The heat’s on and the referendum’s a month away in the Khalistani heartland of Surrey, BC, where the top Sikhs for Justice leader was shot dead 6 weeks ago. There’s a flurry of propaganda to whip up the turnout and…it’s not going well.
The core problem is, the propaganda makes no sense on the inescapable issue: celebrating terrorists. If the Air India bombers are heroes, how are mass-murderers heroes? And if you call them agents of the hated Indian government, why do you honour them as great martyrs?
Harjeet Singh is the latest to step up and tweet for Khalistan. He’s getting applause for…well, a good one! Canada and its judiciary were in cahoots with India to rig the Air India trial! Plus, he’s fabricated a ton of fake quotes, for lack of any real ones to help him.
He latched on to the fact-free “Truther” theory that the Indian gov’t slaughtered 331 of its own passengers and blew up its own plane in the 1985 Air India bombing. But Harjeet adds a new theory: that for years before and after the bombing, the Indian gov’t was …yes, “funding a terror operation” by paying “millions” as an “unsecured” loan for “Khalistani activities” to a wealthy Air India suspect, Ripudaman Singh Malik. Malik was acquitted at the Air India trial in ’05 and shot dead in a contract hit last year.
Harjeet is .silent on sources but, with Khalistani Twitter cheering him on, says Malik was acquitted “as part of a coverup arranged at the diplomatic level.” (Seems I’m in on it, by “hiding” the years of Indian cash for Malik. Which I learned about in Harjeet’s tweet. Late as usual.)
It looks like he’s embellished (A LOT) a mention in Soft Target, a 1989 book on Air India which leans heavily on anonymous sources and was written before most of the evidence was known. It alleges that the State Bank of India gave Malik a $2m line of credit in March 1984.
That was 15 months before the bombing, when Malik was a successful businessman, not a suspect in anything. Soft Target says he secured the loan with his clothing biz. So…so what? But Malik’s not the only Air India figure to be painted as a puppet of the Indian gov’t.
There’s also the bomb-maker, Inderjit Reyat – the only man convicted in the bombing. Although he was in prison nearly all the time from 1988-2017, Khalistanis have been tweeting that Reyat was never convicted. They hear that all the time! But Harjeet Singh says no.
He says Reyat got off lightly (he didn’t) as part of that sinister “coverup” by the Indians, the Canadians and the judiciary. Harjeet demands, “Why was Reyat only sentenced to 5 years in prison?…Why did so many former CSIS officials call him an Indian intel operative?”
The problems are, a) Reyat got 30 years. not 5. And, b) no CSIS officials called Reyat an Indian agent. Asked who did, Harjeet again has no reply. But his own logic leads him into that same inescapable corner of Khalistani propaganda.
Once more: if the Air India bombers were working for the hated Indian gov’t, why is their leader, Talwinder Parmar, glorified as a great shaheed? Asked if he does think Parmar and Reyat were Indian agents, Harjeet, yet again, is silent. And, hey, you can see his point.
If you call them Indian agents, well, they massacred civilians to discredit your cause. So you definitely put the wrong guys on a pedestal. But call them heroes and you’re still stuck. Stuck with mass-murderers as your heroes.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @CBCTerry on August 02, 2023, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
