CHARBONNEAU – India’s Modi is wrong about Canada
(Image: Justin Trudeau, Facebook)
INDIAN PRIME MINISTER Modi believes that Canada supports Sikh separatism because a Sikh leader is in a power-sharing agreement with the government.
True, the leader of the federal NDP, Jagmeet Singh, is Sikh. Also true, Singh is part of our government through their supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals.
What Prime Minister Modi fails to realize is that Canada is a pluralistic, bilingual, multicultural society, unlike the India that Modi favours.
Modi is not just satisfied in targeting Sikhs in India. He allegedly had a Canadian, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, assassinated. The Sikh leader had been declared a terrorist by India for calling for the creation of Khalistan, a separate sovereign state in India for Sikhs.
In 1984, the Sikh uprising for independence in India was crushed by Indian security forces when troops stormed the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine.
India remains strongly opposed to the Khalistan movement and is particularly upset by the many Sikhs overseas who continue to demand a separate homeland for Sikhs.
Canada and the U.S. have accused India of targeting Sikh separists. In response to the accusations, India’s external affairs minister was indignant. He said that he was reminded of the Hindi expression “ulta chor kotwal ko daante,” tantamount to “the pot calling the kettle black”—arguing that India was the aggrieved party in terms of foreign interference because Canada was giving space “to separatists, extremists.”
Modi’s presumption appears to be that Canada has been negligent in addressing his concerns about Sikh separatists: if Canada won’t tackle Sikh separatists on its soil, India will.
The Indian prime minister doesn’t seem to understand the politics of Canada’s cultural mosaic. Politicians must appeal to ethnic groups to win elections.
Canada is home to one of the largest number of Canadians of Indian heritage in the world, at over 1.3 million, 770,000 of them Sikh. As a percentage, Sikhs form a larger share of the national population in Canada than they do in India.
It should be no surprise that politicians attend Sikh events.
India was angry over Trudeau’s presence at a Sikh event in Toronto in 2017. Indian media had reported that the event included the display of Khalistani flags; posters of a Sikh separatist leader who was killed in the army operation of 1984 at the Golden Temple; and a celebration of a motion passed by the legislative assembly of Ontario calling the anti-Sikh riots in India in 1984 a genocide.
Sikh separatism is a logical response to Modi’s attempt to create a mono-cultural state, says Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University:
“Sikh separatism is the logical corollary to the idea of India as a ‘Hindu Rashtra,’ a Hindu nation,” says Sushant Singh.
“It has been a long-standing dream of the Hindu right wing to see India transform from the plural, tolerant, and diverse country it has been, as enshrined in its Constitution, into a Hindu nation where the religious majority is dominant and firmly in power. That dream is now being vigorously pursued by Modi’s party and is unofficially already a reality in many ways.”
The Modi government could look to Canada as an example of how to cultivate a tolerant, multicultural society.
David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Very well written article. Wanting a separate nation by non violence and political activism is not a crime and is not terrorism as Modi and his devotees would like us to believe. No death threats have been made and no threats to blow up air India. The problem is the India media who portrayed everything in a negative light and spread misinformation.
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Canada is bilingual? India is multilingual.
Canada pluralistic? India is multi-pluralistic: religion, languages, and beyond. So, know what you are talking about before you bring up trite comparisons…
Not a word said about the loss to Canadian lives from the violence perpetrated by the Canadian Sikhs? A terrorist blow up of a passenger plane, the cover up and killings to cover up, the unremitting gang warfare…why? because they vote as a bloc and the Canadians don’t mind if their politicians cozy up for those votes…?
Canada and its system would have my attention and sympathy when they act decisively to stop bad actors, not complain when someone else does what Canada should have in the first place. Put it this way, if the USA had terminated an immigrant that obtained Canadian citizenship through fraud and had threatened American political/other leaders, would Canada be protesting? No. So, is not its protests when India allegedly did the same specious and duplicitous? Racist even?
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Calling for deaths of diplomats, open calls saying travel by air India will be risky, inviting a person convicted of murder in Canadian court….are these free expression? Of course they are much lesser than blowing up an airplane for which no one was punished. Indians are confident of protecting their democracy. But there is reason to worry about Canadian democracy.
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Some perpetrators of the airplane attack were punished. But it goes to show how both sides of the Indian conflict can present a huge problem for Canada. Why did we ended up importing it?
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