[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 154 (Friday, September 29, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1889-E1890]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[[Page E 1889]]
ANNIVERSARY OF KHALISTAN'S INDEPENDENCE
______
HON. PETER T. KING
of new york
in the house of representatives
Friday, September 29, 1995
Mr. KING. Mr. Speaker, on October 7, 1987, the Sikh Nation took its
destiny into its own hands by declaring the independence of Khalistan.
I am very pleased to salute the Sikhs of Khalistan on this anniversary.
The Sikh Nation ruled Punjab in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and was supposed to receive its own country when the British
freed India in 1947. Though promised by India that their freedom would
be protected, those promises collapsed like a house of cards. As a
result, no Sikh has ever signed the Indian constitution and the Sikh
Nation has struggled ever since then to regain its sovereignty.
I find it appropriate that as the anniversary of Khalistan's
independence approaches, the government of Canada is re-opening its
investigation into the 1985 explosion of an Air India jetliner which
killed 329 people to determine if there was any involvement by the
Indian government.
In this light, American support for Khalistan's independence is
crucial. I commend the Council of Khalistan for the work it is doing to
free the Sikh Nation and I join my colleagues in congratulating the
Sikh Nation on the anniversary of Khalistan's declaration of
independence.
I am placing into the record a review of Soft Target, the book that
describes the Air India case, by David Kilgour, a Canadian Member of
Parliament, and an article from Awaze Quam by Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh,
President of the Council of Khalistan.
Should The U.S. Be Trading With India?
Washington.--Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, President of the
Council of Khalistan, today condemned India's downing of its
own airliner ten years ago. June 23 marks the tenth
anniversary of the attack, which killed 329 people. ``This
was a tragic event,'' said Dr. Aulakh. The Sikh Nation
extends its deepest sympathies to the families of the
victims. This act was brutal terrorism in its most naked
form.
Agents of the Indian regime openly blamed the Sikhs for the
attack even before it was known to the public that it had
happened. But in Soft Target, journalist Brian McAndrew of
the Toronto Star and Zuhair Kashmeri of the Toronto Globe and
Mail, show conclusively that the Indian regime blew up its
own airliner.
In the book, an agent of the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service (CSIS) is quoted as saying ``If you really want to
clear the incidents quickly, take vans down to the Indian
High Commission and the consulates in Toronto and Vancourver,
load everybody up and take them down for questioning. We know
it and they know it that they are involved.'' According to
the book, the Indian consul general in Toronto, Surinder
Malik, identified and ``L. Singh'' whom Malik said was a Sikh
activist in Canada, as the culprit. This occurred when the
police had just found the passenger register. But according
to Kashmeri and McAndrew, Malik took his wife and daughter
off that flight shortly before it departed. An auto dealer
who was a friend of Malik's also cancelled his reservation at
the last minute.
The book also reports that less than a year before the Air
India bombing, 29 people were killed and 32 injured in an
airplane bombing Madras which also appears to have been
planned by Indian Intelligence. According to Soft Target
``CSIS found the similarities between the Madras plot and the
bombing--aboard Air Indian remarkable.'' Additionally,
according to Kashmeri and McAndrew, ``CSIS was astounded that
such similar plans could be hatched in opposite parts of the
world. It would not be so astounding though, if the plans
emanated from the same source--namely, from within the Indian
intelligence service.''
``Brutal terrorist acts like the Air India bombing should
prevent any country from receiving American aid or trade,''
said Dr. Aulakj. ``Events like this only remind us that India
is a brutal tyrant which will stop at nothing to achieve its
aims. If America is a moral country, it must cut off all aid
to India.'' Dr. Aulakj said.
Recently, India has emerged as a new U.S. business partner
despite evidence that it is collapsing. Several Swiss drug
companies pulled out last year due to the unstable market and
the Washington Post reported last fall that it takes the
average Indian three days pay just to buy a box of Corn
Flakes. Yet the U.S. and India have exchanged visits from
high-level officials in pursuit of increased trade between
India and the United States.
The Indian regime has murdered over 120,000 Sikhs since
1984. It has also killed over 43,000 Kashmiri Muslims since
1988, over 150,000 Christians in Nagaland since 1947, and
tens of thousands of Assamese, Marupuris, and others.
According to the U.S. State Department, over 41,000 cash
bounties were paid to police officers between 1991 and 1993
for killing Sikhs.
Many people are beginning to see the breakup of India as
inevitable. Dr. Jack Wheeler of Freedom Research Foundation,
who foresaw the Soviet breakup, predicted last year in the
newsletter Strategic Investment that within ten years, Indian
``will cease to exist as we know (it).''
On October 7, 1987, the Sikh nation declared the
independent country of Khalistan. No Sikh has ever signed the
Indian constitution. Sikh ruled Punjab from 1710 to 1716 and
from 1765 to 1849. In the February 1992 state elections in
Punjab, only 4 percent of the Sikhs there voted, according to
Indian Abroad. On December 26, former Member of Parliament
Simranjit Singh Mann spoke to a crowd of 50,000 Sikhs calling
for a peaceful, democratic, nonviolent movement to liberate
Khalistan. He asked those attending to raise their hands if
they supported freedom for Khalistan. All 50,000 did so. For
that speech he was arrested on January 5 under the new-
expired Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA),
despite the fact that the Punjab and Haryana High Court has
ruled that speaking out for Khalistan is not a crime. Mr.
Mann remains in illegal detention in a windowless cell after
more than five months.
``The continuing detention of Sardar Mann shows how
frightened India is of an idea,'' said Dr. Aulakh. ``Just
talking about freedom for Khalistan terrifies the brutal
tyrants of New Delhi. But freedom for Khalistan and all the
nations living under brutal Indian occupation is
inevitable,'' said Dr. Aulakh.
``India is not one nation,'' he said, ``It is a
conglomeration of many nations thrown together for
administrative purposes by the British. It is last vestige of
colonialism. With 18 official language, India is doomed to
disintegrate just as the former Soviet Union did.'' Dr.
Aulakh said, ``The Sikh Nation's demand for an independent
Khalistan is irrevocable, irreversible, and non-negotiable.
But we are willing to sit down with the Indian regime anytime
to demarcate the boundaries of Khalistan. A peaceful
resolution to this issue is in India's interest. It is time
for India to recognize the inevitable and withdraw from
Khalistan and all the nations it brutally occupies.''
____
What Lay Behind the Air-India Disaster
(By David Kilgour)
This book will be received with hostility by External
Affairs Minister Joe Clark and his departmental advisers on
India, the Indian High Commission in Ottawa and segments of
the RCMP and CSIS. Canadians who cling to the romantic but
fast-fading notion that the present government in New Delhi
is a beacon of hope for a non-violent and democratic world
will also be skeptical.
Basing their conclusions partly on information leaked by
RCMP, CSIS and Metro Toronto Police investigators,
journalists Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew contend in
Soft Target that during most of the eighties senior Canadian
Cabinet ministers and their officials--who were obsessed with
winning the favor of the two Gandhi governments for trade,
Commonwealth and North-South reasons--were easily duped by
Indian agents operating within Canada. This manipulation,
begun partly because India's Congress I Party needed the
Sikhs as scapegoats to win votes on a law-and-order platform,
resulted in a large community of hard-working and
enterprising Canadians becoming estranged from both Ottawa
and a good deal of Canadian society.
A particularly refreshing feature of Soft Target is its
treatment of Sikhism, a 500-year-old faith few Canadians know
much about. The founder, Guru Nanak, believed in one God, a
classless democracy and equality of the sexes. A later guru
built the Golden Temple in Punjab, probably more spiritually
important to Sikhs worldwide than the Vatican to Catholics or
Mecca to Moslems. The last and most influential guru, Gobind
Singh, first persuaded many Sikhs to wear the turban and four
other faith symbols largely so that they could not deny their
religion when persecuted for it. The Sikh homeland, which
at its peak stretched from Tibet to Afghanistan, was lost
in 1839 when its ruler converted to Christianity and came
under the control of England's ubiquitous Queen Victoria.
The first Sikhs who in 1904 managed to settle on Canada's
West Coast, despite MacKenzie King's effort, as deputy labor
minister, to bar all Indian immigrants until 1947,
experienced much hardship. By the eighties, however, 200,000
to 250,000 Sikhs were prospering across Western and Central
Canada, when Indira Gandhi ordered the attack on the Golden
temple. She had first detained hundreds of suspected Sikh
separatists and, in 1981, unleashed a surveillance operation
against expatriate Khalistani supporters in Canada and
elsewhere.
Two cases examined here are the shooting of Toronto
policeman Chris Fernandes and the Air-India disaster. About
the Fernandes killing, the authors conclude that agents
provocateurs from the Toronto Indian consulate, seeking to
discredit Sikhs generally among Canadians, in effect
engineered the violence at the demonstration where Fernandes
was shot. The vice-consul had inflamed some of the
participants, had predicted in advance that violence might
break out and even hired a friend's son to photograph the
event. Canadian public opinion predictably sided with the
Indian and Canadian governments against the Sikhs.
The worst mass murder in Canadian history occurred near
Ireland for years ago, killing 329 Air-India passengers, many
of them Canadian citizens, and crew. Many people concluded
that Canadian Sikhs had
[[Page E 1890]]
placed a bomb on board, but a nation-wide investigation, costing an
estimated $60-million, has left the crime still unsolved.
According to Soft Target, some senior CSIS officials and
one RCMP officer eventually concluded that an Indian
intelligence service was probably the real culprit. After
all, a number of persons associated with the Indian
government had cancelled their reservations on the doomed
flight. And why did the Indian consul-general in Toronto have
a near-perfect account of what happened so soon after the
event?
Moreover, a similar bombing had occurred at the Madras
airport in southern India about a year earlier, most probably
caused by the Third agency, an Indian intelligence group
created in the early eighties to win support for Indira
Gandhi's government by encouraging Sikh extremists in Punjab.
One group at CSIS concluded from the exclusively
circumstantial evidence available that most likely the Third
agency ordered the bombing, knowing that suspicion would fall
on Sikhs generally and Canadian ones in particular. Another
CSIS group inferred that the planting of a bomb was not
authorized in New Delhi, but originated solely with local
security agents.
Some Canadians became convinced that Talwinder Singh
Parmar, head of a tiny extremist Sikh group based in
Vancouver, the Babbar Khalsa, was the Air-India murderer. The
RCMP, say Kashmeri and McAndrew, eventually decided that
Parmar was an agent of the government of India. They query
why, among numerous contradictions, a major financial backer
of Parmar in Vancouver received a $2 million loan from the
State Bank of India (Canada). By early 1989, Parmar had
disappeared, and Joe Clark finally ordered several Indian
diplomats to leave. Until then, as detailed carefully in Soft
Target, Clark and his officials had accommodated the Indian
government repeatedly in ways that seemed to have the effect
of poisoning the minds of Canadians against Sikhs.
This controversial book examines some important issues and
is largely convincing. All who want Ottawa to do the correct
thing for correct reasons in both domestic and foreign policy
should read it.
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