Questions remain about India trip

Dear editor: Why didn't Justin Trudeau denounce the Khalistan separatist movement long before his announced India trip?

Unfortunately, Liberal Party leaders Trudeau and Michael Ignatieff had been associating over several years with figures involved in the Khalistan movement; BC's Khalistan members have been heavily involved in Liberal politics at a both the provincial and federal levels for years.

Jaspal Atwal’s connections to this movement were revealed by the Indian government on Trudeau’s overseas Indian trip.

Atwal has a record of being involved in terrorism. He was one of four men convicted of shooting and wounding an Indian Cabinet Minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1985. He served jail time and was later paroled.

The second of Jaspal Atwal's high-profile cases was when he was charged with an 1985 attack on former NDP B.C. premier and Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, but was later acquitted. Struck with an iron bar several times, Dosanjh needed 85 stitches to close the wounds on his head.

Accusations of Sikh separatist sympathizers in the Liberal cabinet cast a long shadow over Trudeau's India visit. Last year, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh refused to meet with Canada's Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, accusing him of supporting the violent pro-Khalistan movement which advocates for an Independent Sikh state.

Is it Trudeau’s arrogance or is he just plain stupid for getting caught up in the Sikh Khalistan separatist movement? Atwal’s past is well known. How could the B.C. Liberal Sikh movement have been able to grow to such large numbers, when the warning signs about Sikh extremism were so widely known in B.C.?

Khalistan extremism has a violent history in Canada going back to the Air India disaster, when 329 people, many of them IndoCanadians and Indians nationals, were killed.

How and why was Jaspal Atwal able to penetrate RCMP security? How and why did Atwal end up at being photographed with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the prime minister’s wife? Why was he invited to attend an official banquet?

Upon Trudeau’s return to Canada his Liberal government had the audacity to publicly blame the Indian government for orchestrating that "political disaster" as an international incident.

Only in Canada, eh?

Ernie Slump Penticton