[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 154 (Friday, September 29, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1889-E1890]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




[[Page E 1889]]


                ANNIVERSARY OF KHALISTAN'S INDEPENDENCE

                                 ______


                           HON. PETER T. KING

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 29, 1995

  Mr. KING. Mr. Speaker, on October 7, 1987, the Sikh Nation took its 
destiny into its own hands by declaring the independence of Khalistan. 
I am very pleased to salute the Sikhs of Khalistan on this anniversary.
  The Sikh Nation ruled Punjab in the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries and was supposed to receive its own country when the British 
freed India in 1947. Though promised by India that their freedom would 
be protected, those promises collapsed like a house of cards. As a 
result, no Sikh has ever signed the Indian constitution and the Sikh 
Nation has struggled ever since then to regain its sovereignty.
  I find it appropriate that as the anniversary of Khalistan's 
independence approaches, the government of Canada is re-opening its 
investigation into the 1985 explosion of an Air India jetliner which 
killed 329 people to determine if there was any involvement by the 
Indian government.
  In this light, American support for Khalistan's independence is 
crucial. I commend the Council of Khalistan for the work it is doing to 
free the Sikh Nation and I join my colleagues in congratulating the 
Sikh Nation on the anniversary of Khalistan's declaration of 
independence.
  I am placing into the record a review of Soft Target, the book that 
describes the Air India case, by David Kilgour, a Canadian Member of 
Parliament, and an article from Awaze Quam by Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, 
President of the Council of Khalistan.

                 Should The U.S. Be Trading With India?

       Washington.--Dr. Gurmit Singh Aulakh, President of the 
     Council of Khalistan, today condemned India's downing of its 
     own airliner ten years ago. June 23 marks the tenth 
     anniversary of the attack, which killed 329 people. ``This 
     was a tragic event,'' said Dr. Aulakh. The Sikh Nation 
     extends its deepest sympathies to the families of the 
     victims. This act was brutal terrorism in its most naked 
     form.
       Agents of the Indian regime openly blamed the Sikhs for the 
     attack even before it was known to the public that it had 
     happened. But in Soft Target, journalist Brian McAndrew of 
     the Toronto Star and Zuhair Kashmeri of the Toronto Globe and 
     Mail, show conclusively that the Indian regime blew up its 
     own airliner.
       In the book, an agent of the Canadian Security Intelligence 
     Service (CSIS) is quoted as saying ``If you really want to 
     clear the incidents quickly, take vans down to the Indian 
     High Commission and the consulates in Toronto and Vancourver, 
     load everybody up and take them down for questioning. We know 
     it and they know it that they are involved.'' According to 
     the book, the Indian consul general in Toronto, Surinder 
     Malik, identified and ``L. Singh'' whom Malik said was a Sikh 
     activist in Canada, as the culprit. This occurred when the 
     police had just found the passenger register. But according 
     to Kashmeri and McAndrew, Malik took his wife and daughter 
     off that flight shortly before it departed. An auto dealer 
     who was a friend of Malik's also cancelled his reservation at 
     the last minute.
       The book also reports that less than a year before the Air 
     India bombing, 29 people were killed and 32 injured in an 
     airplane bombing Madras which also appears to have been 
     planned by Indian Intelligence. According to Soft Target 
     ``CSIS found the similarities between the Madras plot and the 
     bombing--aboard Air Indian remarkable.'' Additionally, 
     according to Kashmeri and McAndrew, ``CSIS was astounded that 
     such similar plans could be hatched in opposite parts of the 
     world. It would not be so astounding though, if the plans 
     emanated from the same source--namely, from within the Indian 
     intelligence service.''
       ``Brutal terrorist acts like the Air India bombing should 
     prevent any country from receiving American aid or trade,'' 
     said Dr. Aulakj. ``Events like this only remind us that India 
     is a brutal tyrant which will stop at nothing to achieve its 
     aims. If America is a moral country, it must cut off all aid 
     to India.'' Dr. Aulakj said.
       Recently, India has emerged as a new U.S. business partner 
     despite evidence that it is collapsing. Several Swiss drug 
     companies pulled out last year due to the unstable market and 
     the Washington Post reported last fall that it takes the 
     average Indian three days pay just to buy a box of Corn 
     Flakes. Yet the U.S. and India have exchanged visits from 
     high-level officials in pursuit of increased trade between 
     India and the United States.
       The Indian regime has murdered over 120,000 Sikhs since 
     1984. It has also killed over 43,000 Kashmiri Muslims since 
     1988, over 150,000 Christians in Nagaland since 1947, and 
     tens of thousands of Assamese, Marupuris, and others. 
     According to the U.S. State Department, over 41,000 cash 
     bounties were paid to police officers between 1991 and 1993 
     for killing Sikhs.
       Many people are beginning to see the breakup of India as 
     inevitable. Dr. Jack Wheeler of Freedom Research Foundation, 
     who foresaw the Soviet breakup, predicted last year in the 
     newsletter Strategic Investment that within ten years, Indian 
     ``will cease to exist as we know (it).''
       On October 7, 1987, the Sikh nation declared the 
     independent country of Khalistan. No Sikh has ever signed the 
     Indian constitution. Sikh ruled Punjab from 1710 to 1716 and 
     from 1765 to 1849. In the February 1992 state elections in 
     Punjab, only 4 percent of the Sikhs there voted, according to 
     Indian Abroad. On December 26, former Member of Parliament 
     Simranjit Singh Mann spoke to a crowd of 50,000 Sikhs calling 
     for a peaceful, democratic, nonviolent movement to liberate 
     Khalistan. He asked those attending to raise their hands if 
     they supported freedom for Khalistan. All 50,000 did so. For 
     that speech he was arrested on January 5 under the new-
     expired Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA), 
     despite the fact that the Punjab and Haryana High Court has 
     ruled that speaking out for Khalistan is not a crime. Mr. 
     Mann remains in illegal detention in a windowless cell after 
     more than five months.
       ``The continuing detention of Sardar Mann shows how 
     frightened India is of an idea,'' said Dr. Aulakh. ``Just 
     talking about freedom for Khalistan terrifies the brutal 
     tyrants of New Delhi. But freedom for Khalistan and all the 
     nations living under brutal Indian occupation is 
     inevitable,'' said Dr. Aulakh.
       ``India is not one nation,'' he said, ``It is a 
     conglomeration of many nations thrown together for 
     administrative purposes by the British. It is last vestige of 
     colonialism. With 18 official language, India is doomed to 
     disintegrate just as the former Soviet Union did.'' Dr. 
     Aulakh said, ``The Sikh Nation's demand for an independent 
     Khalistan is irrevocable, irreversible, and non-negotiable. 
     But we are willing to sit down with the Indian regime anytime 
     to demarcate the boundaries of Khalistan. A peaceful 
     resolution to this issue is in India's interest. It is time 
     for India to recognize the inevitable and withdraw from 
     Khalistan and all the nations it brutally occupies.''
                                                                    ____


                 What Lay Behind the Air-India Disaster

                           (By David Kilgour)

       This book will be received with hostility by External 
     Affairs Minister Joe Clark and his departmental advisers on 
     India, the Indian High Commission in Ottawa and segments of 
     the RCMP and CSIS. Canadians who cling to the romantic but 
     fast-fading notion that the present government in New Delhi 
     is a beacon of hope for a non-violent and democratic world 
     will also be skeptical.
       Basing their conclusions partly on information leaked by 
     RCMP, CSIS and Metro Toronto Police investigators, 
     journalists Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew contend in 
     Soft Target that during most of the eighties senior Canadian 
     Cabinet ministers and their officials--who were obsessed with 
     winning the favor of the two Gandhi governments for trade, 
     Commonwealth and North-South reasons--were easily duped by 
     Indian agents operating within Canada. This manipulation, 
     begun partly because India's Congress I Party needed the 
     Sikhs as scapegoats to win votes on a law-and-order platform, 
     resulted in a large community of hard-working and 
     enterprising Canadians becoming estranged from both Ottawa 
     and a good deal of Canadian society.
       A particularly refreshing feature of Soft Target is its 
     treatment of Sikhism, a 500-year-old faith few Canadians know 
     much about. The founder, Guru Nanak, believed in one God, a 
     classless democracy and equality of the sexes. A later guru 
     built the Golden Temple in Punjab, probably more spiritually 
     important to Sikhs worldwide than the Vatican to Catholics or 
     Mecca to Moslems. The last and most influential guru, Gobind 
     Singh, first persuaded many Sikhs to wear the turban and four 
     other faith symbols largely so that they could not deny their 
     religion when persecuted for it. The Sikh homeland, which 
     at its peak stretched from Tibet to Afghanistan, was lost 
     in 1839 when its ruler converted to Christianity and came 
     under the control of England's ubiquitous Queen Victoria.
       The first Sikhs who in 1904 managed to settle on Canada's 
     West Coast, despite MacKenzie King's effort, as deputy labor 
     minister, to bar all Indian immigrants until 1947, 
     experienced much hardship. By the eighties, however, 200,000 
     to 250,000 Sikhs were prospering across Western and Central 
     Canada, when Indira Gandhi ordered the attack on the Golden 
     temple. She had first detained hundreds of suspected Sikh 
     separatists and, in 1981, unleashed a surveillance operation 
     against expatriate Khalistani supporters in Canada and 
     elsewhere.
       Two cases examined here are the shooting of Toronto 
     policeman Chris Fernandes and the Air-India disaster. About 
     the Fernandes killing, the authors conclude that agents 
     provocateurs from the Toronto Indian consulate, seeking to 
     discredit Sikhs generally among Canadians, in effect 
     engineered the violence at the demonstration where Fernandes 
     was shot. The vice-consul had inflamed some of the 
     participants, had predicted in advance that violence might 
     break out and even hired a friend's son to photograph the 
     event. Canadian public opinion predictably sided with the 
     Indian and Canadian governments against the Sikhs.
       The worst mass murder in Canadian history occurred near 
     Ireland for years ago, killing 329 Air-India passengers, many 
     of them Canadian citizens, and crew. Many people concluded 
     that Canadian Sikhs had 

[[Page E 1890]]
     placed a bomb on board, but a nation-wide investigation, costing an 
     estimated $60-million, has left the crime still unsolved.
       According to Soft Target, some senior CSIS officials and 
     one RCMP officer eventually concluded that an Indian 
     intelligence service was probably the real culprit. After 
     all, a number of persons associated with the Indian 
     government had cancelled their reservations on the doomed 
     flight. And why did the Indian consul-general in Toronto have 
     a near-perfect account of what happened so soon after the 
     event?
       Moreover, a similar bombing had occurred at the Madras 
     airport in southern India about a year earlier, most probably 
     caused by the Third agency, an Indian intelligence group 
     created in the early eighties to win support for Indira 
     Gandhi's government by encouraging Sikh extremists in Punjab. 
     One group at CSIS concluded from the exclusively 
     circumstantial evidence available that most likely the Third 
     agency ordered the bombing, knowing that suspicion would fall 
     on Sikhs generally and Canadian ones in particular. Another 
     CSIS group inferred that the planting of a bomb was not 
     authorized in New Delhi, but originated solely with local 
     security agents.
       Some Canadians became convinced that Talwinder Singh 
     Parmar, head of a tiny extremist Sikh group based in 
     Vancouver, the Babbar Khalsa, was the Air-India murderer. The 
     RCMP, say Kashmeri and McAndrew, eventually decided that 
     Parmar was an agent of the government of India. They query 
     why, among numerous contradictions, a major financial backer 
     of Parmar in Vancouver received a $2 million loan from the 
     State Bank of India (Canada). By early 1989, Parmar had 
     disappeared, and Joe Clark finally ordered several Indian 
     diplomats to leave. Until then, as detailed carefully in Soft 
     Target, Clark and his officials had accommodated the Indian 
     government repeatedly in ways that seemed to have the effect 
     of poisoning the minds of Canadians against Sikhs.
       This controversial book examines some important issues and 
     is largely convincing. All who want Ottawa to do the correct 
     thing for correct reasons in both domestic and foreign policy 
     should read it.

                          ____________________