In June it will be six years since an Air India jumbo jet crashed off the coast of Northern Ireland bombed according to aviation experts Six long years of agony for the next of kin of the victims most of whom are still awaiting justice in civil courts and from the police. It has also been six long years of agony for the 200000 members of a Canadian minority group that is still trying to shake off the stigma the incident besmirched them with. And like the victims they too are patiently awaiting the much publicized culprits that popular literature claimed were hiding among them!

The minority group is the Sikh community a people who moved history in their homeland of Punjab and continue to move it But one for whom history has been moving cruelly slow in their adopted land of Canada thanks to a combination of racism government policy and interference by foreign power.

In many ways the needs of the bereaved families and those of the Sikh community are running a parallel course-both are seeking out officialdom to publicize the real story one to purify the emotional state and the other to purify its image. Both have asked for public inquiries to bring out the truth. And both have been rebuffed told: No the Mounties will get their man or men.

But what if the real culprit is not a man or men but an institution a government institution controlling human assets in Canada? This was the theory we raised in our book Soft Target based on hard Canadian intelligence painstakingly accumulated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Is there a chance then that this institution which our information revealed was an agency of the Government of India can be publicly identified and chastised by Ottawa? Hardly likely at this stage of the proceedings and hardly likely if the incident continues to remain only in the realm of a Criminal investigation the rules of evidence in a public inquiry are much broader to accept such information. Our thesis was very straightforward Beginning in the early 1980’s the Sikhs in North America developed a very effective lobby group and began convincing parliamentarians in the United States Canada Britain and even the United Nations about gross violations being perpetrated against the Sikhs in Punjab.

Slowly a case was made out that if the Sikhs were not given their legitimate aspirations and if the violations and killings did not stop then the Sikhs would have no alternative but to separate from India.

New Delhi’s reply was brutal force inside India which the Sikhs more than matched and an intelligence operation outside India to destabilize the Sikh community. We traced the initial operation to paint the Sikhs as terrorists. When this did not dampen the Sikh spirit although it did dampen the enthusiasm of Western government officials and elected politicians toward the Sikhs out of the blue came the Air India incident. An incident that was totally out of character for North American Sikhs.

After Soft Target was released in 1989 much was made of the argument that it was a fiction of our imagination and that India’s intelligence service did not have the capability that I and my co-author Brian McAndrew described.

Well perhaps it’s time to set the record straight. Let us consider some of the writing since Soft Target was released.

 

  1. In an article on the plane crash that killed former Pakistani President Zia-UI-Haq Vanity Fair a New York based magazine listed the suspects the KGB and the Khad-Afghan secret service and RAW. This last one is an acronym for India’s equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency the Research and Analysis Wing.
  2. The New York Times in an article by Barbara Crossett cited RAW as believed to be involved in Fiji with the East Indian problem in Bhutan Sikkim and Nepal and of course Sri Lanka.
  3. India Week another New York based weekly citing FBI officials linked RAW activities in the assassination of militant Jewish Rabbi Mcir Kahane in that city last year The gun used by the gunman came from a shipment of .357 Magnums purchased by RAW for the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka an FBI official told the weekly.
  4. Most recently intelligence reports indicate that the uprising in Bangla Desh was the joint work of RAW and the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States to oust General Ershad

These are not the works of a ragtag Third World intelligence service much as people would have us believe. In Canada the Canadian Security Intelligence Service largely put an end to RAW’’s operation on the clandestine level although it is known that the RCMP continues to cooperate with its officers thanks to an official policy of the Government of Canada.

Officially Ottawa remains committed to a special friendship policy toward India a posture now slowly creeping into the US administration.

Noone denies that India should be offered special friendship it does occupy the center stage in the Third World. No one denies that the 150 million rich consumers in that country offer a massive trade potential for Canadian businesses. But should this make us blind to natural justice?

Shouldn’t the norms of international justice and the interests of Canada’s minorities take first place? For instance we still await comment from Ottawa on the mass killings and jailing’s and torture recorded by Amnesty International that continue to be practiced by state security forces battling the struggles in Kashmir Punjab and Assam.

And Ottawa cannot hide behind the argument that it is India’s internal matter Otherwise one would have to say the same about the movements inside the Soviet Union the various struggles in Latin America and elsewhere. In fact Ottawa never slops commenting on the violent response of these countries to the people’s movements.

And turning to within Canada we are told that 1991 was a watershed for Canadian Sikhs They has the first turbaned Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and the first turbaned Metro Toronto Police officer. Students and teachers in the Peel Board of Education just outside Toronto can now carry Kirpans in school thanks to a recent ruling by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

But take a look at the flip side of this victory. It is happening almost 100 years after the first Sikhs landed on Canada’s west coast the stalwart soldiers of the British Empire who believed in their naiveté that their loyalty had earned them the right to settle in any of the colonics One hundred years to wear a turban in the police department! Why did the governments involved have to drag their heels in these situations? And what messages do such delays send to the mainstream population? That minorities continue to occupy the bottom rung?

Is it any wonder then that history has been moving so slowly for the Sikhs in Canada?

(The Sikh Spectrum)

(Zuhair Kasmeri is the principal author of Soft Target 1989. Lorimer Publishers

Toronto)

Article extracted from this publication >> May 31, 1991