(Courtesy: The Globe and Mail by: David Roberts)

CANADA: Manitoba’s Sikh community is feeling jittery after a local man was accused of attempting to sneak an alleged member of the Khalistan Liberation Front into Canada.

The saga involves a Winnipeg man named Pinder Singh Brar and an alleged Sikh militant, Daya Singh Sandhu.

RCMP say Mr. Brar, who immigrated to Canada in 1993, sent his Indian passport to the British High Commission in Ouawa last May for a routine visa application.

The British said the document had been disassembled and then put back together, although apparently not altered. They passed it to the Mounties in Ottawa, who alerted RCMP in Winnipeg, who began an undercover watch of Mr. Brar, a service-station attendant who earns $720 a month, and some of his associates.

The Mounties also made inquiries in the Sikh community.

On July 28, the Mounties got a tip that Mr. Brar would be meeting some- one at an unnamed U.S. airport.

The next day, Brar is alleged to have rented a utility vehicle from a local agency in another man’s name. And it is alleged he secured three sets of travel documents from a local Sikh, his wife, and a third local man. He drove across the Canada-U.S. border at Emerson, Man., and into Minnesola.

On Aug. 3, immigration officials at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport recognized Mr. Brar from an RCMP photograph and followed him to the Continental Airlines arrivals gate.

There, Brar, who has no criminal record in Canada or in India, and Daya Singh Sandhu, 33, a Sikh who was on India’s most-wanted list, were detained. They are being held in the United States on charges of visa fraud. Mr. Sandhu had arrived in Minneapolis on a flight from New York, where he’d been lying low after entering the United States from Britain on July 6 on false documents. Authorities claim the pair, once school chums in Punjab, planned to re-enter Canada and drive to Winnipeg.

Indian officials say Mr. Sandhu is the leader of the Khalistan Liberation Front, an organization fighting for Sikh independence in Punjab. He is wanted in India on charges of murdering at least eight people, kidnapping and bombing. India has asked for Mr. Sandhu’s extradition.

The CBC reported the story of the Minneapolis airport arrests on Aug.11, a week after they occurred.

Subsequent stories in the local press have said that Winnipeg now finds itself “home to the strongest and most militant group of Sikhs in North America” and that Brar’s case is “only the tip of the iceberg.”

A copyrighted story on the front page of The Winnipeg Free Press recently quoted a single source – Piyosh Jha, a Toronto graduate student and “an expert in Sikh terrorism” -as saying his research shows a cell of 15 to 20 extremist Sikhs in Winnipeg “may be violating Canadian law by offering logistical and financial sup- port to militant organizations.”

The paper also disclosed that the passport of a local Sikh was found by German authorities to be in the pos- session of an unnamed “militant” within the past 12 months.

While most professional-class Sikhs immigrating to Canada choose to live in Toronto or Vancouver, another group, mostly members of the Jatt caste, (generally less skilled and more militant), prefer Winnipeg, said Mr. Jha, who estimated that $500,000 a year is pumped through a North Winnipeg bank branch to the Punjab in support of the KLF.

Moreover, the Winnipeg-Minneapolis connection has very likely usurped the “Punjabi Pipeline” between California and British Columbia as the easiest way to smuggle people into Canada now that the West Coast route has been shut down by Canadian and U.S. customs officials, Jha said.

The publicity after the Aug. 3 arrests in Minneapolis has shaken Winnipeg’s Sikh community, which has not been eyed so carefully in the local press

since a reporter last year went to eat curry at a Winnipeg temple and a Sikh was given permission to wear his turban at a Winnipeg hall of the Royal Canadian Legion. Although the newspaper observed that “the broader Winnipeg population of about 4,000 Sikh citizens is not implicated in any wrongdoing,” Sikh O spokesmen complained that their community had been slandered.

A general meeting last week brought together members of eight Winnipeg Sikh temples. They said it is obvious that most Sikhs support an independent homeland, but vigorously denied that Winnipeg is a hotbed of anything.

“This has created a perception that links all people believing in Sikhism to terrorism,” Winnipeg Sikh leaders said, reporting that, in the glare of publicity, some Winnipeggers had refused to ride in taxi-cabs driven by Sikhs.

Angry Sikh leaders met with the newspaper editors last week and have been offered space in the local paper to publicize their concerns about the coverage of the story.

Article extracted from this publication >> September 1, 1995