OTTAWA - Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh says he and others who spoke out against Sikh extremism in the 1980s faced a "reign of terror'' that included beatings, arson and threats of kidnapping and death -- and the rest of Canadian society didn't seem to care.
Testifying at the Air India inquiry Wednesday, Dosanjh said most mainstream politicians and police officers viewed the problem as an internal dispute among immigrants, with no consequences for anybody else.
"I believe that the institutions of our society were unable to understand or comprehend it to any great degree at that time and were not able to deal with it,'' he told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major.
"We were left to fend for ourselves.''
Dosanjh, then a human rights activist and lawyer in private practice, went so far as to write directly to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney, calling his attention to the escalating violence.
The letter was dispatched in April 1985 just two months before Air India Flight 182 was bombed with the loss of 329 lives -- but it went unanswered.
Though he steered clear of laying personal blame on Mulroney or any other public figure, Dosanjh said the overall impression among moderate Sikhs was inescapable.
"We felt abandoned by the political leaders, by the government . . . . We felt that nobody really cared very much.''
Dosanjh was brutally beaten in 1985 by a man believed to be acting on behalf of the extremist groups he had repeatedly denounced.
A suspect was eventually charged, but Crown attorneys warned the evidence was weak and asked Dosanjh if he really wanted them to go ahead with the prosecution. He said he did and the man was acquitted -- only to be convicted years later in the shooting of a visiting Punjabi cabinet minister on Vancouver Island.
Dosanjh insisted he harboured no bitterness over the failed prosecution, but he did offer one pointed observation: "The investigation left a lot to be desired in the way it was done.''
The incident did nothing to halt a budding political career, as Dosanjh went on to become NDP attorney general and then premier of British Columbia before jumping to the federal Liberals.
He stressed Wednesday that he wasn't accusing anyone of conscious racial discrimination in the investigation of his own case, or of similar attacks on others, or of the bombing of Air India.
"The vast majority of (Canadians) are fair, just and compassionate,'' he said. "If they weren't that, I'd never be elected in the first place.''
He added, however, that he'd be "less than candid'' if he didn't admit to sharing a belief -- widespread among Indo-Canadians -- that many of his fellow citizens had a cultural blind spot about what was going on before the Air India bombing.
The attitude of the general public, said Dosanjh, seemed to be that beatings, threats and bombings "weren't really happening to Canadians -- they were happening to some brown guys that were arguing with each other that we don't understand.''
Dosanjh also maintained that, although the matter has faded from the headlines in most parts of the country, the climate in the Sikh community has not improved in the last 20 years.
"The fear and the reign of terror is still there,'' he said, noting that he received emailed death threats as recently as last summer -- including one that denounced him as a "blood traitor.''
Police and prosecutors have told him the threats are too vague, and the prospect of conviction too slim, to try to bring charges under current law, he said.
That assertion has led Dosanjh to campaign for amendments to the Criminal Code to strengthen provisions against hatemongering and incitement to violence.
The latest threats came after he was publicly critical of a parade in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey last spring where Talwinder Singh Parmar -- the suspected mastermind of the Air India bombing who was shot dead by Indian police in 1992 -- was held up as a "martyr'' to the cause of an independent Sikh homeland.
A number of federal and provincial politicians, including some Liberals, attended the event, although Dosanjh charitably suggested that his colleagues probably didn't understand the political motives behind the parade.
He did express disappointment, however, that few stepped forward to voice criticism after media reports pointed out that many participants had openly worn the insignia of banned terrorist groups.
"If we can't apprehend them or convict them, then at least we can denounce them,'' Dosanjh told reporters after his testimony. "And part of that denunciation has to come from politicians.''
