Why Look The Other Way?

The CM cold­shoulders a ‘Khalistan­-linked’ Sikh minister from Canada in India. Not all are pleased.

- Ushinor Majumdar

THE temperature in Amritsar, at 42 degree Celsius, would have been in stark contrast to chilly Ottawa when Harjit Singh Sajjan prayed at the famed Golden Temple. But a different kind of heat was building up over the visit of Canada’s defence minister to his parents’ land. Capt Amarinder Singh, now back in the saddle as Punjab chief minister, invoked an old festering wound a week ago to make a dramatic, unusual statement: no meeting this foreign dignitary. The reason Amarinder offered: Sajjan and some other Sikh­origin cabinet ministers and parliamentariansin Canada were Khalistan sympathisers. For what should have been a diplomatic affair full of courtesy and nostalgia, the fat was truly in the fire.

The Sikh nationalist movement seeking a separate state for the community may have lost its steam in the past quarter century, yet a mention of ‘Khalistan’ can stir up violent memories in the collective mind—it’s a wound that has refused to heal. The period of insurgency Punjab experienced spanned well over a decade beginning in the late 1970s—and no one has fond memories about those days.