The Justin Trudeau government apparently removed references to Khalistani extremism in a report on terror threats to Canada because of a warning that leaders of the ruling Liberal Party wouldn\u2019t be allowed to speak at parades marking Baisakhi, the Punjabi harvest festival.
Pressure from sections of the Sikh community had mounted on the government over references to Khalistani extremism in Public Safety Canada\u2019s report released last December.Last week, the government released an updated version of the report that removed all mention of Sikh and Khalistani extremism, much to the chagrin of India.
With federal elections due in October, \u2018nagar kirtans\u2019 or parades are considered prime locations for politicians to reach out to tens of thousands of voters. For instance, the Baisakhi event at Surrey in British Columbia attracts almost 500,000. And its organisers decided that Liberal Party leaders would be banned from speaking at the massive Khalsa Day observation.
\u201cI definitely think the decision we made as a collective had an impact, otherwise we would not have seen such a quick response within 36 hours by the Liberal government,\u201d said Moninder Singh, president of Gurdwara Sahib Dasmesh Darbar and one of the principal organisers of the event in Surrey.
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April is the month for nagar kirtans across Canada, \nwith some events stretching into the early weekends of May. There was \nconcern within Liberal Party circles of a domino effect, across cities \nand provinces. Singh confirmed his group had \u201cstarted discussions for \nother nagar kirtans in Calgary, Toronto and Montreal to follow suit as \nwell\u201d.Prime Minister Trudeau attended a nagar kirtan in Vancouver less \nthan 24 hours after the decision to remove all references to Khalistani \nextremism from the report was made and the changes were in place.
The\n Liberals also received a scare recently when a slate backed by fathers \nof two major figures of the Sikh community, cabinet minister Navdeep \nBains and MP Ruby Sahota, was soundly defeated in elections to the \nmanagement of Ontario Khalsa Darbar in the Greater Toronto Area .
As\n Singh said, \u201cThere was consistent pressure from many different places \nthat pushed this through and forced the Liberal government to take a \nstrong look at the type of language they had used and agree that it was \nmaligning and would not be used in future.\u201d
Veteran GTA-based \njournalist Balraj Deol agreed: \u201cThis was a victory for Khalistani \ngroups. Removing it [the references] is a political decision. It\u2019s not a\n security agency assessment. This happened because of pressure of \nKhalistanis they control most of the gurdwaras that hold parades.\u201d
London-based\n activist Jasdev Singh Rai, who has been in talks with the Narendra Modi\n government to resolve issues of overseas Sikhs since 2015, said there \nwas \u201cfrustration and anger\u201d among Sikhs worldwide over Canada labelling \n\u201cSikhs as extremists and terrorists\u201d. There was also anger that this was\n done when Canada had Sikhs at the highest levels of government, \nincluding in security. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Justin Trudeau government apparently removed references to Khalistani extremism in a report on terror threats to Canada because of a warning that leaders of the ruling Liberal Party wouldn\u2019t be allowed to speak at parades marking Baisakhi, the Punjabi harvest festival. Pressure from sections of the Sikh community had mounted on the government over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59337,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59335\/revisions\/59337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}