re: #227 goddamnedfrank

This US Attorney’s Office statement is wild:

re: #3 The Ghost of a Flea

The guy who was the target of an alleged extrajudicial killing was - Gurupatwant Singh Pannun.

He is a political activist mostly active in Canada who supports a separatist movement (the Khalistan movemement which seeks an independent homeland for members of the Sikh religion) in India that has nearly entirely lost its support in India. That support pretty much got lost after a bloody insurrection/separatist war that led to 80,000 deaths (mostly in India’s Punjab state where they form slightly under 60% of the population) in the 1980’s and was pretty much put down by Sikhs who were against separatism themselves by the mid-90’s. The bulk of the violence happened after Operation Blue Star, the assasination of Indira Gandhi, and the 1984 Delhi Sikh riots.

Pannun is also a stochastic terrorist issuing threats against Indian and Hindu targets, in a long line of people sheltered by the Canadian government, and whom legitimate extradition requests were ignored, leading to several hundred deaths.

Just in the past year… he told Sikh’s not to fly on Air India on November 19th, claiming that their lives would be at risk, earlier he called for Hindus to get out of Canada or else. In 2020 he gave hate-filled screeds against members of certain castes at an Anti-caste conference and Hindus in general, and immediately afterwards the Hindu American Foundation got many credible threats that they had to shutdown their office in DC for a week.

But here’s the context of the overall India-Canada diplomatic rift, which this is really about, from the Brookings Institution:

lawfaremedia.org

Amongst other things, Pierre Trudeau had refused to extradite a person to India on the grounds that India was insufficiently deferential to the queen (according to a CBC journalist). That person went on to mastermind the Air India bombing on a flight from Canada that killed more than 300 people when it blew up over Ireland.

I don’t believe the Khalistan movement has much of a force in India, but the memories of it (especially since lots of the activity happened either in or a short distance from the capital), and Indian touchiness about secessionism are why Indian governments of all national level political parties are ready to pounce on anything that might remotely seem secessionist, and act in ways that others think are overreaching.

And India is legitimately touchy about anything remotely secessionist, because 1/2 million to 2 million people died during Partition, a similar number died during Bangladesh’s freedom struggle against Pakistan (after a Pakistan decided to imprison the Bengali leader who would have become Prime Minister of Pakistan) and India got about 10 million refugees, and just within the Republic of India’s borders since independence at least a couple of hundred thousand people have died in various insurgencies. And every separatist group attacks the local minority groups in its midst — usually violently.