Exiled rebels

By Gurpreet Singh
The recent request for amnesty for Sikh rebels settled outside India by the country’s National Commission for Minorities (NCM) has raised hopes among blacklisted members of the community in British Columbia, and across Canada. These Sikhs have been denied entry to their home country for indulging in “anti-national” activities since 1984, the year in which political events in India galvanized the Sikh separatist movement across the world. As a result, the Indian government prepared a “blacklist” of Sikhs suspected of being involved in separatist activities in order to deny them entry to the country for security reasons.
NCM member Harcharan Singh Josh recently recommended that those Sikhs who “have realized their faults” and want to return to the “mainstream” shall be allowed to visit their homeland for the first time in nearly 25 years.
Although no official record is available to suggest how many Sikh rebels are on the blacklist, these migrants are now primarily settled in Canada, the U.S., Britain, France and Germany and number around 15,000, according to Josh.The now defunct South Asian Human Rights’ Group (SAHRG), which campaigned for the blacklistees’ cause, estimates that between 70 to 80 Sikhs living in Western Canada continue to be denied a visa and an Indian passport by the Indian government.
Among them is Surdev Singh Jatana of Abbotsford. He was associated with the now banned International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF). Jatana claims that he was never involved in violence, but was in the forefront of peaceful protests.“The situation has changed now and I wish to return to the mainstream,” Jatana told the South Asian Post.
Jatana, who is a former employee of Canada Post, became a member of the militant ISYF group following Operation Bluestar in June of 1984. There were angry protests in B.C. and across North America following the infamous military operation, which was launched to flush out extremists who had stockpiled weapons inside the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. The government-backed military operation resulted in massive destruction to the temple complex.
The army operation was linked to the Oct. 31, 1984 assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards. A wave of anti-Sikh violence subsequently swept India, alienating the Sikh community from the Indian mainstream and leaving nearly 3,000 innocent Sikhs dead.
The army operation and the subsequent anti-Sikh pogroms had a far reaching effect on the Sikh community in Canada, the U.S. and Europe, with a number of emotional Sikh men joining a movement for Khalistan, a separate homeland for the Sikhs.
Even in B.C., Sikh protesters stormed the Indian Consulate in downtown Vancouver in the weeks following the initial troubles in India.
Jatana came to Canada in 1969 and visited India twice before 1984. He says Operation Bluestar changed his life. He could not visit his ailing mother, who died in 2001.
Though he was granted amnesty in 2003 and was allowed to visit India following negotiations between the SAHRG and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party government, he was later blacklisted again and couldn’t visit India at the time of his brother’s death in 2004. The story of Kuldip Singh Malhi is similar. An editor of Surrey-based Phulwari, a Sikh cultural magazine, he has not been able to visit India since 1981. Malhi participated in the 1984 protest rally in Vancouver.
“My close relatives were also denied a visa because of my participation in the anti-India rallies,” he said.Like Jatana, Malhi was also associated with the ISYF and was once accused of assaulting a moderate Sikh in Surrey – although he was acquitted by the B.C. courts. His daughter is getting married in July this year and his family plans to visit India for shopping.“I won’t be able to join them although I wish to visit the place of my birth,” he lamented.SAHRG leader Harpal Singh Nagra recalled that the BJP government allowed 22 Sikhs to return to India in 2003.“Most of them had participated in the protest rallies and had nothing to do with violence, except three convicts, who were denied visas at the last moment,” he told the South Asian Post.
Since Operation Bluestar was blamed on the Congress Party, its opponent, the BJP has tried to woo the Sikh minority for political survival in Punjab. The BJP is a coalition partner in the current Punjab government led by the Akali Dal, the mainstream political party of the Sikh-dominated province.
Ironically, these overtures suffered a major jolt after the Congress regained power in India with Manmohan Singh, the country’s first Sikh Prime Minister. Singh rejected a demand to scrap the blacklist.
There are some die hard separatists, however, who are not impressed by such campaigns and do not even wish to apply for a visa to enter India. “It’s all drama,” said Satinderpal Singh Gill, a former member of the Panthic Committee, an umbrella group of the Sikh militants. “The Indian government continues to discriminate against the Sikhs.”Gill has not visited India since 1983. His father passed away in March this year, but he still did not apply for a visa. “Since the tenth master of the Sikhs had lost his father and four sons in his war against the Islamist Empire, we shall also be determined to suffer personal losses instead of begging for the mercy of the Indian state,” Gill opined.
Harcharan Singh Josh said in his amnesty-request report to the Indian government: “The migrants admitted that being disturbed by the Bluestar operation and the 1984 (anti-Sikh) riots in India, they joined extremist groups and terrorist camps.”
But many, he suggested, were simply young men caught up in the times.
“Now they are well settled in these countries and are financially supporting their families in India. They are separated from their families for the last 24 years and want to come back home,” he said.
Kashmir Singh Dhaliwal, the moderate president of Vancouver’s oldest Sikh temple on Ross Street, said that he welcomes the amnesty initiative, but only for those men who have “realized their mistakes.” He cautioned against a general pardon for those who continue to indulge in anti-India propaganda and politics of violence. The Indian government is currently reviewing the amnesty request.

Khalistani cause not forgotten in B.C
A decade of Sikh militancy began in the Indian border state of Punjab in the early 1980s and officially ended in 1993. The violence during this period claimed more than 25,000 lives.
The problem began with political and religious demands that brought a sense of alienation among the Sikhs. The full scale terrorist violence for the achievement of a separate homeland for the Sikhs was also supported by Pakistan, the country next door. With the return of normalcy, several top Khalistani ideologues have already returned to India.
Among them was the late Jagjit Singh Chauhan, who was running a Khalistan government-in-exile in the UK and opened a Khalistan consulate in Vancouver. Wassan Singh Zaffarwal, another top notch militant leader, has also returned to India, as has Didar Singh Bains, another Khalistani ideologue from the U.S.Although many Sikhs in Western countries have bid goodbye to the Khalistan cause, Indian officials believe a small section is still active. Indeed, a low intensity campaign for Khalistan continues in B.C. and other parts of Canada.
The pro-Khalistan management of the Dashmesh Durbar Sikh temple in Surrey recently organized special prayers for the assassins of the former military chief of India, A.S.Vaidya, who led Operation Bluestar against the holy Golden Temple. The two assassins, Harjinder Singh Jinda and Sukhdev Singh Sukha, were hanged in 1992.
The father of a Sikh prisoner who allegedly murdered a Punjab police spy was also honoured on this occasion. Hem Singh came from the U.S. to accept the “award” on behalf of his son, who allegedly burnt to death Ajit Singh Poohla, a Punjab police agent who was detained in Amritsar jail on human rights’ violations.

Singer Hans Raj Hans is SAD candidate for Jalandhar LS seat

Charanjit Singh Atwal (Fatehgarh Sahib),
Sukhdev singh Dhindsa (Sangrur),
Ratan Singh Ajnala (Khadoor Sahib)
JALANDHAR: Prominent Singer Padam Shree Hans Raj Hans on Sunday joined Shiromani Akali DAl (SAD) and party president Sukhbir Badal on Sunday announced Hans' candidature for Jalandhar (Reserve) parliamentary constituency"Hans Raj Hans has formally joined SAD today and he will be party's candidate from Jalandhar (reserve) constituency", Sukhbir, accompanied by Hans, announced at a Press Conference here. Hans has earned fame due to his voice at both national and international level and his joining SAD would not only fetch win for the party from Jalandhar but would definitely have positive impact on all 13 constituencies of the state, Badal claimed. Sukhbir also announced that till now four candidates have been selected including Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker Charanjit Singh Atwal (Fatehgarh Sahib), former Union Minister S S Dhindsa (Sangrur), and sitting MP Ratan Singh Ajnala (Khadoor Sahib) apart from Hans Raj Hans (Jalandhar). Remaining names of candidates would also be announced very soon, he added. Apprehending that parliamentary election would be held in the month of February, Sukhbir said that party was fully geared up to defeat the Congress in the state. Pointed out that BJP had rejected SAD's demand of 15 assembly seats in Delhi election, Junior Badal said "SAD-BJP enjoys strong relationship and it does not matter how many seats SAD is contesting but it is significant that it is for the first time SAD is contesting in Delhi assembly polls on its own symbol" On four seats in Delhi assembly elections SAD was contesting and on the remaining seats BJP has fielded its candidates, Sukhbir said adding that it was first time that BJP has aligned with any other political party to contest Delhi assembly elections.

Black in White House

How Barack Obama defied history

To measure fully the historical achievement of Barack Obama's victory it is worth recalling what America looked like in 1961, the year of his birth।

By Nick Bryant, BBC News, Washington
Back then, much of the American South remained segregated, the races separated from the cradle to the grave. Black people - or Negroes as they were known then - were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated school systems and buried in segregated graveyards.
Handed down in 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown decision, which called for the integration of southern schools, had been met in many southern communities with a campaign of "massive resistance". For segregationist die-hards it became the twisted metaphor of the age, as they fought to uphold a system of racial apartheid that was known by the deceptively friendly aphorism, Jim Crow.
Washington DC was regarded still as a hardship posting for African diplomats, despite the efforts of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to desegregate the nation's capital.
Restrictive covenants prevented them from living in the most fashionable parts of town, and they were denied service in the high-end barber shops.

Distance travelled
When they made the journey to the United Nations in New York, they travelled a road, Route 40, which was lined with segregated motels, diners and restaurants.
Back at the start of the 1960s, America's first black presidential aide, a former public relations man called E Frederic Morrow, published a memoir of his years working under Dwight D Eisenhower.
It was titled Black Man in the White House. It revealed how he was never allowed to be left alone in the same room as a white woman, such was the fear that he might sexually molest her.
On becoming president in 1961, Jack Kennedy made a series of senior black appointments. Still, the young president's most valued African-American aide was a man called George Thomas, whose job each morning was to lay out his clothes.
Leaving others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy, Barack Obama has not spoken much about the struggle for black equality, nor the tumultuous decade into which he was born.
Go through his speeches, and you will find little mention of the civil rights era.
For to become a history-defying candidate he has been something of a history-denying figure. The strategy throughout has been to de-emphasise his race.
A quirk of scheduling and a quantum leap of history meant that Mr Obama delivered his acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
But even then, Mr Obama did not mention Dr King by name, referring to him instead as the "young preacher from Georgia".

Black and white
Back in June, on the night when he finally saw off the challenge from Hillary Clinton, his celebration speech made no reference to his historic racial first, and noticeably he dedicated his victory to his white grandmother. Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama has emphasised his whiteness as much as his blackness. The president-elect understood one of the great paradoxes of the civil rights era. While it helped pave the way for his ultimate success, it also made it more difficult for northern candidates, like him, to win the presidency.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he told an aide: "We have lost the south for a generation". But he had miscalculated.
The once solid Democratic South - the Democrats used to be an unhappy alliance between Northern moderates and progressives, and southern segregationists - started to go reliably Republican in presidential elections.
Prior to 1964, the Democrats won six out of eight presidential elections. After 1964, they lost seven out of 10.

Achieving the impossible
The civil rights era was responsible for the great historical anomaly of US post-war politics: the process through which the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, established a stronghold in the states of the Old Confederacy.
It is no coincidence that every Democratic president since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has hailed from the south: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and, the die-hards would contest, Al Gore. The new law not only demolished segregation, but re-drew the US political map.
So it is worth remembering that Barack Obama will not only be the first African-American president, but the first Northern Democrat to serve in the White House since Kennedy.
To achieve this racial first represents the most extraordinary of achievements.
Since the end of Reconstruction - the period in the aftermath of the US civil war - there have been just three black US senators.
Only two states, Massachusetts and Virginia, have elected a black governor. With the election of a black president, what many considered the politically impossible has now become real.
On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of his dream for America, with the brooding statue of Abraham Lincoln offering the most glorious of pulpits.
On 20 January 2009, Barack Obama will appear on the west steps of the US Capitol, at the other end of the Washington Mall, and seal his historic triumph with just 35 words: the presidential oath of office.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality