Is Justin Trudeau guilty of inadvertently facilitating potential mass murder?

The Khalistani extremist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun made an extraordinary statement. He advised Sikhs not to board any Air India flight on 19 November, 2023, or after, going so far as to suggest that plans were afoot to blow up a plane belonging to the airline on that day.

- RAJESH TALWAR

Given the urgency of the issue it is time to sound the alarm bells and challenge the hypocrisy, if not duplicity of the Canadian government and its leader.

Some days ago, the Khalistani extremist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun made an extraordinary statement.

He advised Sikhs not to board any Air India flight on 19 November, 2023, or after, going so far as to suggest that plans were afoot to blow up a plane belonging to the airline on that day, which incidentally also happens to be the day of the 2023 World Cup Cricket final.

Even more extraordinary than Pannun's statement was the deafening silence on the part of Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Neither Trudeau nor the Canadian government came forward with any proposed action against the Khalistanis, let alone stepping forward to arrest Pannun. Canadian media too is silent on the issue. It could have been argued that it is best to ignore statements made by 'crazy' people were it not for the fact that more than twenty-five years ago, in 1995, the Khalistanis carried out an attack on an Air India flight.

It came to be known as the Kanishka bombing case and resulted in the death of all three hundred and twenty-nine passengers.

Why does Pannun want to bomb an Air India flight while trying to ensure simultaneously that there are no Sikhs on board? It is because he knows no Sikh in India is willing to buy into his toxic narrative. Time is a great healer and vestigial anger over the 1984 riots notwithstanding, there is no one more loyal to the nation than the Indian Sikh.

As the journalist Shekhar Gupta puts it, Sikhs may have ninety-nine demands but Khalistan is not one of them.

Yet there is method behind Pannu's apparent 'madness.' Let us consider, for a moment, that an Air India plane is bombed.