, Satbir Singh aka Satnam Singh in
Greece, and Yadwinder Singh in the Philippines.
On January 27, 2020, another arms and
drug dealer, as well as the then ‘chief’ of the KLF, Harmeet Singh alias ‘Happy
PhD’, was killed at the Dera Chahal Gurdwara near Lahore, apparently because of
a financial dispute over drug deals with a local Pakistani gang. It is within
these murky environments of the Khalistani-narcotics-gangs network, patronized
and substantially controlled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI);
that the killing of Paramjit Singh Panjwar needs to be assessed.
Panjwar was deeply involved in the
smuggling of heroin, weapons and Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) from
Pakistan, even as he sought to keep the KCF alive with the revenues generated
from these activities. There is as yet no clarity on who killed Panjwar, and
the case is unlikely to be solved in Pakistan, where Panjwar’s existence is not
even acknowledged, and where his death was reported as the killing of ‘Malik
Sardar Singh’, the identity he had been given by the ISI. Furthermore, Panjwar
would not be a very high priority target for Indian agencies, were they to
begin drawing up any ‘hit-lists’.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on whose behalf
the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken on a political risk with
his blatantly false statements in his own parliament; has however, been high
among India’s concerns about Khalistani elements in Canada. Nijjar had been
accused of two killings in Punjab and for organizing terrorist training camps
in Canada itself. Indian intelligence has reported that Nijjar had links with gangster
Arshdeep Singh aka Arsh Dalla, to provide the logistics and manpower for
several of his operations in Punjab. Nijjar has long been associated with an
often-violent Gurudwara politics in Canada, and for his well-known clashes with
the principal architect of the Air India flight 182 Kanishka Bombing of 1985,
Ripudaman Singh Malik.
On January 23, 2022, at the Guru Nanak
Sikh Temple in Surrey, Nijjar ranted against Malik for over an hour, describing
him as a “Qaum da gaddaar” (traitor to the nation) and an “agent”,
adding that he should be “taught a lesson.” Malik was killed in a gang-style
hit, very similar to Nijjar’s own subsequent killing, by two men on 22 June,
2022. Investigations into Nijjar’s killing are likely to be a dead-end, as were
investigations into the Ripudaman Singh Malik’s killing.
When Justin Trudeau publicly accused
India for being involved in Nijjar’s death, his credibility dropped even
further than usual; since it is from Canada that a continuous separatist
campaign is being fueled and funded by Canadian citizens and permanent residents
of Indian origin, and where extremists openly flaunt their affiliations with
terrorists, and their close connections with Justin Trudeau’s ruling Liberal
Party.
In Canada, the Punjabi gangster culture
is rampant. Twenty-one per cent of gangsters killed in gang wars or police
operations since 2006 are of Punjabi origin, while only two per cent of
Canada’s population is Punjabi. Of the eleven individuals identified by the
Canadian law-enforcement in August 2022 as those who “pose a significant
threat to public safety due to their ongoing involvement in gang conflicts and
connection to extreme levels of violence”, nine of these listed gangsters
were of Punjabi origin. These gangs have come to dominate organized criminal
activity in Canada, with fratricidal conflicts within the Punjabi gangs
accounting for much of the present gang violence.
Therefore, the more credible
explanation of Nijjar’s killing seems to be differences within their own
vicious political and criminal connections, rather than the policy of the
Indian government.
References:
1. The Sikh Diaspora www.journals.openedition.org
2. Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies www.ipcs.org
3. Canadian Press www.thecanadianpress.com
4. Wikipedia
5. Public Safety Canada www.publicsafety.gc.ca
6. Cold Terror by Stuart Bell
7. The Wilson Centre www.wilsoncenter.org
8. JSTOR www.jstor.org
9. www.justice.gc.ca
