Resurgence of Sikh militancy in Canada, AI inquiry told

A former British Columbia premier and Liberal Member of Parliament has testified before the Air India bombing public inquiry in Ottawa that he and others in Canada, who spoke against Sikh extremism, faced a reign of terror in the 1980s.

Testifying before Inquiry Chairman Judge John Major on November 21, Ujjal Dosanjh said: "I believe that institutions of our society were unable to understand or comprehend it (the extremism) to any great degree at that time and were not able to deal with it. We were left to fend for ourselves."

Before he was elected to the British Columbia legislature, Dosanjh was a practicing attorney and a human rights activist who frequently criticized Sikh extremism. He was warned of dire consequences, and ultimately paid the price with stitches on his body when extremists beat him up in 1985.

He told the inquiry he is concerned militancy is again on the rise. During the Baisakhi Day parade in April in Surrey, there was a float 'honoring' Talwinder Singh Parmar, the alleged mastermind of the Kanishka terrorist attack that killed 329 people. Dosanjh had strongly criticized federal and provincial politicians who attended that parade and did not speak out.  

"I have also gone to several functions without knowing much and once I have noticed something objectionable I have strongly criticized that and I did that after seeing what was going on at that parade in Surrey," Dosanjh told rediff.com in an earlier interview.

In his testimony before Justice Major, Dosanjh addressed his political colleagues: 'If you go in not knowing what has happened at the event, but find out that something serious is taking place, you have an obligation to deal with it and say: No. This is not right and it is wrong to glorify violence and I do not want to be part of this any more.'

Dosanjh says there is still a widespread belief among Indo-Canadians that many of his fellow citizens had a cultural blind spot about what was going on before the Air India bombing.

The attitude of the public, Dosanjh reportedly said in his testimony, seemed to be that beatings, threats and bombings 'were not really happening to Canadians. They were happening to some brown guys that were arguing with each other.'

"The fear and the reign of terror is still there," he said, pointing out that he received e-mails with death threats last summer, including one that denounced him as a 'blood traitor.'

"If we cannot apprehend them (the militants) or convict them," he told the inquiry, "then at least we can denounce them. And part of that denunciation has to come from politicians."

Norman Inkster, Royal Canadian Mounted Police commissioner from 1987 to 1994, testified before the inquiry about the tension between the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The source of that tension, he told Justice Major, came from RCMP demands to know everything the CSIS had on Air India. The spy agency regularly sent back letters asking the RCMP to be 'more specific.'

"It was disconcerting," said Inkster, "to find the CSIS looking for more specificity in terms of the request, because you could not be more specific if you didn't know what they had."