CAPT MEETING MAKES HEADLINES IN CANADA
CHANDIGARH: Justin Trudeau’s meeting with Punjab chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh in Amritsar on Wednesday was the highlight of the Canadian prime minister’s week-long visit to India in the media back home.
Amarinder will meet the Canadian PM in an Amritsar hotel after the Trudeaus pay obeisance at the Golden Temple. Trudeau wants his visit to the shrine to be a low-key affair. Six ministers, of which four are Sikhs, are also expected to be with him when he meets Amarinder.
The meeting has generated considerable interest in Canadian newspapers and TV channels.
Toronto Star, an English daily published from a city with a sizeable population of Punjabi and Sikh migrants, reported, “An Indian politician who publicly accused members of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet of being connected to the Sikh separatist movement will meet the prime minister later this week. The meeting comes amid simmering tensions between India and Canada about the demands in some Sikh communities for an independent state called Khalistan.”
The Globe and Mail, another newspaper published in Toronto, carried a report on similar lines.
CBC Television, a Canadian English-language broadcast network owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, reported that the Trudeau government is reaching out to mend fences with an Indian politician (Amarinder) who accused it of including Sikh separatists in its cabinet.
“Capt Amarinder is an Indian war hero and chief minister — or head of government— of the state of Punjab. Singh is a Sikh and he runs India’s only majority-Sikh state. But he’s also an implacable enemy of separatists who have tried to break away from India to form a Sikh nation they called Khalistan,” it added.
Last April when Canada’s Punjab-born defence minister Harjit Singh Sajjan came visiting, Amarinder refused to meet him for being a “Khalistani sympathiser”.
But when the news of Trudeau’s visit broke, Amarinder said he would like to meet the Canadian PM without his ministers, particularly the “Khalistani sympathisers”.
However, earlier this month, Sajjan and his ministerial colleague, Amarjit Sohi, clarified that they neither sympathise with nor espouse the separatist Sikh movement. Sajjan said the allegations were “ridiculous” and “offensive”.
The clarification comes amid criticism that some Sikhs in Canada are exploiting the country’s political system and freedom of speech to prop up fundamentalist language against India.