Former B.C. premier Dosanjh weighs in on crumbling Canada-India relations

As tensions spike between Canada and India over accusations of New Delhi-backed violence on Canadian soil, a former B.C. premier and federal MP is speaking out.

Ujjal Dosanjh is a lawyer and civil rights activist who led B.C. from 2000 to 2001 and served as the province’s attorney general from 1995 to 2000. He was a Liberal member of parliament from 2004 to 2011.

He believes relations between Canada and India are at their lowest point in living memory, and is criticizing the leaders of both countries.

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Dosanjh says the accusations against the Indian government are serious, but he believes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is inflaming the situation.

“The Government of Canada needs to tone down its rhetoric in the sense that the prime minister doesn’t need to send it into the stratosphere by standing up in Parliament or by standing beside the RCMP and giving a news conference,” he told OMNI News.

“Prime ministers don’t do news conferences on these kinds of issues … here you have both the prime minister and the external affairs minister engaged in what I might call politicking. They don’t need to because the police are doing their job, courts are doing their job, and prosecutors are doing their job.

“Why do they have to say anything? Why, in particular, when they say nothing about Khalistani extremism in the first place?”

Dosanjh is a vocal opponent of violence and extremism and has criticized extremists in the separatist pro-Khalistan movement.

For his views, Dosanjh was attacked and brutally beaten in the parking lot of his Vancouver law office in 1985. He was targeted again in 1999 while he was a B.C. MLA when his constituency office was broken into and a Molotov cocktail was left burning on a table.

Dosanjh suggests Ottawa needs to be more prudent in how it presents the situation.

“When they say they are standing with the Sikh community, what they are really saying is they are standing with the Khalistanis in Canada. They are not standing with you or with me,” he stated.

“I am not a Khalistani … and if it’s true that Khalistanis are under threat then they should be standing with them. But they should also be standing against them when they try to dismember a friendly country.”

Canada has ordered six Indian diplomats out of the country, and India has expelled six Canadian diplomats, over RCMP accusations that Indian government agents are linked to extortion, coercion, and the murder of Canadian citizens in this country, including the assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey last year.

“For the RCMP to hold a press conference in such a fashion is somewhat unprecedented,” said Dosanjh. “The investigation is continuing and trials are possibly going to be soon underway. The police never usually hold news conferences right in the middle of everything, so they must have more serious information that the Government of India through its agents or gangsters, directly or indirectly, is causing harm to Canadian citizens or residents.”

“That is very serious, that’s concerning.”

However, he believes the relationship between the two countries can be repaired.

“But we may need a change in leadership in both countries to actually get past this because the perception of Mr. Trudeau in India is that he is implicit in the rise of Khalistani extremism in Canada, and the perception of Mr. Modi is that he is capable of what they are alleging the government of India is doing,” Dosanjh said.

“For Canadians of Indian descent — whether you are a Punjabi Sikh or not — it is a concern because we want to go back, we have relationships, we have assets back home and there is a lot of traffic going back and forth, we have visitors and a lot of students here who are Indian nationals,” he added.

“It is a concern because it is an important relationship. It has been a good relationship, by and large, for the last seven or eight decades and it needs to be repaired. But people may have to look beyond the current leadership in both countries to make that happen.”