Canada cannot preserve its sovereignty by accommodating movements that reject the sovereignty of other nations. It can protect Sikh religious life, free speech and political participation without legitimising a separatist agenda, a report has stated.
It noted that this should include enforcing terror designations, denying platforms to groups that glorify the Air India bombing perpetrators, and refusing to let a foreign referendum share the news cycle with a vote on Confederation.
As Canada’s Alberta province prepares to vote on October 19 on whether to begin the constitutional process for a binding independence referendum, billboards near Airdrie are drawing attention to an “Alberta Referendum on Independence of Punjab” planned in Edmonton a day earlier, according to a report in Khalsa Vox.
Behind the billboards is terror group 'Sikhs for Justice', the US-based Khalistani outfit that has publicly cast a Khalistan convoy in Calgary city in Alberta as a vehicle for both the Punjab referendum and Alberta independence, while praising Ottawa for allowing Albertans to “exercise their right to self-determination", the report highlighted.
An Alberta independence speaker has reportedly told a Khalistan rally that the spectacle inspires his own cause. The dates are deliberately adjacent. The confusion is the tactic, it mentioned.
“This is how a fringe operates once a host country has taught it that sovereignty is a suggestion. Sikhs for Justice’s votes are unofficial, non-binding, and irrelevant to the Government of India. They are not irrelevant to Canada. A movement that has spent four decades using Canadian streets, gurdwaras, and ballot-theatre to prosecute a foreign territorial claim is now hitching that claim to the most serious unity vote this federation has faced in a generation,” the report detailed.
“Separatism is contagious precisely because it is procedural. Once you grant that any motivated diaspora may stage a referendum on someone else’s map, you have conceded the premise Alberta’s own hardliners need: that borders are a campaign, not a settlement,” it added.
According to the report, fringe secessionists pose a danger not only to their targets but also to the host country.
Highlighting the wider implications, it said, “They import a doctrine that the nation is provisional. They launder foreign intelligence rivalries into domestic policing. They intimidate co-ethnics who dissent, which is a sovereignty problem in any country that claims a monopoly on coercion. And they look for the next open constitutional wound.”
“Alberta’s October 19 question asks whether the province should remain in Canada or start the legal path to a separation vote. It is a Canadian argument, conducted under Canadian law, among Canadian voters. A Punjab referendum staged in Edmonton the day before is an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of that argument for a cause that has already killed hundreds of Canadians,” Khalsa Vox mentioned.
--IANS
