Ripudaman Singh Malik's Assassination Puts The Spotlight Back On Canada's Worst Kept Secret

Ripudaman Singh Mallik, a man with presumably many hats, was assassinated on Thursday, 14 July, in Brampton, Surrey, of Canada. Having earned millions through his Khalsa Credit Union, Ripudaman Singh Malik had actually been accused of being a key figure in the conspiracy behind the Air India Bombings of 1985 as ‘revenge’ for Operation Blue Star.

Investigations are on, and there are theories ranging from rival Khalistani elements to Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) having murdered Malik for ‘betraying’ the Khalistani cause and supporting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Punjab assembly elections. After all, Ripudaman had been closely associated with Talwinder Singh Parmar, the alleged mastermind of the Air India bombing. Parmar headed one of the Babbar Khalsa factions before being killed by the Punjab Police in 1992.

It was disconcerting to see Paramjit Singh Sarna, a candidate for heading the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), calling him a community leader and whitewashing his strong association and contribution to Khalistani elements. This targeted killing of Ripudaman Singh Malik only ended up bringing back painful memories for a number of victims who lost their loved ones in Air India bombing, and did not receive any justice.

The South China Morning Post reported one of the survivors telling news agencies that the shooting “just brings back all the horrible memories we’d had to go through for the last 37 years”. What it however has also done is to bring the spotlight back on to Canada’s worst kept secret of being a hotbed for Khalistani terror networks.

While he was acquitted in 2005 by the Canadian judicial system, serious accusations of negligence, evidence destruction and inability to protect witnesses emerged with the Justice Major Commission that had castigated the Canadian administrations over two decades of outright disrespect of the victims and the negligence of their families, forcing the then Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper at one stage to apologize to the victims’ families in 2010. That apology and the memorial built for the victims mean little however to this day to the victims’ families, for whom the nightmare just does not seem to end.

If the shameful and shoddy investigation were not enough, the influence of the Khalistani sympathisers and associates on Canada’s politics has only grown over the years. If vote bank politics were an art, Canada’s political class are its greatest masters, putting India’s self styled secularists to shame. The influence of the ‘vote bank’ today is so strong that people are being actively involved to the extent of influencing political parties to the point of silence.

Terry Milewski, the Canadian journalist who has been rather vocal on this for nearly two decades and now associated with the MacDonald Laurier Institute, had alluded to this in a 2007 investigative feature for Canada Broadcasting Corporation. The same journalist, who has also detailed much of this in his book Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project, had also exposed this rather vice-like grip across parties when he cornered National Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh on the question of condemning Talwinder Singh Parmar.

However, little changed even after that. Justin Trudeau was caught in cahoots with the Khalistani elements, as his aides were caught in the controversy of inviting a convicted terrorist Jaspal Atwal. Atwal and three other men were convicted of attempted murder for the 1986 attack on Akali Dal leader Malkiat Singh Sidhu, who was visiting relatives on Vancouver Island at the time.

However, not much has changed, given how there has not been much movement in either cracking down on these elements or sidelining them out of Canada’s politics. If that was not enough to frost relations between India and Canada, the statements made around farmer protests by Justin Trudeau at the egging of Khalistani activists and the social media trends paid for by Khalistani elements living in Canada continue to remain unaddressed by Canada.

There seems to be a thaw though, given how the first bilateral meeting between Trudeau and PM Modi took place on the sidelines of the G7 summit in June this year. There have been steps in recent times, as the statement coming after the meeting indicates, related to “cooperation in security and counterterrorism”.

One such measure of note would not be so direct but which nonetheless has a strong bearing on Khalistani terror financing - in 2021, the York Regional Police led the dismantling of an international drug trafficking network in a multi-police agency probe dubbed Project Cheetah. The bust took place in Brampton, where Malik in fact lived.

However, it remains to be seen if there will be any effort to break the grip of these elements on Canada’s politics and address India’s concerns by the present dispensation. Till then, Canada will continue to be a host of such hostile elements that will only hijack its diplomatic efforts with India and prevent it from benefiting with a partnership with one of the world’s largest markets.