Late one autumn evening in Little India, the scent of Punjabi cooking congealed in the damp London air. Ajaib Singh Bagri calmly blamed the carnage he’d engineered on a delayed flight. Twelve weeks earlier, on a brilliant summer morning, Air India flight 182 had exploded over the Irish Sea, killing 329 people. The bomb he’d planted, Bagri told Tarsem Singh Purewal, the editor of Des Pardes, had been meant to go off on the ground at Heathrow, just a few minutes’ drive from the Punjabi newspaper’s office in Southall. The Babbar Khalsa leader expressed no remorse.
Twelve years later, as the time neared for Indian-Canadian newspaper publisher Tara Singh Hayer to tell a court the story he’d overheard at the Des Pardes meeting, an assassin ended his life at his home outside Surrey in British Columbia. Two years earlier, Purewal, Hayer’s friend, had also been shot through the heart, at point-blank range. The murderers have never been prosecuted.
For weeks now, the media in Canada has been filled with stories of how foreign intelligence services—among them those of India, Iran and China—have been using organised crime groups to assassinate terrorists and political dissidents. There’s been a strange silence, though, on where the story leading up to the assassination of pro-Khalistan activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar began.
Even as police in Canada, the United States and United Kingdom chose to sit on the sidelines, pro-Khalistan groups recruited ethnic-Punjabi organised crime cartels to murder secular opponents, terrorise the community and capture control of Gurudwaras.
The rise of the gangs
Early one fine spring morning in 1994, as he walked his dog down the street, Vancouver resident Glen Olsen was shot multiple times with a high-powered rifle. He had been mistaken, it turned out, for his next-door-neighbour Bhupinder ‘Bindy’ Singh Johal, a flamboyant 1971-born drug lord who became a hero for many ethnic-Punjabi youth in Vancouver. That winter, Johal had executed his one-time mentors, Raminder ‘Ron’ Dosanjh and his brother Jimsher ‘Jimmy’ Dosanjh, emerging as king of the Punjabi city’s Punjabi gangs.
The killings were linked, through tangled skeins of personalities, to battles in the Sikh community. These were sparked off by the Khalistan movement and its struggle to displace older, secularised elites who controlled British Columbia’s cash-rich Gurudwara ecosystem.
Like many great industrial cities, Vancouver was home to an underworld deeply enmeshed with its social fabric, former police officer and criminologist Keiron McConnell has recorded. In 1928, an investigation into a brothel run by the vice czar Joe Celona led revelations that the mafia had intimate ties to the city’s top officials. The investigation was set off by revelations that a brothel run by Celona allowed White sex workers to serve the ethnic-Chinese—a moral outrage.
Punjabi gangs joined this landscape in the 1980s, with the Dosanjh brothers taking charge of Los Diablos, which was until then dominated by immigrants from Latin America.
For a generation of disaffected young immigrant Punjabis, the gangs offered a kind of redemptive masculinity, the scholar Manjit Pabla has perceptively written. Borrowing from protest cultures like hip-hop allowed young people to assert themselves in opposition to the cultural norms of their parents, as well as their marginalisation in White society. The anthropologist Kamala Nayar has described this new culture as “the rap-isation of the Sikh tradition.”
Even though the ethnic-Punjabi gangsters invoked the language of Black protest, they came from immigrant families that had clawed their way into the middle class. For the most part, gang members were “mama’s boys,” living at home and coddled by the family.
The journalist Renu Bakshi observed that male gang violence was coddled by patriarchy. “From the moment a Punjabi boy opens his eyes, his parents hand him the keys to the Porsche of life,” she noted. “In a fit of childhood rage, he will kick and punch his mother, as his father and grandmother look on, taking great pride.”
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The pious killers
Ever since the late-1970s, a small circle of neo-fundamentalists—among them ideologue Talwinder Singh Parmar, Ripudaman Singh Malik, Surjan Singh Gill, Inderjit Singh Reyat and Bagri himself—began working to eject assimilated Sikhs from the management of Gurudwaras in Canada. The older immigrant who led the Gurudwaras, they argued, did not maintain the observances of the faith, and ought thus to be disqualified from leadership of religious institutions.
Following the Indian Army’s 1984 operation against terrorists hiding in the Golden Temple, journalist Kim Bolan records in her book on the Air India plotters, the circle’s legitimacy and influence grew dramatically.
Liberals and secularists who opposed the Khalistan movement were targeted in violent attacks. The poet Gurcharan Rampuri and the activist Charan Gill were attacked on the streets; and the lawyer and politician Ujjal Dosanjh hit on the head with an iron rod, leaving him with injuries that needed 80 stitches.
Even though police brought no charges in these cases, the links between pro-Khalistan leaders and criminals were no secret in the Punjabi community. For example, Ripudaman Malik had provided a home to gangster Raminder ‘Mindy’ Bhandher—a drug dealer and credit-card thief—since he was a teenager, and bought him a Land Rover.
Later, Bhandher would return the favour during Malik’s trial in the Air India 182 case, appearing to rebut critical eyewitness testimony by a protected witness known as ‘Ms. D.’ Bhandher also attempted to intimidate another witness, Narinder Gill, who said he had heard Parmar saying a plan was in place to bring down the aircraft. Bhandher was eventually sentenced to life in prison for murdering a man in 2008.
The Dosanjh brothers, for their part, were leaders of the Vancouver branch of the International Sikh Youth Federation, founded by the revanchist preacher Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, despite their involvement in trafficking drugs and gangland murders. They served as enforcers for the neo-fundamentalist edicts, despite their own lack of adherence to the precepts of Sikh religious practice. Following an infamous on-air clash with their lieutenant, Bindy Johal, both men were executed in shootings.
The so-called moderates, or old elite, lost control of many important Gurudwaras, like the Gurudwara on Vancouver’s Ross Street, with the muscle provided by gangsters playing a key role in elections to manage the temples.
Two years before Hayer’s assassination, a bomb had been planted outside his newspaper’s office, wrapped in a McDonalds take-away bag. The journalist, at the time, blamed it on Indian government agents. Later, though, Los Diablos-linked cocaine trafficker Jean Gaetan Gingras confessed that he had been hired to transport the explosives from Montreal to Vancouver.
Later, in 1988, Hayer was confined to a wheelchair after an attack, the second in the series of assassination attempts which would eventually claim his life.
Evidence emerged at the trial of hitman Hardip Uppal in 2003 that the Babbar Khalsa had paid $50,000 to gangsters Ravinder ‘Robbie’ Soomel and Daljit Basran for murdering the wheelchair-bound journalist. The two assassins were offered another $50,000 to kill another anti-Khalistan Sikh leader, Balwant Singh Gill.
The faith’s riches
Following Hayer’s killing, moderates organised to take back control of Gurudwaras in the Vancouver area. The neo-fundamentalists resisted, campaigning on issues like the moderates’ efforts to introduce reforms like allowing elderly Gurudwara visitors to sit on chairs at tables instead of the floor. The battles that followed, often involving pitched violence, were at their most intense at the Gurudwaras on Vancouver’s Ross Street and Scott Street. Like the neo-fundamentalists, the moderates recruited gangsters, among them Johal.
A former police officer told the researchers Louis Pagliaro and Anne Marie Pagliaro: “It wasn’t uncommon for renowned toughs to receive the accolades and blessings of temple priests and senior community leaders by day and then their blind eye by night as the same young men peddled drugs as petty dealers.”
Flush with funds from the booming cocaine and marijuana market, the criminologist Stephen Schneider has recorded, Johal was soon making upwards of $800,000 a week. In 1995, Johal was acquitted for the killing of the Dosanjh brothers. He was acquitted—almost certainly, it’s now known, because his co-accused, Peter Gill, was having a secret affair with a juror, Gillian Guess.
But in 1998, the cocaine-crazed, increasingly erratic Johal was murdered by his own gang, as he danced at a crowded nightclub. Johal’s killer, Bal Buttar, was himself left permanently disabled in a later gang-land hit. Hundreds of other ethnic-Punjabis—both gangsters and their victims—have died in the violence.
The killing continues, as gangs have embedded themselves deeper in the community. Edmonton businessman Buta Singh Gill was killed in April, in what is suspected to be an extortion-related hit. The gangster Harpreet Singh Uppal and his 11-year-old son were shot dead in an assassination reported to be linked to the immigrant gunmen who allegedly murdered Nijjar.
Like other immigrants, though, new criminals continue to flow in to Canada, hoping to make their fortune. Ethnic-Punjabi gangs, in turn, recruit actively in the homeland. Harjeet Mann, Jasdev Singh, and Sukhraj Dhaliwal, held on drug charges in the US in 2005, were reported to have been big donors to religious and social events in their native village. Gang names frequently recorded Punjab village affiliations, like Dhak-Duhre, Sanghera, Malhi-Buttar.
Ethnic Punjabi immigrants, and their new homelands, are both paying the price.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.