Remembering the Khalistani Terror
Despite Substack's Pacific Timezone glitchings. . .
I’m away on yet another project, which is why there was no column from me in the National Post this past week. Not quite as exhausting as the last project and the Real Story series that wrapped up this past Monday, but it’s taking a great deal of time and effort. Meanwhile, Substack is currently beset with ‘Too Many Requests’ and “429 error” alerts, so I’m just hoping this much of the newsletter gets through.
Too bad, too, because today’s Real Story was going to be quite the banger.
What we’d want to forget we have a duty to remember
The Ontario journalist and community advocate Ruchi Wali has been doing some very interesting work lately. She’s just launched a Youtube channel, starting out with a series of interviews leading up to the June 23 anniversary of the 1985 Kanishka bombing - the worst terror attack in Canadian history and the most deadly act of terrorism in aviation history prior to 9/11.
I’d been covering the Khalistani movement for quite some time by then and the perpetrators of the bombing were well known to me, notably the Babbar Khalsa mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar. I’d filed to the Globe and Mail from Amritsar at the height of the Khalistani terror, and I’m haunted by these events, for reasons I’ve explained here. See especially the series from 2023, which you can tap into from The Myths That Sustain Khalistan To This Day. All the links and sources you’ll need are there.
My full conversation with Ruchi is here, but below is a snippet. I’m talking about how I’d been visiting family in Cork the day before Air India Flight 182 vanished over the Atlantic Ocean just off Sheepshead Bay. I was back in London when I got the call from Rick Ouston on the city desk at the Vancouver Sun, telling me I had to get back to Cork straight away. It took me a couple of hours to gather my thoughts and make some calls, then I called back and I said:
No, the story isn’t here, the story is in Vancouver. Because I know who did this. I know who did it. And I was eventually proved right.
Some wounds never really heal.
I'm a Canadian 9/11 widow. I testified at the Air India inquiry. I'm more than disappointed to say Canada still does not have bragging rights about deterrence for acts of terror and support for Victims of terrorism. How many recommendations have we made since the Air India inquiry?
Surely it is our parties harvesting votes from defined ethnic blocs that is responsible for the progressive fracturing of "so called Canada"? With 19 current members of Parliament, more than in India, at 5% of the total on a 2% population base, only if Sikhs were from a broadly assimilated group would this not be significant.
I have yet to see a domestic connection made between the Khalistani movement and the Ghadar revolutionaries attempts to foment mutiny and murder in the British Army prior to and during WW1, though this seems to be an important topic in the current Indian Civil Service exams.
https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/ghadar-party/
That the 1914 assassination of Immigration Inspector William Hopkinson at the Vancouver Courthouse by Mewa Singh, as the Calcutta born inspector was about to testify in a Sikh involved murder, is celebrated still by local activists is bad enough, but the commandeering of the "Komagata Maru" incident, the attempted landing of recruits for the Ghadar struggle, to which the fluently tri-lingual Hopkinson was a particular threat, has had disastrous distortion of Canada's foreign policy.
Seeking influence through victim hood is now established practice with historic grievances of "racism" and "colonialism" (though only of the nominally white variety) being a sure fire go to, but that the Sikh settlement of Vancouver was sparked by the 1897 transit of the Imperial Sikh Lancers for Queen Victoria's Jubilee and their favourable impressions leading to British India army veterans retiring there on their pensions, seems ironic in the extreme.