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autumn evening in Little India, the

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scent of Punjabi cooking congealed in

0:35

the damp London air. Ajayab

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Singh Bagri calmly bramed the

0:40

carnage he'd engineered on

0:43

a delayed flight. 12

0:45

weeks earlier on a brilliant summer morning, Air

0:48

India Flight 182 had exploded over

0:50

the Irish Sea, killing 329 people. The

0:54

bomb he'd planted, Bagri told Tarsem

0:56

Singh Purewan, the editor of Des

0:58

Pardes, had been meant to go

1:00

off on the ground at Heathrow,

1:03

just a few minutes drive from

1:05

the Punjabi newspaper's office in Southall.

1:07

The Babbar Khalsa leader expressed

1:10

absolutely no remorse. 12

1:13

years later, as the time

1:15

neared for Indo-Canadian newspaper publisher Tara

1:17

Singh Heer to

1:19

tell a court the story he'd overheard

1:21

at the Des Pardes meeting, an

1:24

assassin ended his life at his home

1:26

outside Surrey in British Columbia. Two

1:29

years earlier, Purewan, who is Heer's close

1:32

friend, had also been shot through the

1:34

heart at point-blank range. There

1:37

were no witnesses left. The murders

1:39

have never been prosecuted. For

1:42

weeks now, the media in Canada has been

1:44

filled with stories of how foreign intelligence services

1:48

– among them those of India,

1:50

Iran and China – have been

1:52

using organised crime groups to assassinate

1:55

terrorists and intimidate political dissidents. There's

1:58

been a strange silence though. on where

2:00

the story leading up to

2:03

the assassination of pro-Khalistan activist,

2:05

Hadip Singh Nijar, actually

2:07

began. Even as police

2:09

in Canada, the United States and the United

2:11

Kingdom, chose to sit on the sidelines, pro-Khalistan

2:15

groups recruited ethnic Punjabi

2:17

organised crime cartels to

2:19

murder their secular opponents, terrorise

2:21

the community and capture control

2:24

of financially lucrative gurdwaras. Early

2:27

one fine spring morning in 1994, as he walked his

2:30

dog down the street, Vancouver

2:32

resident Glen Olson was shot multiple

2:34

times with a high powered rifle.

2:37

He'd been mistaken, it turned out,

2:39

for his next door neighbour, Bhupinder

2:41

Bindi Singh Johal, a

2:43

flamboyant 1971 born drug

2:46

lord who became a hero

2:48

for many ethnic Punjabi youth

2:50

in Vancouver. That winter, Johal

2:52

had executed his one-time mentor,

2:54

Raminder Dusanj and his brother

2:56

Jimshaid Dusanj. He emerged

2:58

as king of the city's

3:00

Punjabi gangs. The

3:03

killings were linked through

3:05

tangled schemes of personalities to

3:08

battles inside the Sikh community.

3:11

These battles were sparked off

3:13

by the Khalistan movement and

3:15

its struggle to displace older,

3:18

secularised elites who controlled British

3:20

Columbia's cash-rich gurdwara ecosystem. Like

3:24

many great industrial cities, Vancouver was

3:26

home to an underworld which was

3:28

deeply enmeshed with its social fabric.

3:31

Former police officer and criminologist Kieran

3:33

McConnell has recorded. In

3:36

1928, an investigation into a brothel

3:38

run by the vice czar Joe

3:40

Cellona, linked to the Italian mafia,

3:43

led to revelations that the mafia had

3:45

intimate ties to the city's top officials.

3:49

That investigation was set off by revelations

3:52

that the brothel allowed white sex

3:54

workers to serve ethnic Chinese, a

3:57

moral outrage the community wouldn't tolerate.

4:00

Punjabi gangs joined this landscape in

4:03

the 1980s with the

4:05

Dosanj brothers rising to the top of

4:07

Los Diabolos. Los Diabolos

4:09

was a gang until then dominated

4:11

by immigrants from Latin America who'd

4:14

used their ethnic background and connections

4:16

to tap into the drug trade.

4:20

For a generation of disaffected young

4:22

immigrant Punjabis, the gangs offered a

4:25

kind of redemptive masculinity. The

4:27

scholar Manjit Pabla has perceptibly written,

4:31

borrowing from protest cultures like hip-hop

4:34

allowed young Punjabis to assert themselves in

4:36

opposition to the cultural norms of their

4:38

parents as well as

4:40

to their marginalization in white society.

4:43

The anthropologist Kamala Nair has described

4:45

this new culture as the rapization

4:47

of the Sikh tradition. Even

4:50

though the ethnic Punjabi gangsters invoked the

4:52

language of black protest, they came from

4:54

immigrant families that had clawed their way

4:56

into the middle class. For

4:59

the most part, gang members were mama's

5:01

boys, living at home and coddled

5:03

by the family. The

5:06

journalist Renu Bakshi observed that male

5:09

gang violence was wrapped

5:11

around and blanketed by patriarchy.

5:15

From the moment a Punjabi boy opens his

5:17

eyes, she wrote, his parents hand him the

5:19

keys to the Porsche of life. In

5:22

a fit of childhood rage, he will kick

5:24

and punch his mother as his father and

5:26

grandmother look on, taking great pride. Ever

5:29

since the late 1970s, a small

5:31

circle of neo-fundamentalists, among

5:34

them the ideologue Talwinder Singh Parmar,

5:36

Rippudaman Singh Malik, Sojaan Singh

5:38

Gill, Indajeet Singh Rayat and

5:40

Bagri himself, began working

5:43

to eject a simulated Sikhs from

5:45

the management of gurdwaras in Canada.

5:48

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older immigrants who led the gurdwaras,

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they argued, did not maintain the

6:53

observances of the faith, and

6:56

ought thus to be disqualified from

6:58

leadership of religious institutions. Following

7:01

the Indian Army's 1984 operation against

7:03

terrorists hiding in the Golden Temple,

7:06

journalist Kim Bolan records in her fantastic

7:08

book on the Air India plotters, the

7:11

circle's legitimacy and influence grew

7:13

dramatically. Liberals and

7:16

secularists who opposed the Khalistan movement

7:18

were targeted for violence. The

7:21

poet Gurcharan Rampuri and the activist Charan

7:23

Singhal were attacked on the streets. The

7:27

lawyer and politician Ujjal Dosanjh was hit on the

7:29

head with an iron rod, leaving him with injuries

7:31

that needed 80 stitches. Even

7:34

though police brought no charges in

7:36

these cases, the links between pro-Khalistan

7:38

leaders and criminals were no secret

7:40

in the Punjabi community. For

7:43

example, Ripudaman Malik had provided a

7:46

home to gangster Raminder Bhander, a

7:49

drug dealer and credit card thief, since he was

7:51

a teenager and even bought him a Land Rover.

7:54

Later, Bhander would return the favor during

7:56

Malik's trial in the Air India 182

7:58

case. appearing to

8:01

rebut critical eyewitness testimony provided

8:03

by a protected witness known

8:05

as Ms. D. Pandeyer

8:09

also attempted to intimidate another witness, Narinder

8:11

Gill, who said he had heard Parmar

8:14

saying a plan was in place to

8:16

bring down the aircraft. Pandeyer was eventually

8:18

sentenced to life in prison, but

8:21

not for the Air India case. He

8:23

went to jail for murdering a man in 2008.

8:26

The Dosaan brothers for

8:28

their part were actually leaders of

8:30

the Vancouver branch of the right-wing

8:32

International Sikh Youth Federation, which was

8:35

founded by the Revanchist preacher Jarnil

8:37

Singh Bendravale. They

8:39

held this post despite their involvement

8:42

in trafficking drugs and gangland murders.

8:45

They also served as enforcers

8:47

for neo-fundamentalist edicts, despite

8:49

their own lack of adherence to

8:51

the precepts of Sikh religious practice.

8:55

Following an infamous on-air clash with their

8:57

lieutenant, Bindi Johan, both

9:00

men were executed in shootings on

9:02

the street. The so-called moderates or old

9:04

elite lost control of many

9:06

important Godwaras, like the one on Vancouver's Ross

9:09

Street, because of the muscle provided

9:12

by gangsters in elections to

9:14

choose temple management. Two years

9:16

before Hare's assassination, a

9:19

bomb had been planted outside his newspaper's

9:21

office, wrapped in a McDonald's takeaway

9:24

bag. The

9:26

journalist at the time blamed it on Indian government agents.

9:28

Later though, Los Diabolos-linked cocaine

9:30

trafficker Jean-Gétain Gingras confessed that he

9:32

had been hired to transport

9:36

the explosives from Montreal

9:38

to Vancouver. Later

9:40

in 1988 Hare was confined to

9:46

a wheelchair after an attack, the

9:49

second in the series of assassination attempts that would eventually

9:52

claim his life. Evidence

9:55

emerged at the trial of hitman Hardeep Upal

9:57

in 2003 that the Baba's murder was not

9:59

a crime. Khalsa had paid

10:01

$50,000 to gangsters Ravinder

10:04

Rabi Sumail and

10:06

Daljeet Basra for murdering the wheelchair

10:08

bound journalists. The two assassins

10:10

offered another $50,000 for killing another

10:14

Kalistan Sikh leader Balwan Singh Gill.

10:19

Following Hare's killing, moderates organised to

10:21

take back control of Gurdwara's in

10:23

the Vancouver area. The

10:25

new fundamentalists resisted campaigning on issues

10:27

like the moderate's efforts to introduce

10:30

reforms. He forms like

10:32

allowing elderly Gurdwara visitors to sit

10:34

on chairs and tables instead of

10:36

the floor. The

10:38

battles that followed often involved pitched

10:41

violence. They were

10:43

at their most intense at the Gurdwara's

10:45

on Vancouver's Roth Street and Scott Street.

10:49

Like the new fundamentalists, the

10:51

moderates recruited gangsters, among

10:53

them Johan. A former police officer

10:56

told the researchers Louis Paliaro and

10:58

Anne Marie Paliaro, I

11:00

quote, "... it wasn't uncommon

11:02

for renowned tuffs to receive the

11:04

accolades and blessings of temple priests

11:07

and senior community leaders by day, and

11:10

then their blind eye by

11:12

night as the same young men peddled

11:14

drugs as petty dealers." Flush

11:16

with funds from the booming

11:18

cocaine and marijuana market, the

11:20

criminologist Steven Schneider has recorded,

11:23

Johal was making upwards of $800,000 a week. In 1995,

11:25

Johal was

11:30

acquitted for the killing of the Dossan's

11:32

brothers. He was

11:34

let off almost certainly it's now

11:36

known because his co-accused Peter Gill

11:38

was having a secret affair with

11:40

one of the jurors, Gillian Guess.

11:44

But in 1998, the cocaine crazed

11:46

and increasingly erratic Johal was bumped

11:48

off by his own gang as

11:51

he danced at a crowded nightclub.

11:54

Johal's killer, Bal Buter was

11:56

himself left permanently disabled in

11:58

a late galat. later gangland

12:00

hate. Hundreds of

12:02

other ethnic Punjabis, both gangsters and

12:05

their victims, have died since.

12:08

The killing continues and

12:10

gangs have embedded themselves ever

12:12

deeper inside the community. Edmonton

12:16

businessmen Bhuta Singh Gill was killed just

12:18

in April in what is

12:20

suspected to be an extortion related hate.

12:23

Local businessmen have been getting letters

12:25

from ethnic Punjabi gangs based

12:27

in Punjab and in Canada.

12:31

The gangster Harpreet Singh Opal and

12:33

his 11-year-old son were shot dead

12:35

in an assassination reported to be

12:37

linked to the immigrant gunman who

12:39

allegedly murdered Nijar. Like

12:43

other immigrants though, new criminals continue

12:45

to flow into Canada, hoping

12:47

to make their fortune just like

12:49

other immigrants. Ethnic

12:51

Punjabi gangs in turn recruit actively in

12:54

their homeland. Harjit Mann,

12:56

Jastave Singh and Sukraj Dhaliwal held on

12:58

drug charges in the United States in

13:00

2005, who were reported to

13:03

have been huge donors to religious and

13:06

social events in their native village in

13:08

Punjab. Gang

13:10

names today frequently record Punjab

13:12

village affiliations like Dhaag Dure,

13:14

Sangheda, Mali