Over a period of many years, the deep conflict between Sikh nationalists and the Indian government had a reverberating impact on the Sikh diaspora, notably in Canada. Sikh immigration, first to British Columbia and then to many Canadian cities, predates the First World War. The hostility to the arrival of these newcomers was spread throughout the political landscape. Sending back the Komagata Maru from Vancouver harbour was a profound statement about Canada’s exclusion of “the other.”
The growth of the movement for a separate country called Khalistan in the Punjab had been simmering for many years, and as the resistance to this movement by the government of India grew, many politicized by this struggle came to Canada in the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, after the Canadian immigration system, like its American counterpart, adopted a points system that ended overt quotas and barriers.
The violence in India came to a head with the bloody massacre at the...
Bob Rae was Ontario’s 21st premier and served as interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Now a lawyer and distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, he wrote the 2005 report on the Air India bombing called “Lessons to Be Learned.”
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