Politics and The Punjabi Gangland Wars
Justin Trudeau vs. Narendra Modi, Hardeep Singh Nijjar vs. Ripudaman Singh Malik; Khalistanis, gangsters, rogue operations and murder-for-hire rackets.
There’s a lot to digest in all this, but you’ve come to the right place.
This newsletter is late in coming. I’m back from my travels in the backcountry of Oregon and Washington State and I’m already overloaded with work.
There’s my bulging file on the Nazi-adjacent Samidoun enterprise in Canada (I’m not exaggerating, by the way) for starters. And I’m just now finishing up the better part of an entire page in the National Post to mark the third anniversary of the federally-induced “mass graves” mass hysteria I examined in great detail on the first anniversary, in The Year of the Graves.
So let’s get into the guts of this edition of Real Story newsletter.
Awaiting The Great Demystification
Despite all the speculations and assumptions in certain sections of the news media, Canadians are still no closer to seeing evidence to warrant Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s detonation of Indo-Canadian relations along with his government’s own Indo-Pacific Strategy than we were when he blew it all up in our faces last September.
Earlier this month, four sketchy characters were seperately arrested and charged in the July 18, 2023 assassination of the Canadian Khalistani leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, president of the Guru Nanak Temple in Surrey, British Columbia. The killing was an outrage I’m sure you don’t need reminding that Trudeau has pinned on India’s strongman prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Each of the accused in the case are Punjabis without citizenship or permanent-resident status. They have been living in Canada for several years.
There has been some useful bread-and-butter reporting lately about the American police investigations behind Trudeau’s shocking claim in the House of Commons. This New York Times report - Canadian Arrests Highlight Alleged Gang Role in India’s Intelligence Operations - is worthwhile. The Times is quite right to note that the arrests of Nijjar’s accused hitmen “did little to demystify the basis of his [Trudeau’s] claim.”
There’s been at least as much unhelpful, ill-informed, misleading and narrative-parroting journalism. I’ll be coming to some of that too, but below the paywall, because I don’t like being too publicly cantankerous about fellow toilers in the journalism trade.
As Real Story subscribers will know, my ill temper about all this derives from having been on the Khalistani terrorism story since I was a kid, from well before the Air India bombing (see Canada's worst terrorist atrocity and the awful conspiracy theory that won't die). I was on it even before the time I spent during the Khalistani terror in Punjab, filing from Amrtisar to the Globe and Mail (here’s an archive). If you like, see also my Post piece The Atwal affair is personal. People I've known have been killed.
Khalistan, it would useful to bear in mind, is the theocratic ethnostate Sikh separatists hope to carve out of India’s Punjab and several neighbouring states. Before it petered out in disgrace among Sikhs in India in the 1990s, the Khalistani cause had led to the deaths of perhaps 20,000 people, the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and the destruction of a great deal of Sikhism’s holiest of holies, the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar.
I point this out mostly to plead for some understanding when I get grumpy about the way journalists continue to muck up the story and leave people understanding less about what’s going on in the Nijjar controversy instead of more. Which, I’m not happy to say, is the rule rather than the exception.
For more background than you’ll find anywhere else, here’s a series I composed for Real Story subscribers last summer: Is India Interfering In Canada's Affairs?, Did Ottawa Sabotage Modi's Peace Talks?, Conspiracy Theories, From Inside The House and The Myths That Sustain Khalistan To This Day.
The only other journalists who have been burdened by this story for as long as I have are the CBC’s now-retired Terry Milewski (his book Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project, is terrific) and most importantly, The Vancouver Sun’s irreplaceable, magnificent Kim Bolan. If there’s ever any difference in the way Kim and I come down on the gangland angle to the Nijjar case, go with her take.
Kim’s recent work in the series Lethal Exports: B.C. gangsters at the centre of a global drug trade is gold-standard quality in the dying craft of investigative reporting. You may be amused to know that the series was the result of a Journalism Fellowship grant that I’d applied for, too, coincidentally, in a joint proposal with the tireless independent investigative reporter Cynthia Mao 納蘭雪野. Kim deserved to win, so it’s all good.
To get something else out of the way, my take on the recent arrests and related developments connected to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar remains largely unchanged from what it was the day Trudeau rose in the House of Commons with that bombshell allegation.
It is difficult not to infer from all this that Trudeau has decided to take sides in this gangland melodrama, that by his solemn insinuations his hope is to be back with a spring in his step on “the world stage,” and that Beijing’s friends in high Canadian places will be well pleased.
The point of that smartalecky remark: The very day Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons to accuse Modi of assassinating a Canadian was Judge Marie-Josée Hogue’s first day on the job. Judge Hogue is leading that commission of inquiry into foreign interference that Beijing’s diplomats in Canada and Trudeau’s Liberals had fought so hard to scuttle.
It now does look certain - the Washington Post should be thanked for this revelation - that Vikram Yadav, an individual in India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was the money man involved in an interrupted plan to place bets in Canada’s Punjabi Underworld murder-for-hire rackets. That’s news. Also noteworthy: Bloomberg India reports that Delhi’s investigation has concluded that a rogue operation was in play within RAW in a directly related case. Bloomberg reports that an unnamed agency field officer is no longer in RAW’s employ - although he’s still working for the government - and a criminal investigation is still underway.
Another thing that looks even more certain than it did last September: There are no “sleeper cells” in Canada just waiting to be put into play by Modi’s government, and no serious person claims that Modi sent Nijjar’s killers to Canada to do his dirty work for him.
Assassins Without Borders
For at least 20 years, Indo-Canadian gangs have ranked at the top of the list with Asian triads and the Hell’s Angels in the hierarchy of organized crime networks in this country. Emerging mainly from Metro Vancouver, the Punjabi Underworld involves the Brothers Keepers gang and its various Dosanjh Brothers’ mutations, the Red Scorpions, the United Nations gang, the Cheemas, Buttars, Dhaks, Duhres. . .
It’s a dizzying managerie of evolving formulations, extinctions and mergers and shifting allegiances in a hyper-violent, borderless dystopia where main-street gunplay bleeds into back-alley Khalistani strongarming and extortion. In Vancouver, Surrey, Richmond and Edmonton, brazen daylight shootings have become commonplace in recent years.
It’s a kind of import-export business.
India’s organized-crime and anti-terrorism police are as overworked as Canada’s, but the record of convictions clearly shows that drugs and extortion fuel the bigger enterprises, and containing the competition by securing hitmen for one-off jobs is a standard industry practice.
Last September, the murder-for-hire specialist Sukhdool Singh Gill (alias Sukha Duneke) was whacked in Winnipeg, where he’d been living since 2017 after securing a phony Indian passport and decamping from Punjab’s Moga district. From the relative safety of Manitoba, Gill directed a guns-and-extortion business that carried out operations across Punjab until Indo-Canadian gangsters started worrying he’d move in on their action, so bang.
Two years ago, Brampton gangster-rap icon Sidhu Moose Wala was shot dead in Punjab’s Mansa district. The accused in that case is the notorious Goldy Brar, who set up shop in Canada on a student visa in 2017. Brar is allegedly a kingpin in India’s big-league Bishnoi Gang, an assassin and occasional money-launderer for the terrorist-listed Babbar Khalsa organization, the primary Khalistani groupuscule involved in the Air India atrocity of 1985.
The subject of a recent Interpol arrest warrant, Brar was Number 15 on Canada’s most wanted fugitive list last year. Brar stands accused of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and weapons trafficking along with an associate, Satbir “Sam” Singh.
India’s security services identify Goldy Brar and Sam Singh as criminal partners with the Babbar Khalsa fugitive Lakhbir Singh Landa, who was listed as an Edmonton-based terrorist in an arrest warrant issued last December by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs.
Landa is alleged to have been involved in a 2021 rocket attack on the Punjab Police Intelligence Headquarters in Mohali and an RPG rocket attack on a police station in the Punjab city of Tarn Taran in December, 2022.
I could go on. And on and on.
Anyway, as the Washington Post revealed last month, the RAW’s Vikram Yadav is the guy who shows up as “CC1” in this U.S. Justice Department indictment, unsealed last November. The indictment lays out the evidence for murder-for-hire conspiracy charges against Nikhil Gupta, described as a player in “international narcotics and weapons trafficking.”
The indictment reveals a Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight operation (two of the five plotters were in on the sting; one was a government agent, the other was an undercover informant) that centred on Gupta’s plan to assassinate Nijjar’s dangerously deranged associate in the Khalistani “Sikhs for Justice” outfit, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York.
Pannun spends a lot of time in Canada, and why he has not been brought up on Canadian charges of incitement to murder Indian diplomats is a mystery to me. It’s a mystery and point of serious annoyance in Delhi, too. I claim no inside knowledge about that.
By June 18, 2023, when shots rang out in the Guru Nanak Gurudwara parking lot in Surrey, between the two of them Pannun and Nijjar had been named in about 30 terrorism and subversion cases prepared by Indian law enforcement agencies. Nijjar is accused of being a bigshot in India’s terrorist-listed Khalistan Tiger Force. Pannun’s SFJ outfit, with Nijjar playing the key Canadian role, is also terror-listed organization in India.
Remember in 2018, Trudeau’s Bollywood costume party tour of Kardashian-style media availabilities and Bangra dance-offs across India? Remember the convicted would-be Khalistani assassin Jaspal Singh Atwal showing up in Trudeau’s entourage?
Remember how Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh refused to meet with Trudeau or Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan back then unless they agreed to act like grownups and address the very real concern about the safe haven Canada provides Khalistani militants and Punjabi gangsters?
Remember that list of names Amerinder Singh passed on to Trudeau and Sajjan, the nine people India wanted extradited from Canada to face charges?
None of the nine were extradited. Nijjar was on that list.
And here’s where we should probably go off the public channel. . .