Violent postings on Facebook condemn former B.C. premier and Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh as a traitor to the Sikh religion and threaten to “pierce him with bullets.”
“Someone shoot him — ASAP,” wrote one member of a Facebook group called “Ujjal Dosanjh is a Sikh traitor.”
Another branded the MP, who is a vocal opponent of Sikh extremism, as a “rat in our midst.”
The group’s page says the former federal Cabinet minister “betrayed his own people” and is a “scumbag traitor and an insult to the Sikh religion.”
RCMP Inspector Paul Richards, who heads the force’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, said police are investigating the Facebook comments.
“We are aware of them and we are going to look into them,” he said. “Obviously we take that very, very seriously.”
The threats come days after a controversial Sikh parade in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey. Before the parade last Saturday, organizers told Mr. Dosanjh and provincial MLA Dave Hayer — also a Sikh — that they would have to take their own security if they planned to attend the Vaisakhi event.
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Vaisakhi marks the birth of Sikhism. The Surrey parade is one of the biggest Vaisakhi celebrations outside of India.
Just days before the event, Dasmesh Darbar temple director Inderjit Singh Bains said Mr. Dosanjh and Mr. Hayer weren’t welcome at the parade.
Both Mr. Dosanjh and Mr. Hayer, as well as Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, lodged complaints with the RCMP over Mr. Bains’ comments.
About 100,000 people attended the parade, which featured a float displaying photographs of the leaders of banned terrorist groups.
B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff boycotted the event. Mr. Campbell had denounced Mr. Bains’ comments, saying, “People are free to express their political positions in Canada. But you are not in a position where you can single out individual elected representatives and say, ‘They’d better watch out if they come.’ That is simply not acceptable in our country.”
He added, “Obviously, it’s totally unacceptable, in Canada, that anyone would say those things about a public official.”
Ms. Watts said the city intends to review the annual Vaisakhi celebration after a float depicting Sikh “martyrs” appeared in the parade.
“We had assurances by the organizers that that float was not going to be in there, and lo-and-behold, it showed up, which was really disappointing,” she said.
This is not the first time the parade has stirred controversy. In 2008, the Indian government made a formal complaint to Canada over images displayed at the parade depicting the assassins of Indira Gandhi as martyrs.
This week, Mr. Dosanjh said it is alarming to see Sikh extremism rising again, 25 years after the Air India bombing, which was suspected to have been the work of Sikh extremists. All 329 people aboard the June 1985 flight were killed in the terrorist attack.
“The extremism now is much more entrenched than it was,” he said. “It is much more sophisticated.”
The 62-year-old politician has been the target of violence and death threats before.
In February 1985, he was beaten with a lead pipe in Vancouver after many months of threats directed toward moderate Sikhs. He wrote to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney that April, warning that something dire might happen if the government did not deal with the extremist threat. He received no reply.
On June 23, 1985, Air India Flight 182 was blown up by a bomb in Irish airspace. The incident was the largest mass murder in modern Canadian history. The explosion and downing of the airliner occurred within an hour of a bombing at Japan’s Narita Airport that is believed to have been related to the Air India bombing.
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