When Canadian rights become weapons for Khalistani activists

A campaign now circulating gives the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) an ultimatum: publicly prove its account of Air India Flight 182 or withdraw it.

On June 23, 2026, CSIS stated plainly that ‘a bomb planted by Canada-based Khalistani extremists’ destroyed Kanishka, killing all 329 people aboard. Its 2024 public report had attributed the bombing to Canada-based extremists; its 2025 report identified the suspects as members of Canada-based Khalistani extremist groups.

Some Khalistani organisations and activists now demand that CSIS reproduce the evidence behind a four-decade-old terrorism investigation and effectively retry the case in public.

They are entitled to challenge the government. But the tactic is revealing where acquittal becomes exoneration, missing evidence becomes proof of another theory, litigation becomes punishment and freedom of expression becomes intimidation at a memorial.

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Canadian rights are invoked, then stretched beyond what the law established.

This history does not just rest on one intelligence assessment. Canada conducted an extensive investigation and one of its most complex criminal trials. Bob Rae completed an independent federal review, followed by Justice John Major’s multi-year public inquiry.

Canadian surveillance officers followed Talwinder Singh Parmar and Inderjit Singh Reyat into woods near Duncan, British Columbia, where they heard what investigators later believed was a bomb test. Japanese investigators recovered physical evidence from the Narita explosion, traced bomb components and purchases to Reyat and helped secure his conviction.

CSIS did not discover these facts in 2026. Yet it took 41 years to state its conclusion so directly.

That delay caused damage.

Official hesitation left a vacuum in which Parmar could be recast from the identified mastermind behind the bombing into a victim, criminal outcomes could be distorted into political vindication, and a documented Canadian terrorist plot could be reduced to merely one ‘version’ of history.

By the time CSIS spoke without ambiguity, denial had been repeated, organised and politically normalised.

That revisionism now follows victims into memorial spaces.

Families gather to mourn 329 people, including 82 children. Khalistan activists have appeared at commemorations disputing responsibility for the bombing. Parmar, identified by the judge and the Air India inquiry as the plot’s mastermind, continues to appear on Canadian posters labelled ‘Shaheed and martyred’.

The history of the Khalistani movement cannot be cleansed of bombings, assassinations, suicide attacks and intimidation by presenting the advocacy as peaceful.

Freedom of expression protects lawful political speech. It should not require governments, police and public authorities to treat targeted provocation at a victims’ memorial as ordinary debate.

Why are authorities more confident protecting such displays than protecting grieving families from intimidation?

A memorial should not force victims to defend the history of their own loss.

Tara Singh Hayer remains the clearest example of this institutional imbalance.

Hayer was a Sikh journalist who opposed Khalistani violence and became a critical potential witness in the Air India case. An explosive device was found outside his newspaper office. In 1988, Harkirat Singh Bagga shot him repeatedly, leaving him permanently disabled.

Bagga was prosecuted through Canada’s youth-justice system. Prosecutions has questioned his stated age, identity documents and how he qualified for those protections.

Every accused person is entitled to due process. But Canada protected the accused through law while failing to protect the witness whose evidence the law required.

Hayer continued speaking despite his injuries and threats. In 1998, he was murdered before he could testify.

His murder eliminated one of the prosecution’s most important potential witnesses. Evidence died with him, the case lost a critical voice, and every remaining witness understood the message: speaking could cost them their life.

Other witnesses faced the same fear.

One anonymous witness told CSIS that Bagri sought her car before the bombing and said only the baggage, not he, would be travelling. The court found no apparent motive for her to invent the allegation and accepted that fear explained her silence. But because the defence could not cross-examine her, the account could not carry the necessary evidentiary weight.

In law, that may have been defensible. In practice, the defence’s right to question her outweighed the reality that she feared she could be killed for answering.

Another protected witness delayed revealing an alleged confession by Ripudaman Singh Malik, while she was being threatened. She entered witness protection and said the experience had destroyed her life. Yet the delay caused by fear was later used to brand her account unreliable.

This was the pattern: intimidation damaged the witness, and the damage was then used against the case.

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is essential. The manipulation comes later, when a precise legal outcome is inflated into a political declaration. An acquittal means the Crown failed to prove a specific charge; it does not clear an entire movement. A stayed charge is not exoneration, and missing evidence does not make every competing theory true.

Inderjit Singh Reyat exposed another limit. He was convicted in the Narita case, pleaded guilty to manslaughter for helping construct the Flight 182 bomb and was later convicted of perjury for lying at the Malik–Bagri trial. Yet he did not identify the wider participants.

His legal rights remained intact. The families remained without the complete truth.

Journalists who pursued that truth also paid a price.

After CBC aired Terry Milewski’s Samosa Politics in 2007, CBC, Milewski and Ujjal Dosanjh were sued for $110 million. Complaints and accusations of bias followed. The action was later abandoned without the documentary being changed one bit or a court finding that Milewski’s reporting was false.

He was later sued again over Khalistan: A Project of Pakistan.

A lawsuit need not succeed if the process drains the reporter and deters the next one. Years of litigation consume time, money and energy while giving the accusation immediate publicity.

The process becomes the punishment.

Kim Bolan faced a different but related campaign. Her reporting on Air India, organised crime and Khalistani violence brought threats through telephone calls, mail and Punjabi-language radio. She worked under police protection while her credibility was attacked.

Milewski demonstrates lawfare. Bolan demonstrates intimidation. In both cases, journalists bore the cost of defending their work while their accuser (s) gained attention and manufactured doubt without proving the reporting false.

Canada has already investigated its failures. The Rae review and major inquiry documented destroyed intelligence, poor information-sharing, witness intimidation and the difficulty of converting intelligence into admissible evidence.

Those failures are now turned against the record itself; mishandled evidence is used to reject every Canadian conclusion, attacks on witness credibility erase the intimidation that damaged them, and incomplete convictions keep the history permanently unsettled.

Canada’s Charter protects dissent, due process and freedom of expression. It was never meant to ensure that intimidation, lawfare and historical revisionism would face no resistance.

Canadian rights are not too strong.

Canadian institutions are too often too hesitant to stop those rights from being turned against the witnesses, journalists, families and agencies they were meant to protect.

(The author is a Canada-based writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)