The report also refers to the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which killed 329 onboard in 1985

The ‘Khalistan Movement’ which aims to take away Punjab from India and make it into a separate country is being endorsed and nurtured by Pakistan at the time when it is ‘not going anywhere in the Sikh home state,’ Punjab, Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), a leading Canadian think tank has said in a report.

MLI said reports from India continued to demonstrate the threat that Pakistan-sponsored Khalistani terrorism poses; for Canadians, Pakistan’s actions pose “a real and present national security risk”.

The report, ‘Khalistan: A Project of Pakistan,’ written by veteran journalist Terry Milewski, takes readers through the evolution of the movement and how it became a threat for the entire world, especially India and Canada, and how Pakistan played the nasty game of fostering terror in 1980s to reviving a dead movement.

The MLI report comes ahead of a so-called referendum planned by proponents of an independent Khalistan, an exercise that Canada and many other nations have already stated they will not recognize.

In the foreword, former Member of Canadian Parliament Ujjal Dosanjh and Programme Director of MLI Shuvaloy Majumdar say, “The proposition of an independent Khalistan, in truth, is a backward idea from a backward time. It is a proposal without economic or democratic logic, unloved by the very Punjabis whose lives it would most directly affect. It is a fantasy rooted in religious bigotry and chauvinism, kept alive in Canada by thugs and political hustlers unbothered by the innocent lives that have been lost in its name.”

Milewski’s report takes into account the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which killed 329 onboard which notorious Talwinder Singh Parmar had planted.

“He schemed to place bombs on two Indian planes in late June of 1985. One bomb erased 329 lives aboard Air India’s flight 182 from Montreal to Heathrow. The other blew up early, on the ground at Narita airport in Japan, killing two baggage handlers as they moved it to another Air India flight,” the report said.

According to Milewski’s report, while there were many who believed that Parmar was innocent, the Canadian government always knew and he was always on their radar.

“The notion that Parmar was innocent need not detain us long. Although Canadian authorities failed to stop him, Parmar was a known threat, already wanted for murder in India when he set up shop in Canada. His home in Burnaby, BC, was watched and wiretapped,” the report mentioned.

Talwinder Singh Parmar was later killed in an encounter in 1992. The authorities found a number of weapons at the spot.

“With them, they had a rocket launcher, a machine gun, three AK-47s, grenades, handguns, ammunition and – always an essential additive in the Sikh struggle for independence – some well-connected Pakistanis,” the report said.

It was Pakistan that was giving refuge to the minds that nurtured the ‘Khalistan Movement.’ “It didn’t take long to figure out that Pakistan had given refuge to the leader of the Air India plot. Parmar was easy to identify,” the report said.

The report further said, “The police also quickly identified two non-Sikhs who died alongside him. Both were Muslims, both carried Pakistani passports, and both traced back to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence service, the ISI.”

Pakistan has always been interested in the separation of Punjab from India. According to the report, Khalistan is a revenge that Pakistan wants to take from India as it helped in Bangladesh’s freedom movement but revenge is not the only thing, it wants to inflict pain to India, the report said.

“So far, though, that hope has been enough to keep Pakistan’s army and its political leadership interested. No matter how low the support for Khalistan sinks in India – and it has sunk very low indeed – the cause still survives in Pakistan, where jihadist groups have made common cause with Sikh separatists against their shared enemy, India,” the report said.

Amid this, Justin Trudeau’s administration is what concerns India. The report said, “In 2018, an international lobby campaign advocating for an independent Khalistan successfully removed references to ‘Sikh (Khalistani) extremist ideologies and movements,’ from the Ministry of Public Safety’s Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada.”

The Canadian government replaced the language with ‘Extremists who support violent means to establish an independent state within India,’ a move that hurt India.