New Delhi, May 4: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday said that Canada has been welcoming a number of gangland people with organised crime links from Punjab and ignoring Indian warnings against giving them visa, and therefore killings like that of separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar is an issue that Ottawa needs to worry about.
Asked about the arrest of three Indian nationals with regard to the killing of Khalistani separatist Nijjar in British Columbia last year, EAM Jaishankar, while speaking to a group of professionals in Bhubaneswar, said he had seen the report about the arrests:
“I also saw this report; okay somebody may have been arrested, their police may have done some investigation, but the fact is the number of gangland people, the number of people with organised crime links from Punjab, have been made welcome in Canada. We have been telling Canada that these are wanted criminals from India, you are giving them visa; many have come on false documentation, and yet you allow them to live there. If you decide to import people with negative backgrounds there will be issues.
“If something has happened there, it is for them to worry about,” he added.
He also said that the Khalistani elements have organised themselves politically in Canada and become a political lobby.
“And in some of these democratic countries the politicians of those countries are made to believe that if they defer to these people or pander to these people, these people have some ability to get the community to support them,” he said, in reference to Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, who has taken the support of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who is a Khalistan sympathiser. Canada is known to have the second highest Sikh population in the world, after India, at over 770,000, or about two % of its total population.
EAM said these separatist elements “have tried to create space for themselves in the politics of these countries”.
“At this time, I would say it is not so much of a problem in the US; our biggest problem right now is in Canada. Because in Canada, actually, the party in power in Canada, other parties in Canada, have given these kinds of extremism, separatism and advocates of violence a certain legitimacy, in the name of free speech.”
On India taking a hard stance on Canada’s backing of the separatists, he said:
“The point they need to understand, this is no longer a world which runs as a one-way street, that if there are things that happen out there, there will be pushback; the Newtons law of politics will apply there also. There will be a reaction, others will take steps to counter it.”
On Friday, Canadian police said they had arrested three men who they claim are members of a “hit squad” that investigators believe was “tasked by the Indian government” with killing of prominent Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia in June last year, CBC News reported.
The three, Kamalpreet Singh, Karanpreet Singh and Karan Brar, face first-degree murder and conspiracy charges in the Nijjar case, according to documents filed in a Surrey court on Friday.
All are alleged associates of a criminal group in Punjab and neighboring Haryana state that is associated with notorious Punjabi gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, currently held in India’s high-security Sabarmati prison in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, according to sources close to the investigation, CBC reported.
