Ottawa, Oct 10 (IANS) 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
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