NEW DELHI /OTTAWA: In an eye-opening report, Terry Milewski, one of Canada's veteran journalists, has warned that the Khalistan project is sponsored by Pakistan and it is detrimental to the national security of not only India but Canada as well.
An award winning journalist, Milewski reported from 52 countries during four decades as a correspondent for Canada's most watched CBC TV News.
He was CBC's first Middle East bureau chief and also covered at least three former US administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
In 1985, he covered the Air India bombing in which 329 people were killed aboard from Montreal to Heathrow. He has chased that story for the last 35 years, covering the entire investigation and inquiry into the case.
Milewski retired as CBC's senior correspondent in 2016, returning occasionally as a guest host on the network's Power and Politics.
The Milewski report published by Macdonald Laurier Institute, a reputed think tank based in Ottawa, reveals how Pakistan launched the Khalistan insurgency using Indian Sikhs in Indian Punjab to avenge its own defeat in the Indo-Pak 1971 war.
India had intervened in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) to stop the genocide perpetrated by Pakistani Army and consequently helped it to liberate from West Pakistan.
Interestingly, the report points out how Pakistan viewed the Khalistan project as a strategic buffer and how a independent Khalistan would end India's land access to Kashmir to north, another key interest of the Pakistan Army since 1947.
Highlighting the logical fallacy of the Khalistan project, Milewski reveals how separatist Sikhs complain loudly and properly about the massacre of several thousand Sikhs by Hindus in 1984, but do not hold rallies to demand justice for at least a quarter-million Sikhs massacred by Muslims in 1947 in the name of Islam during the Partition of India.
The Milewski report claims that the western democracies with large Sikh communities like Canada, the UK and the US are aware of this absurdity and therefore, sceptical of the Khalistan referendum, planned for November 2020.
Canada's government has already said it won't recognise it.
Questioning the Khalistan referendum, the veteran journalist in his report has asked why the separatist Sikhs seek India's "occupation" of Indian Punjab, but never ask Pakistan to end its occupation of Pakistani Punjab.
Majority of Sikhs, the report points out, are happy with India and those who live in Indian Punjab even cheer for their regional government headed by Captain Amarinder Singh.