Sikh & India (Alleged) Shenanigans in Canada (split fm Non-Muslim terr thread)

[Kirkhill]

I wonder if some folks left JT to swing in the breeze for a while to ponder life, the universe and everything.

 

[Kirkhill]

Two personal anecdotes.

Father-in-law served in corvettes. His daughter-in-law's father served in U-boats.
My boss served in the Fallschirmjaeger. His subordinate supervisor served in the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Both served on Monte Cassino the same days.

I could toss in a couple of others.

 

[dimsum]

Two personal anecdotes.

Father-in-law served in corvettes. His daughter-in-law's father served in U-boats.
My boss served in the Fallschirmjaeger. His subordinate supervisor served in the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Both served on Monte Cassino the same days.

I could toss in a couple of others.

I know a guy whose maternal grandfather served in the “Desert Rats” in British Army, and whose paternal grandfather served in the Afrika Corps.

There was a non-zero chance they shot at each other.

 

[Good2Golf]

Meanwhile, in Canada

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2266032707786

Am I the only one wondering if Canada just openly admitted to spying on foreign diplomatic communications, or if they were given signals intelligence from an ally, and so claiming demonstrates a lesser appreciation of the nuances of intelligence and stewardship of national interests and security?

 

[Kirkhill]

Am I the only one wondering if Canada just openly admitted to spying on foreign diplomatic communications, or if they were given signals intelligence from an ally, and so claiming demonstrates a lesser appreciation of the nuances of intelligence and stewardship of national interests and security?

I couldn't help wondering if the info came directly from AUKUS or it was relayed through NZ.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

G2G, if you could find a country that doesn't spy on foreign diplomats - other than Iceland and Costs Rica - I would be very surprised.

And note here that the "leak" seem to be from civil servants, not an elected official. If the original info came from another member of the five eyes, I suspect that a Canadian ambassador is about to be called in for a private meeting with the government of the foreign country he/she is posted to.

 

[OldSolduer]

Am I the only one wondering if Canada just openly admitted to spying on foreign diplomatic communications, or if they were given signals intelligence from an ally, and so claiming demonstrates a lesser appreciation of the nuances of intelligence and stewardship of national interests and security?

Everybody spies on everybody even at the local level- neighbors do. That’s how police etc get the dirt on individuals.

 

[OldSolduer]

IIRC there was a book written by a former SS officer and apparently after WW2 a shit ton of Germans joined the French Foreign Legion and were sent to Indochina. The Devils Guard I think it was called. The Viet Minh didn’t like them….

 

[Humphrey Bogart]

IIRC there was a book written by a former SS officer and apparently after WW2 a shit ton of Germans joined the French Foreign Legion and were sent to Indochina. The Devils Guard I think it was called. The Viet Minh didn’t like them….

Yes and Algeria. The FFL actually has a couple of German SS Marching songs.

The SS Vets had a VERY BAD time at Dien Bien Phu.

 

[OldSolduer]

Yes and Algeria. The FFL actually has a couple of German SS Marching songs.

The SS Vets had a VERY BAD time at Dien Bien Phu.

Everybody had a bad time se Dien Bien Phu

 

[FSTO]

IIRC there was a book written by a former SS officer and apparently after WW2 a shit ton of Germans joined the French Foreign Legion and were sent to Indochina. The Devils Guard I think it was called. The Viet Minh didn’t like them….

I used to have that book. There was some dispute as to the truthfulness of the author.

 

[Good2Golf]

Everybody spies on everybody even at the local level- neighbors do. That’s how police etc get the dirt on individuals.

…but most don’t go blathering about it to everyone…

 

[Kirkhill]

Meanwhile, per the incomparable Terry Glavin

Maayyybeee....

Do you think Indian agents did it?
​

I’m going to get into some background below to help subscribers make up their own minds about this question. I’m going to get my own answer out of the way right here because it’s the big question people have been asking me all week. There’s another important question that’s just as important that nobody’s asking out loud, but we’ll wait a moment for that.

For starters, it would be nearly impossible for there not to be what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has coyly described as a “potential link” between Indian government agents and the gangland-style killing of Khalistani militant Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18 outside the Guru Nanak Temple in Surrey, B.C., where Nijjar served as president.

For reasons I’ll get into below, there are crowd of “agents” and informants that India’s Research and Analysis Wing relies on have been present in Canada’s Sikh temples for years, and understandably so. And they were very, very busy in the lead-up to Nijjar’s murder.

The “Indian agents killed Nijjar” proposition is also easily understood as plausible if you define the term “Indian government agents” in the typically loose way the Khalistanis use it - a verbal cue Trudeau may have picked up from the Khalistanis themselves. Among these so-called “agents” are the associates of hardcore Khalistani geezers from the old days who have come in from the cold and thrown in their lot with Modi. They can be quite trigger-happy and they do not abide backchat.

Also, while Trudeau referred only to “allegations” which he called “credible,” you’ll get completely thrown off track if you hype “allegations” to mean “evidence,” as some of my colleagues in the news media have done. It’s complicated too by the practice of intelligence agencies to sometimes classify “allegations” as “intelligence.”

So there’s all that. But it’s also plausible that Narendra Modi’s government has simply had quite enough of the constant and terrifying background noise of Khalistani violence in India, and with Ottawa’s indifference to the rising spectre of Khalistanis using Canada as a safe haven to drag India back into the horrific bloodshed of the 1980s.

Maybe this, or maybe that? Maybe lots of things, all at once.
​

It has not been Delhi’s custom to engage in clandestine overseas operations targeting terrorists. Maybe that’s changing. Maybe Modi is becoming something like a post-Munich Golda Meir, with his very own, scaled-down Wrath of God policy.

Unhelpfully paranoid speculation along these lines has been making the rounds at the fringes of the Sikh diaspora for a while, but there’s been some suggestive evidence for it lately. The notion is gaining some respectability. Avinash Paliwal, from the international relations faculty of Soas University of London, says it’s plausible: “India might just be, or is, the new Israel.”

But to consider whether there’s any truth to it, it’s necessary to be disabused of the commonplace idiocy that the Khalistanis merely represent some popular non-violent movement favoring a sovereignty-association arrangement of some sort between Punjab state and the Republic of India.

The “Khalistan” proposition is vehemently opposed by the Sikhs of Punjab and animated in no small measure by Pakistan’s sinister Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) vampires. It is explicitly intended to open a giant crater in Northern India. It would leave Punjab’s historic territory inside Pakistan’s borders undisturbed but take in all of India’s Punjab, along with Haryana and Himachal Pradesh and chunks of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The plan is to ultimately “Balkanize” the Indian subcontinent, as Nijjar’s Sikhs For Justice puts it.

Then again, maybe the unconscionable rule-breaking audacity Trudeau has attributed to Modi is just Trudeau changing the foreign-interference channel from the damning evidence against him in the matter of his occluded affinities with the Being-aligned Mandarin bloc in Canada. On the “foreign interference” front, Trudeau has now shifted the spotlight entirely from Beijing’s monkeywrenching operations on the Liberals’ behalf in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

Maybe Trudeau jumped the shark on Monday because he knew the Globe and Mail was preparing a story about the “allegations” regarding Nijjar’s murder and he needed to conjure something to excuse the laughing stock he made of himself at the G20 in Delhi, and to explain why Modi had treated him like an annoying teenager.

Maybe Trudeau is so desperate about his minority government’s rapid drop in the polls, and about the prospect of support tipping too far in the direction of his coalition partner Jagmeet Singh, that he’s just opted to do some crazy, attention-getting thing that he and only he can tell us about.

Maybe a lot of things, but the sole source of Monday’s sensational story, all these days later, remains Justin Trudeau himself. That’s just one of the reasons why it’s necessary to comprehend this story very, very carefully, and to allow for cautions and caveats, no matter how much buzzkill a sober reading will introduce into such an exciting “narrative.”

What Trudeau is alleging would be a very big deal indeed, “if proven true,” as Trudeau’s own foreign affairs minister, Melanie Joly, let slip the other day.

And

"if proven true..."

A gulf becomes a chasm. The chasm becomes a sinkhole.
​

It’s necessary to understand that a vast gulf of distrust has been separating senior officials in India’s national security and intelligence establishment from their Canadian counterparts, from times long predating Trudeau’s assumption of power in 2015.

It goes all the way back to the prologue to the 1984 Air India atrocity. Indira Gandhi’s government and India’s high commissioners in Ottawa and India’s Research and Analysis Wing had grown hoarse warning about the Khalistanis who were operating in Canada, openly. They still are.

The Air India bombing was plotted, planned and executed in this country, under the noses of the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, by characters Canada had refused to extradite to India. The subsequent investigations were such a shambles that only one man, Inderjit Singh Reyat, went to jail for it.

There are currently at least ten individuals India wants extradited from Canada. One of them is the SFJ’s Gurpreet Singh Pannun. I’ll be coming to him in a bit.

For reasons I’ve explained in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen, and in this newsletter’s Khalistan series over the summer and in the Times of India this weekend, this gulf of distrust dramatically widened and deepened after Trudeau settled into the Prime Minister’s Office in 2015.

My case was confirmed this weekend by no less a figure than Omer Aziz. He was a key policy adviser in Trudeau’s shop starting in 2017, while working as a top official in the Foreign Minister’s office. “From the first briefing, it was clear that India-Canada relations were headed in the wrong direction,” Aziz writes in the Globe and Mail.

“Canada should have at least begun to take steps to ensure our land was not used for terrorist financing. . . The only problem was, Mr. Trudeau did not want to lose the Sikh vote to [NDP leader] Jagmeet Singh. So we dug in our heels.”

Now that is a genuinely ‘bombshell’ admission. I’ll resist the urge to say ‘I told you so’ (although I kinda just did there, sorry).

You could quibble with bits of Omer’s tell-all but everything’s there. At the very top of the Liberal government, he writes, “we could hardly focus on foreign policy and strategy without factoring in which ridings might be lost because a certain group might be upset.”

The whirlwind Canada has reaped is “the worst of all possible worlds,” says Omer Aziz. Trudeau has now shattered Canada’s relationship with India and threatened to open a rift in the U.S.-led western alliance. Which is what I wrote in the Times of India this weekend.

The 2018 India-Canada security agreement Trudeau agreed to sign, so as to attempt a costume-change during the self-inflicted humiliation of his magical mystery fashion-show across India that year, did nothing to resolve matters.

As of this week, that 40-year-old gulf became a chasm that threatens to undermine the struts holding up vital diplomatic undertakings that U.S. President Joe Biden had been hoping Modi would join to defend against the contemporary Molotov-Ribbentrop entente between Moscow and Beijing.

It’s like a giant sinkhole now. Over the past week it’s swallowed up the entire centrepiece of Ottawa’s Indo-Pacific Strategy. The Canada-India free trade talks, 12 years in the making, are comatose. Nobody is willing to guess when the talks might be revived, if ever. More than 80,000 Canadians visit India every year, but India’s external affairs ministry has now stopped issuing visas in Canada altogether, indefinitely.

Despite the avalanche of journalistic attention paid to the story and its fallout, despite some solid reporting about intelligence-sharing among and between Canada’s “Five Eyes” partners, Justin Trudeau’s central proposition remains unverifiable and unfalsifiable.

The reporting reasonably affirms that some of Canada’s allies have been saying reassuring things to Trudeau and badgering Modi about what the hell is really going on.

Despite the accounts from reputable journalists like the CBC’s Evan Dyer (unfortunately tabloidized by CBC’s editors) about Canadian spies eavesdropping on Indian diplomats, and the CBC’s reliance on important-sounding terms like SIGINT (signals intelligence, ordinarly meaning wiretaps or digital information) and HUMINT (human intelligence, also known as stuff people say), nothing changes this:

We’re still going solely on Trudeau’s claim about “allegations” which may indeed be credible, “if proven true,” as Joly put it, which happen to be the same allegations anyone who has been paying attention has been hearing from the Khalistani side, ever since Nijjar got whacked.

The worst of all possible worlds.

A U.S.-led global strategy on confronting Beijing: suckerpunched. Canada's Indo-Pacific Strategy: gutted. And the Khalistanis haven't been this emboldened since Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984.

therealstory.substack.com

 

[Kirkhill]

Follow up

Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and lies​

​

It’s bad enough that so many Canadian journalists have simply accepted that what they are taking as Trudeau’s word for it really is true. But that’s just bad form. “We are simply laying out the facts as we understand them," Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday. By the end of the tumultuous week, Trudeau still hadn’t offered any facts.

More importantly, can we please stop calling the militant Khalistani Sikhs for Justice outfit - first out of the blocks with the Modi-Did-It claim - a “human rights” group? Here’s a sad example of the mainstream media doing just that, among other things.

And can we at least stop referring to Nijjar’s confidante and SFJ boss Gurpreet (Gurpatwant) Singh Pannun (sometimes spelled Pannu) as some sort of “activist” who also happens to have been Nijjar’s lawyer? He’s a lot more than that, as well shall see.

It’s not just that by June 18 Pannun and Nijjar were both named in about 30 terrorism and subversion cases prepared by Indian law enforcement agencies, or that Pannun’s SFJ is a terror-listed organization in India. Or that Nijjar was among the ten accused terrorists India wanted extradited, from that list Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh presented to Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan during Trudeau’s squeamish-making 2018 Indian sojourn.

In British Columbia’s gurudwaras, Nijjar’s murder was widely understood to have been revenge for the gangland-style slaying of Bagri’s former associate, the Babbar Khalsa lieutenant Ripudaman Singh Malik, on July 14, 2022. Malik was one of those so-called “Indian government agents” who’d seen the error of his ways and come around to Modi’s camp. Nijjar’s crowd loathed Malik’s crowd. The feeling was mutual.

Buy a subscription ....

 

[Kirkhill]

Worth watching in my opinion. The Indian version of Sandi Rinaldo and Lisa Laflamme?

8:56.

Interesting that Jagmeet is identified not as a Sikh but a Khalistani.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Interesting that Jagmeet is identified not as a Sikh but a Khalistani.

One is religion, one is "nationality" ?

 

[Kirkhill]

One is religion, one is "nationality" ?

Sounds like.
Fenian? IZL? Provo?

 

[Eaglelord17]

One is religion, one is "nationality" ?

Sounds like the difference between a Jew and a Israeli.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Good question. One would assume a cursory background check would have been done.

Come on, man!

There is no known technology on earth where you can type a person’s name into a computer and a micro-second later be rewarded with information on them.

Whoever invents that, is going to make a mint….

 

[Kirkhill]

Ujjal Dosanjh being interviewed by Brian Lilley.

Trudeau not a serious statesman.
Cartoonish trip to India.
Not respected by the international community at large and India in particular.

Jagmeet a Khalistani
A friendly country would treat the Khalistanis the way that the IRA fundraisers were treated - arrested and imprisoned.
Jagmeet gives India no comfort.
Canadian politicians have been dodging India's extradition requests since the days of Pierre Trudeau, pre-dating the Air India bombing.
India requested the extradition of the bombers before the bombing.
Conservatives have played the same politics.

Ujjal is asking for proof. He wants to believe the Prime Minister because he is the Prime Minister
But
The RCMP is still wandering around Vancouver with photographs asking the locals to help identify the people in the pictures.

Two scenarios are plausible:
Indian assassination
Internecine Khalistani warfare.

Pre-empting a Globe and Mail article is not sufficient reason for a statesman to open this can of worms.

Ujjal knows Sikhs, he is one, and he knows Khalistanis, he was beaten by them. He also knows India. He is from Punjab and recently visited there and continues to see no sign ot Khalistani organization or support.

He doesn't like Modi but Canada has had opportunities to support other Indian PMs who wanted to maintain India as the secular state Gandhi created with Nehru and instead Canada has supported Khalistanis for party political reasons.

No Canadian politician, let alone Canadian Prime Minister, has ever come out and said "We don't support separatism. We don't support Khalistan".

The equivalent is the French harbouring FLQ sympathisers like DeGaulle and not condemning separatism. Or the Irish supporting Sinn Fein and pretending there is no connection with the IRA.

Canada has not put the Khalistani movement on the terrorist list despite the 1985 Air India bombing.

Trudeau isn’t being taken seriously about India: Full Comment podcast

Ujjal Dosanjh joins Brian Lilley to explain what’s really going on with the allegations and how Ottawa undermined Canada’s global reputation

nationalpost.com

And just like the Provos, and the UVF, the believers fund their organizations through crime.

Remembering Air India Flight 182

Remembering Air India Flight 182

www.publicsafety.gc.ca

Glorification of terrorism legal here: Canadian journalist on Khalistan movement

Senior Canadian journalist Terry Milewski said that it was normal and legal to praise an extremist in Canada while referring to the Khalistan movement in the country.

www.indiatoday.in

Khalistan movement is headed for a brick wall: Terry Milewski - The Sunday Guardian Live

The Canadian author of the book, ‘Blood for Blood: 50 years of the Global Khalistan Project’, spoke to The Sunday Guardian. New Delhi With separatist

sundayguardianlive.com

MLI Releases “Khalistan: A Project of Pakistan”: New MLI Publication By Terry Milewski | Macdonald-Laurier Institute

In a new MLI publication, “Khalistan: A Project of Pakistan,” journalist Terry Milewski delves into the Khalistan movement and the ties to Pakistan.

macdonaldlaurier.ca

As for Jagmeet Singh, it is not his gold watch and expensive suits that the Indians comment on. It is that big saffron turban. That is like a red rag to a bull or the IRA wearing green. It is a sign of allegiance to the Khalistani cause.