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- Uday Singh, in his Caledon home where the living room doubles as his office, continues to advocate for an independen Sikh homeland.
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This all comes mere weeks before the 25th anniversary of the June 23, 1985, Air India bombing — Canada's worst mass murder — and on the heels of meetings between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Singh has expressed concern about growing support by Canadian Sikhs for militants in India.
Most Sikhs worldwide long ago abandoned the notion of Khalistan, a separate Sikh state. But community leaders here acknowledge evidence that separatism is festering in Canada, believed to have the largest Sikh diaspora in the world. Some fear that extremist views offering a distorted view of what happened in Punjab years ago are influencing second-generation Sikh immigrants.
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Yudhvir Jaswal, host of the Mississauga radio show South Asian Pulse and editor of Mid-Week News Weekly, said impressionable youth are being led astray. “The movement is dead ... long dead in India,” said Jaswal, who left India nine years ago. “But some people, a very tiny minority, have kept it alive here and divided the community.”
Others defend the diaspora's right to peacefully campaign for a separate homeland.
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Between the late '70s and early '90s, thousands of Sikhs, many involved in the push for a homeland, immigrated to the U.S., England and Canada.
In India, the movement for a separate state largely evaporated in the early 1990s after it lost support of a majority of Sikhs, who were tired of the senseless violence.
- “They are misleading youngsters and giving them wrong information. It scares me — what they teach at these places,” said Mann. Giving wall space to photos of alleged martyrs and celebrating their birthdays also creates fissures in the community, he added. “These are divisive activities.”
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