The sikhs between the Khalistan and the charter

Fatima Houda-Pepin

Tuesday, 6 march 2018 05:00

UPDATE
Tuesday, 6 march, 2018 06:37

Look at this article

The sikhs would be 27 million worldwide, including 21 million in India, mainly in Punjab. In Canada, they represent only 1.4% of the population, but comprise four ministers important in the government of Justin Trudeau.

From the beginning of the 20th century (see my review from yesterday), they are endowed with a community structure, based on religious foundations, temples (gurdwaras), which are also used for religious festivals and for the mobilisation against discrimination in immigration.

You don’t fool around with the religion

The racism to which they were subjected led them to becoming the champions of the defence of rights. This is by far the visible minority group is better equipped in that regard. At the time of repatriation of the canadian constitution in 1982, leaders, sikhs had campaigned, with success, to convince the government of PE Trudeau to introduce, in the canadian Charter of rights, the famous claude interpretative on multiculturalism.

In 1994, the federal Court had recognised a policeman, sikh the right to wear his turban in the royal Canadian mounted police. It is also the case for the canadian army. In 2006, the supreme Court had given reason to a young sikh of 12 years, which required the wearing of a kirpan (dagger) in a Montreal school. However, last February, the Court of appeal of Quebec has dismissed four members of the World Sikh Organization, which had sued the national Assembly for them to have refused access to the precincts of the Parliament, with a kirpan. This is to be followed.

Give a country

At the dawn of India’s independence, the sikhs were dreaming to regain the empire that they had left the maharajah Ranjit Singh. But their hopes of a Punjab autonomous within a “India united” have been betrayed.

Thus was born, in 1940, the idea of an independent country, Khalistan, and with it decades of terror, of massacres and terrorist acts like the bombing of Air India flight 182, from Montreal to Mumbai, which exploded, on June 23, 1985, over the Atlantic, killing 329 people dead.

It goes without saying that the immigrant communities do not leave their conflicts at the border when they deposit their luggage in Canada. Diaspora indo-canadian here – hindu, sikh and muslim – are at loggerheads on this issue. Evidenced by this pass of arms of the former premier of British columbia, Ujall Dosanjh, a sikh layman who has questioned, on Twitter, Jagmeet Singh, a sikh religious, on August 27, 2017, on Twitter : “How can we support a secular State in Canada and a State separatist theistic in Khalistan in India : Ask #Jagmeetsingh “.

We have not yet heard of the sikhs!