WASHINGTON, D.C.: The recent attack on a Sikh youth leader in Oslo, Norway, and the conflict surrounding that attack strikingly resembles a covert operation to subvert the Sikh independence movement in Canada, according to Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, President of the Council of Khalistan.
Dr. Aulakh pointed out that “Indian embassies are involved in covert operations aimed at creating rifts among Sikh communities abroad and diverting attention away from the struggle for an independent Khalistan.”
He said the Indian government is known to be involved in “drug smuggling and other illegal schemes to generate large sums of cash that are spent on the subversion of the Sikhs. These professional intelligence operations are meant to discredit, defame and destabilize Sikh communities in foreign lands, while concealing the Indian government’s hand behind this treachery.”
Mr. Gurcharan Singh, the youth leader who was attacked in Oslo, said in a newspaper interview there that he understands that the attempt on his life was a direct Response to a press conference he gave on July 3. He was quoted by the Oslo newspaper, Dagbladet, as saying at that press conference that over 80,000 Sikhs had been killed by Indian government forces since 1984. Singh says he sees definite parallels between the resulting attack on his group in Oslo and an Indian espionage operation against Sikhs in Canada.
“It is now well established that the Indian intelligence group, the so-called Third Agency, was running a complex espionage network in Canada and possibly other countries. The new book, Soft Target, by Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew, two Canadian investigative journalists, gives abundant details of this operation.
Third Agency attempts to subvert the Sikh freedom movement in North America,” said Dr, Aulakh in Washington.
“It looks to us as though we may also have the beginnings of such an operation there in Norway as well.
The Third Agency tactics in Canada involved infiltrating Sikh independence groups with India agents and apparently there were millions of dollars of Indian government funding involved.
“Indian intelligence is also implicated, by the authors of Soft Target, in the sabotage bombing of AirIndia Flight #182, which crashed in the Atlantic, killing all 329 aboard in 1985. Kashmeri and Mc Andrew followed the case for four years, interviewing Canadian intelligence officials and most of the principal figures involved in the covert operation,” Aulakh said.
The violence that has occurred recently in Oslo, perpetrated by the Indian government supported Sikh group, has the same kind of subversive design as the Canadian covert operation, Aulakh said. In both cases, a small group staged violent incidents aimed at discrediting the majority of the Sikhs living in, respectively, North America and Western Europe. Most of those Sikhs favor Sikh independence from India, noted Aulakh.
The Oslo conflict is not a religious dispute, as the Indian government alleges, Aulakh said, but rather the real issue is a dispute over whether Khalistan should be free and independent. “The Indian Embassy supported group of Sikhs in Oslo, is obviously opposed. to independence, and, apparently, they are willing to kill young Khalistanis like Gurcharan Singh to stop the Sikh freedom movement.”
He added that the recent assassination of a Sikh leader in West Germany, as well as the attempted murder of another in England, apparently point to a new, more violent tactic by the Third Agency to simply liquidate the leadership of the Khalistan movement in Western Europe. (Khalistan is the name of the Sikh homeland, which was declared independent by the Panthic Committee of Sikh leaders, representing the Sikh nation, in the Punjab on October 7, 1987)
Aulakh noted that subversion of Western governments by Indian intelligence has occurred since the Canadian operation too, He recalled the sensational drug scandal case reported in the London papers in November 1986.
“In that instance, said Aulakh, “we had a Sikh who had been recruited by the Indian government as a spy, who infiltrated the Sikh independence movement in South all, near London, where there is large Sikh community. That agent, Ajit Singh SatBrahma, a Punjabi newspaper owner, was also apprehended receiving 320,000 pounds sterling worth of heroin from an Indian diplomat at Heathrow Airport in London.
“That diplomat retuned to India by grace of his diplomatic immunity and was never charged. He was reported to be working for a senior civil servant in the Indian upper house of Parliament after he left Britain in a hurry, when the drug ring was exposed. The re Cruited spy, SatBrahma gota nine year sentence in British prison,” Aulakh noted.
Aulakh said that he concludes from this case and the Soft Target expose’ of Indian intelligence involvement in the AirIndia bombing that the Indian government is willing to smuggle drugs and commit mass murder simply to discredit Sikhs. He is very concerned, he said, that the United States will be the next target of these kind of. Third Agency subversion and disinformation tactics.
“The idea of India’s government going to these kind of subversive and terrorist extremes to discredit a religious minority like the Sikhs are, frankly, unbelievable to the average Westerner,” said Aulakh. “But then the record speaks for itself.”
Article extracted from this publication >> August 11, 1989
