Courtesy: Vancouver Sun CANADA: The Canadian connection to the Sikh separatist movement in India| was still strong in the early 1990s, says an Indian government report obtained by The Vancouver Sun.
The report says Surrey resident Satinderpal Singh Gill, of the International Sikh Youth Federation, has been a major player in fighting for an independent Sikh nation.
Gill has spent much of the last nine years in Pakistan, where, according to the report, he operated from a Sikh shrine with the assistance of Pakistani secret police and all the major leaders of Sikh extremist groups in India.
“Satinderpal Singh and Balbir Singh (of Edmonton) were maintaining constant contact with the IST (Pakistani) officials and senior militant leaders ‘operating from different places,” the report says.
“They used to organize infiltration of Sikh militants in India from Pakistan along with weapons supplied by the Pak government; They also used to arrange guides and escorts for the militants and arms consignments to cross over to India from Lahore sector in Pakistan.”
A reporter interviewed Gill and Balbir Singh in Pakistan in the late 1980s. Singh was later killed and Gill returned to Canada, but has been in Pakistan again for the last nine months, ‘The Indian government report is based on an extensive interrogation of Gurdeep Singh Sivia, who was with the Sikh separatist group Babbar Khalsa International until he became disillusioned and tured himself in ‘August, 1992. Recently, he was released from prison and is now believed to be underground in Britain. Sivia also talks about his involvement with Talwinder Singh Parmar, the Vancouver founder of Babbar Khalsa, Parmar was considered the number one suspect in the 1985 Air India bombing and another bomb in Japan the same day. He was killed by Indian police in 1992, The Sikh separatists had a large following in Canada and India in the 80s, as they agitated, sometimes violently, for a separate Sikh nation that would be called Khalistan to be carved out of India’s Punjab state.
They were also looking for a way to avenge the 1984 bloody Indian army attack on the Harmander Sahib, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, ordered by former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Sivia, who visited Vancouver in the mid1980s, also describes how he helped Harkirat Singh Bagga, whom he met both in Singapore and in Britain.
Bagga later came to B.C, and attempted to assassinate Punjabi newspaper editor Tara Singh Hayer Hayer said he was surprised at the connection between the Babbar Khalsa leader and the young man who left him paralyzed from the waist down, “I believe the conspiracy to kill me ‘was hatched in Pakistan,” Hayer said “Bagga was only the one to pull the trigger. Would have been much more happy if the real person behind this conspiracy could have been caught.”
Article extracted from this publication >> June 16, 1995
