CSIS’ questionable history with India and Sikh separatists
Image of Air India flight 182 before a bomb planted by Sikh separatists went off, killing all 329 passengers on board, along with media coverage and mourning after the incident. Image credit: The Hindu
Written by: Aidan Jonah
Yesterday, the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase (who have a servile relationship with CSIS) broke a story that CSIS has “what they consider credible intelligence that India was behind the mid-June fatal shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar”, a Sikh separatist leader based in British Columbia. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh endorsed CSIS’ claim of having credible evidence. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre made his condemnation conditional on results of further investigation into Nijjar’s murder, seeking more information about why Trudeau came to endorse CSIS’ claim.
India is most definitely a repressive right-wing state which targets minorities both at home and abroad, and has intelligence agents in their foreign embassies. NPR noted that India had “accused the activist [Nijjar] of involvement in an alleged attack on a Hindu priest in India and had offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest.”
Yet critical faculties need to be retained, because of who is making the claim, and how these allegations serve their interests.
CSIS and the Air India bombings
Canadian and Indian intelligence have mixed relations. While the nations engage in intelligence cooperation, Canadian intelligence has been complicit in targeting India in the past.
CSIS’ fingerprints are all over the 1985 Sikh separatist bombing of Air India 182 which killed all 329 people on board, 268 of whom were Canadian citizens. The bombing came after Operation Blue Star led to the massacre of 5000 to 7000 Sikhs in 1984.
At minimum, CSIS knew about the bombing plot by Sikh separatists desiring the creation of a state called Khalistan from India’s Punjab region, and let it happen. Between 1984 and 1985, both CSIS and the RCMP had three informants tell them about a bombing plot against an Air India flight, but all were deemed unreliable. A CSIS agent who was a suspect in the Air India bombings, Surjan Singh Gill, knew about the bomb plot against Air India 182 and 301. An RCMP transcript indicated “that CSIS agents observed Gill and the suspects in Vancouver just days before the bombings, followed their movements and tapped their phones.”
After the bombing of Air India 182, in 1985, CSIS destroyed wiretaps of “critical wiretaps of Air India suspects”. 156 out of 210 wiretaps of Air India lead plotter Talwinder Singh Parmar’s phone calls, in the three months leading up to the bombing, were destroyed. Strangely, the light treatment of Parmar came despite even CSIS itself stating that he founded the Sikh separatist organization Babar Khalsa in 1981, which urged its followers to “carry out terrorist attacks” in 1984, and “threatened to kidnap or kill the Indian Consul General in Vancouver” in June of that year. Very light treatment for very heavy, known public threats.
A 2010 CBC article notes that:
“On June 1, 1985, three weeks before the bombing, Air India headquarters in Bombay reported to the RCMP in Toronto that it had intelligence regarding a plot to place time-bombs on Air India flights from Canada — timed to explode over Europe.
Although Air India had only one weekly flight from Canada — Flight 182 — the RCMP nevertheless maintained that the threat to attack Air India was not "specific."
Three days afterwards, two CSIS agents followed two of the suspects in the Flight 301 bombing case, Talwinder Parmar and Inderjit Reyat “to a test bombing on Vancouver Island.” The article notes that “CSIS did not ask the RCMP to stop and question the suspects, or to search the trunk.” The test bombing was mistaken for a gunshot, and the surveillance of Parmar and other associates called off the next day (2:10-2:30).
In 2007, to the John Major commission, James Bartleman, then director of Canada’s intelligence and security section of the foreign-affairs department, testified to seeing an intelligence document “giving the time and location of a terrorist attack on an Air India plane matching Flight 182's co-ordinates”, who was told by a senior RCMP officer that the “police force was already aware of it”.
A CBC documentary also saw Mandip Singh Grewal state that he and his family, when seeing off his father to Air India Flight 182 on June 23, 1985, saw Bhabar Khalsa (a terrorist organization) member Hardial Johal at the airport, who couldn’t explain why he was at the airport. Grewal says his father immediately went and purchased an extra $400 000 CAD in life insurance after running into Johal. Babar Khalsa was threatening to make Air India planes “fall from the sky” at this time, according to John Schneider of the former RCMP Air India Task Force. (4:18 to 6:02)
One has to ask the question, if CSIS was wiretapping Babar Khalsa founder Parmar’s calls and understood the threats made by the organization, why did CSIS not take action to have the RCMP prevent Johal from being at Pearson Airport. If the RCMP was “already aware of it [a bombing plot on an Air India plane matching Flight 182's co-ordinates]“, why wouldn’t have it, on its own, sought to prevent Babar Khalsa members from being at Pearson Airport?
On the same day, a series of remarkable errors occurred, including:
Sniffer dogs missing from all Canadian airports for a training seminar in Vancouver (despite Air India’s warning of imminent bomb plots),
X-Ray screens breaking down in Pearson Airport,
An anonymous man who never boarded the flight being allowed to have his suitcase containing the bomb brought on board
Security staff didn’t recognize what beeping from scanning devices around suitcases entailed
Air India Flight 182 being allowed to take off from the Mirabel airport in Quebec, despite several suspicious bags being found, because of cost considerations
All these errors led to the bomb entering Air India Flight 182, and the bomb was triggered while the plane was near Ireland, killing all 329 people on board. Some Indian experts, including Ajai Sahni (Executive Director – Institute of Conflict Management), believe CSIS intentionally let the Air India bombings occur.
Sahni: “In no intelligence system, could this [the Air India bombings] occur with no malice forethought [malicious intent]”... "This is malicious, this is a conspiracy to facilitate a terrorist operation".
Uncomfortable considerations
Nijjar had been warned by CSIS of a likely assassination plot against him back in 2022, though from whom was not mentioned by the Globe and Mail. Yet, as demonstrated by its conduct around the Sikh separatist bombing plot against Air India flights, CSIS having knowledge of plots hasn’t historically stopped it from standing by when they happen. There is certainly no proof that CSIS let Nijjar’s killing happen, but there’s precedent for them letting something of this type occur towards Canadians. At minimum, the timing of these revelations being shared has major utility for CSIS, and should be questioned.
CSIS has a history of outright criminality and deception. CSIS, created to replace the RCMP’s Security Service (RCMP SS) which engaged in so much criminality that it prompted the creation of a parliamentary committee, had its initial employees directly transferred from the RCMP SS which had just been disbanded.
Page nine of The Windsor Star, released on February 6, 1984.
CSIS stands to gain heavily from Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh backing their allegations. CSIS’ major public relations boost of rehabilitation via Chinagate, as do-gooders supposedly limited by the Canadian government, was taken to the next level by the federal political backing of these allegations.
CSIS doesn’t only just benefit on the public relations front. As this author discussed in his June article, “Government by CSIS”, CSIS had been pounding the floor about the “China threat” since 2018, and had also been referencing Indian foreign interference only on occasion. CSIS had been pushing for years, for a foreign agents registry modeled off the US’ FARA act, while its favourite reporters from the Globe and Mail, Robert Fife and Steven Chase, dutifully only included voices calling for a foreign agents registry and none opposed to it.
CSIS has utilised a compliant media and political class to obtain its desired public foreign interference inquiry. One must consider that these revelations were made public only a week or so after the public inquiry was announced, where people easily could’ve shifted to a mentality of ‘let's wait and see what the inquiry process reveals’. While India is the target of the moment, the reality is that the foreign interference push by CSIS has been consistently focused on this “China threat”.
The spreading of the allegations against India is a massive spark for the foreign interference fears push keeping the energy, which while directed partially against India, will mostly still be focused against China. This spark is especially beneficial for CSIS, when the Liberal government still hasn’t provided a timeline to implement a foreign agents registry, which it had said would implement by end of year, back in May. Any chance of the push for a foreign agents registry slowly fading to the backburner is long gone now.
None of this is to say that CSIS’ allegations are false. India very well could’ve ordered the killing of Nijjar and is a right-wing state which consistently represses minorities. But skepticism of CSIS is an absolute must, given CSIS’ history, especially in relation to India and Sikh separatists.
Note: On Thursday night, 8:30pm EST, The Canada Files will be having a special Twitter space, with Indian geopolitical analyst S.L. Kanthan (and more potential guests to come), to discuss the killing of Hardeep Nijjar, how current allegations are affecting Canada-India relations and what relations were like before yesterday.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah has broken numerous stories, including how the Canadian Armed Forces trained neo-Nazi "journalist" Roman Protasevich while he was with the Azov Battalion, and how a CIA front group (the NED) funded the group (URAP) which drove the "Uyghur genocide" vote in parliament to pass in February 2021. Jonah recently wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.
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