Indo-Canadian Sikh activist appointed citizenship judge

3 Nov, 2006 IANS

TORONTO: An Indo-Canadian has been appointed as a citizenship judge by the Canadian government.

Raminder Singh Gill, a politician and former member of Ontario's provincial parliament, is among the four citizenship judges appointed by the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Monte Solberg, according to a press release.

There are 15 citizenship judges across Canada who process about 150,000 applications for citizenship each year. Gill is the only Indo-Canadian among them and the first in Ontario.

Gill is an active member of the University of Toronto chemical engineering faculty advisory board and works as an international consultant.

Born in Punjab, Gill was educated at the University of Toronto and holds a master's degree in engineering. As a chemical engineer, he has held top positions in several multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Gill is also an active spokesperson and volunteer for the Canadian Sikh community.

FBI to investigate role of right wing hindu elements role in disrupting Sikh Muslim relations

By Rob Young, Marysville-Yuba City, California

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The FBI is helping investigate a threat to destroy the Sikh temple on Tierra Buena Road, Sutter County Sheriff Jim Denney said Tuesday. Copies of the written threat were received in the mail by the sheriff, the Yuba City Police Department.

The threat came as the Sikh Temple prepares for its 27th annual festival and parade through Yuba City on Sunday, an event attended by thousands of Sikhs from around the state and country.

Ed Vasquez, spokesman for the San Jose-based Sikh Communication Council, said local Sikhs and Muslims have had a good working relationship. The council was founded after 9-11 in response to violence against Sikhs whose beards and turbans caused them to be mistaken for Muslims. Sikh leaders suspect the role of right wing hindutva elements behind the hoax letter. Most of the muslims in the area is of Pakistani origin, but do have a very cordial relation with Sikhs.

When an arson fire destroyed the Islamic Center's mosque in 1994, local Sikhs contributed money to help rebuild it, said Abdul Kabir Krambo, spokesman for the Yuba City Islamic Center. Relations between local Sikhs and Muslims are generally good, “depending on who you talk to,” said Krambo.

“Oh, great,” said ,Krambo about the letter. The center's mosque is near the Sikh Temple on Tierra Buena Road. Krambo called the threat “just awful. As if we didn't have enough problems already.”

“We hope this doesn't mean problems between Sikhs and Muslims,” he said.

Threats of violence are inconsistent with the “Sufi-oriented” Muslim religion practiced at the Yuba City mosque, he said.

Krambo said he would warn his Pakistani Muslim friends to be on the lookout for outsiders or “anyone talking crap.”

Bains, Krambo and law enforcement officials said they were unaware of any actual groups called the Muslim Union or Taliban Group or of a Taliban leader being sentenced in India.

Karen Ernst, FBI spokeswoman in Sacramento, said law enforcement agencies don't consider the threat credible but are not totally dismissing it. “We're going to be investigating if there are leads to be followed up on,” said Ernst. “The main thing is that people should feel like they can go about their business and participate without being too terribly worried.”

The letter, which purports to be from the “Muslim Union” and is signed by the “Taliban group,” also contains a threat to destroy the Golden Temple in India because “our leader in India punish by sikh ladi judge.”

The Golden Temple is the holiest Sikh site in India and Muslims and Sikhs enjoy cordial relationship. “We also know they have Sikh temple in Yuba City and they are going to be celebrate Sikh guru birthday the first day of November. We are going to destroy the sikh temple in Yuba City on that day,” the letter went on.

Didar Singh Bains, chairman of the annual Sikh event, said temple leaders were “kind of surprised” by the threat but aren't varying their plans, except for adding extra security.

Since Sept. 11, it's hard to tell which threats are credible, said Bains.

“We are alert,” he said. Denney, who met with temple leaders, said the threat is being taken seriously because it deals with international terrorism.

The legacy of India's counter-terrorism

The following article wrote by Jaskaran Kaur is a reminder to minorities who are suffering from the security regime of Indian Officials. Many Sikhs moved to Canada for better living, where they enjoy equal citizenship. If you are from a minority community, think about migrating to elsewhere.

Kaur is co-founder and executive director of ENSAAF , a nonprofit organization fighting impunity in India.

WHEN INDIAN Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets with President Bush in Washington this week on his first official visit, and the first of an Indian head of state since 9/11, he will be reaffirming a strategic partnership. Prime Minister Singh will address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, and terrorism is high on the agenda. An item not likely on the agenda is India's systematic abuse of human rights in the name of counter-terrorism. Despite receiving praise as the world's largest democracy, India's human rights record falls dismally behind countries that have only recently shed their legacy of dictatorships. From 1984-95, Indian security forces tortured, ''disappeared," killed, and illegally cremated more than 10,000 Punjabi Sikhs in counter-insurgency operations. Many perpetrators of these abuses are now championed as counter-terrorism experts. Most prominent among them is former Punjab director general of police and campaign architect K.P.S. Gill, whose policies, according to Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, ''appeared to justify any and all means, including torture and murder." Hailed as a super cop, Gill now heads an Indian counter-terrorism institute.

Four years ago, I criss-crossed Punjab and documented the impact of impunity for abuses committed by security forces. I sat on jute cots in poor farming houses talking with survivors struggling to rebuild their lives and sipped tea in the guarded mansions of judges. A senior high court judge, who addressed me as a naïve daughter, pointedly told me that fundamental rights did not exist during an insurgency.

One afternoon, I spoke with Jaswinder Singh. He was in his 20s. In 1992, Punjab police officers repeatedly subjected Jaswinder to electric shocks, stretched his legs apart at the waist until his thigh muscles ruptured, and suspended him upside down from the ceiling, while beating him with rods. Subsequently, the police ''disappeared" his brother, father, and grandfather. Jaswinder unsuccessfully pursued his family's disappearance to the Supreme Court. But he had no time for grief; the loss of his family's breadwinners meant he had to support the survivors, despite continued police harassment.

A flickering hope of justice remains for survivors of the counter-insurgency abuses. Since December 1996, the Committee for Information and Initiative in Punjab has struggled before the Indian National Human Rights Commission in a landmark lawsuit addressing police abductions that led to mass cremations, including those of Jaswinder's family. The commission, acting as a body of the Indian Supreme Court, has the authority to remedy violations of fundamental rights in this historic case of mass crimes. Its decisions will serve as precedent for victims of state-sponsored abuses throughout India. The commission has received over 3,500 claims from Amritsar alone, one of 17 districts in Punjab.

During the past eight years, however, the commission has not heard testimony from a single survivor. Guatemala's Historical Clarification Commission registered 42,275 victims in 18 months. El Salvador's Commission on the Truth collected information on 22,000 victims in eight months. The Indian Commission, however, has kept survivors running in circles, limiting its inquiry to one of 17 districts in Punjab.

A few weeks ago, the commission drastically narrowed its mandate, stating its plan to resolve the case by determining only whether police had properly cremated victims -- not whether the police had wrongfully killed them in the first place. With this move, the commission rejected the victims' right to life and endorsed the Indian government's position that life is expendable during times of insurgency.

India's counter-terrorism practices have left a legacy of broken families, rampant police abuse, and a judicial system unwilling to enforce fundamental rights. As India ignores its past, it continues to employ the same Draconian measures in places such as Kashmir. While Prime Minister Singh extols India as a leading democracy, the international community must weigh the devastation and insecurity wrought by a national security policy based on systematic human rights abuses and impunity.

In 1997, Ajaib Singh committed suicide after the Punjab police tortured and disappeared his son and justice failed him. His suicide note read: ''Self-annihilation is the only way out of a tyranny that leaves no chance for justice." If India fails to address its own mass atrocities, this should raise serious questions about its role as a partner in the ''war on terror."

July 17, 2005, Boston Globe (www.boston.com)

British Sikhs and Hindus seek open-air cremations

Thursday, 09 February 2006

LONDON - Britain’s Hindus and Sikhs want the right to stage open-air cremations on funeral pyres so their dead can take an unimpeded path to reincarnation. “Without these essential last rites, the soul languishes in restless torment,” said Davender Ghai of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society, a charity that is seeking to overturn a 75-year-old ban.

They are offended by the use of gas-powered crematorium furnaces and fearful that the ashes could be inadvertently mixed with others. Arguing that the law unfairly penalises followers of both religions, the charity has asked permission from local authorities in the northern English city of Newcastle to cremate their dead in the open air.

If the council refuses, they plan to take their case to the High Court in London and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if necessary. Up to 70 percent of people who die in Britain every year are cremated. Ghai said that at present many Hindus and Sikhs “take the ashes to the river Ganges because they think the last rites are not proper here because of gas-fuelled crematoriums.

“I am not blaming the funeral directors. They do their best but ashes should not be mixed,” he told Reuters. More than 550,000 Hindus and an estimated 320,000 Sikhs live in Britain where open-air cremations have been banned since 1930 amid environmental concerns over mercury emissions.

“This is the first time we have asked for anything. I am just praying and hoping,” Ghai said.

Andrew Bogan, legal adviser to the charity’s 2,000 members, said it was sad and poignant that having made their home in Britain, they should have to go continents away to find peace for their dead.

Explaining the sensitivities, he said: “Reincarnation is the fundamental tenet of the Hindu religion and the point of death and the ceremony and disposal to a large degree determines transmigration of the soul and its next embodiment. “Under no circumstances must there be any intermingling of the ashes. Modern crematoriums have up to 12 services a day so guaranteeing this is just not possible. For Hindus that is catastrophic.” A spokesman for Newcastle City Council said of the proposal: ”Until we have had time to examine the legal, environmental and financial implications involved, we are not in a position to comment.” But Bogan said he was he was confident of victory, concluding, “We are gathering signatures for a petition but we don’t want to bang the door down yet and start jumping on the desk.”