New Delhi: Through the summer of 1985, agents from Canada’s Security Intelligence Service watched as Talwinder Singh Parmar plotted the most lethal terrorist attack in history before 9/11. They documented the late-night meetings where Parmar discussed a plot to bomb an Air India jet, listened to his phone conversations, and saw his bomb-making experiments in the woods.
Following the mid-air explosion of the Air India jet Kanishka, which claimed 329 lives, then prime ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Brian Mulroney met in November 1985, hoping to end the impunity militant Sikh separatists had come to enjoy in Canada.
Even though Canada and India signed an extradition treaty in 1987, only six fugitives sought by India have been returned to the country from 2002 to 2020, government records obtained by ThePrint show. The treaty, documents and data reviewed by ThePrint show, has been tied up in paperwork, and made increasingly toothless by lobbying.
Things are set to become even tougher.
In June, a standing committee of Canada’s Parliament called for the country to withdraw from extradition treaties with 10 countries, including India, that do not meet “international human rights standards”. The committee also called for an end to extradition to countries where police are known to torture suspects.
“Authorities in Canada have been extremely reluctant to bring extradition proceedings for fear of backlash from an organised and well-funded Khalistan lobby,” an Indian police officer dealing with the cases told ThePrint.
“There are also legal and procedural complexities to do with our own evidence-gathering, though, that sometimes make progress impossible,” the officer added.
Even though Canada’s 2015 Anti-Terrorism Act criminalises anyone “who, by communicating statements, knowingly advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences,” the legislation has not been used to target advocacy of Khalistan, or celebration of terrorist crimes committed in India.
A review of prosecutions for hate crimes and terrorism from 2009 to 2019 conducted by law scholar Michael Nesbitt did not reveal a single case relating to inflammatory speech by Sikh separatists.
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The last extradition
The last extradition from Canada, government sources said, involved Malkit Kaur Sidhu and her brother Surjeet Singh, in 2019.
Sidhu is alleged to have conspired to kill her daughter Jaswant Kaur in 2000. Five hitmen hired to kill Jaswant were reportedly convicted by a trial court and seven more were acquitted. The two elderly suspects have since been reportedly granted bail by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Canada does not publish data on extraditions, but media reports say that it arrested 755 individuals sought by foreign governments from 2007-2008 to 2017-2018, and ultimately extradited 681 of them.
The reports added that the Canadian government received 1,210 requests for extradition during that period — which suggests a significant number of extradition requests do not meet the legal threshold the Canadian government believes is necessary.
During the same period, government data shows, the United Arab Emirates extradited 23 Indian criminals, including top terrorists like perpetrators of the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, ganglord Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar’s brother Iqbal Sheikh Kaksar, as well as his lieutenants Ijaz Pathan and Mustafa Ahmed Umar Dosa.
The UAE also deported Aftab Ahmed Ansari — an organised crime figure responsible for financing Lashkar-e-Taiba-linked groups in India.
For its part, the United States extradited 10 fugitives between 2002 and 2020, including Sikh extremist Kulbir Singh Barapind accused of multiple murders, including the killing of former Punjab legislator Sarwan Singh Cheema and several police officers. Sikh militant Charanjeet Singh Cheema was also extradited in 2005.
However, like Canada, several countries remain unwilling to surrender fugitives to India.
The United Kingdom, the list of successful extraditions in 2002-2020 shows, extradited just one individual, Samirbhai Vinubhai Patel, in a case related to a financial crime.
According to media reports, the government of Malaysia doggedly refuses to deport hate preacher Zakir Naik, despite the advice of at least four cabinet ministers and even though he ignited a furore in the country when he advocated the expulsion of ethnic Chinese.
Altogether, India secured the extradition of 65 criminals from 2002 to 2020 — most for offences unrelated to terrorism — as many more cases remain stuck.
According to information provided to the Rajya Sabha by the Ministry of External Affairs in 2018, India had another 166 extradition requests pending with various countries, though a breakdown was not provided.
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Removing teeth from a treaty
Extradition has become a fraught issue in Canada since the 2008 case of Hassan Diab — a Toronto University professor with no criminal record who was alleged to have been involved in a 1980 anti-semitic terror attack at a Paris synagogue that killed four people.
Following his extradition, French judges, however, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Diab.
A government-mandated legal review was set up to investigate allegations that Canada’s justice ministry, eager to extradite Diab, withheld exculpatory evidence. The review also asked the government to update extradition treaties “to specifically address issues of delay and timely proceedings.”
Law scholar Joanna Harrington has written that the extradition of Jaswant Kaur’s alleged killers led the Canadian Supreme Court to lay down new standards, requiring “a human rights appraisal of the record and practices of the foreign state making the extradition request.”
A senior National Investigation Agency (NIA) official told ThePrint that extradition requests submitted by state police forces in India also rely heavily on statements made by an accused in custody against the fugitive.
The lack of corroborative evidence, he said, leads to cases stalling. In addition, police investigators have been challenged for failing to record the testimony of incarcerated suspects in question and answer format, instead of as summaries written by the investigating officer.
“Lots of intelligence material is shared with agencies abroad that bear out our terrorism cases,” the official said, “like wiretaps and digital intercepts.”
“The problem,” he said, “is that Indian intelligence services do not operate under the provisions of the Indian Telegraph Act and the Information Technology Act, which means the intelligence cannot be presented in courts in India or abroad.”
Testimony presented before Canadian standing committee this summer by the pro-separatist World Sikh Organisation (WSO) underlined acquittals of terrorism suspects by Indian courts, as well as findings of torture, to argue against extradition. The WSO relied on court judgments from India.
Though the WSO brief could not cite a single Canadian case of legally problematic extradition, it pointed to the Kulbir Singh Barapind case as an example.
Kulbir Singh was reportedly acquitted of all charges in 2008, but is alleged to have been re-arrested and tortured. Later, however, he won elections to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee.
Hardeep Nijjar, the Sikh extremist whose killing sparked off the ongoing Canada-India confrontation, was among the fugitives sought by India. In a 2007 case, however, the men he was alleged to have hired to bomb a Ludhiana cinema were reportedly acquitted during the trial, even as India’s extradition case was pending.
Parmar himself was held in Germany in 1983 based on Indian charges that he was involved in murdering police officers. The terrorist was, however, released after his lawyers produced records showing he was in Nepal on the date of the killings.
History reveals that India’s intelligence services have opposed legal inaction. Following the Air India bombing, Canada reportedly investigated claims of growing activity by India’s intelligence services, designed to support anti-separatist leaders and remove extremists from control of Gurdwaras.
Indian diplomats had also complained that Canada was not doing enough to protect them from physical attacks by separatists — much as they have done now, as extremist groups have published photographs and rewards for information on diplomats they allege are linked to the Nijjar killing.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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