The Surrey Swamp

On September 27, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) raided 53 locations in sev­en states as part of their crack­down on the terrorist-gangster nexus connected with Canada-based Sikh extremists. This is the seventh in the series of such crackdowns in the last one year. Last week, the agency an­nounced a reward of `10 lakh each for information that may lead to the arrest of Harwinder Singh Sandhu alias Rinda and Lakhbir Singh Sandhu alias Landa. The two, according to security agencies, are associated with the Sikh extremist group, Babbar Khalsa International (BKI). A few days later, the NIA also attached properties in Punjab owned by another Sikh extremist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannu. These actions have come close to India’s fallout with Canada over the circumstances leading to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh extremist, who was shot dead by unknown assailants outside a gurdwara in Surrey in June. Since then, Canada has held India responsible for this killing, a charge India has denied. Canada has not put the evidence on the table, though it claims to be in possession of it. Its allies, like the US and Australia, have made some remarks about their concern for India’s purported role in the killing. But the controversy has brought into focus how Canada has harboured fringe Khalistani extremists on its soil and how these elements, with the help of their friends in Pakistan, have been trying to revive militancy in Punjab.

Nijjar was from Bhar Singh Pura village in Punjab’s Jalandhar district. According to investigating agencies, he came in touch with local criminals in the 1980s and was initiated into militancy by Jagtar Singh Tara, the chief of the Sikh extremist group, Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF). As his role in terrorist activities came to police’s attention, Nijjar ran away to Canada on a forged passport (under the fake name of “Ravi Sharma”) in 1996 (some accounts say 1997). He applied for asylum claiming persecution by Indian authorities, but his application was rejected. A few days later, he tried it through another way used by many from Punjab to gain citizenship abroad. He claimed that he was planning to marry a woman who would then sponsor his immigration. That claim also turned out to be false with the said woman’s own citizenship status on wobbly grounds. But Nijjar kept appealing. Later, he was granted citizenship—it is not clear how. “What is shocking is that he was offered this citi­zenship just a few months after the Interpol issued a Red Corner Notice on our request in November 2014,” says an officer with India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) (After the controversy, Canada’s Immigration Minister Marc Miller posted on X that Nijjar had been granted citizenship in March 2015, which he then changed to say that it happened in May 2007). As India raised the issue of his pres­ence on Canadian soil and his role in terrorist activities on Indian soil, Canada hardly acted except putting him on a no-fly list.

In the beginning, Nijjar maintained a low profile there, working mainly as a truck driver. In 2012, Indian intelligence agencies spotted him in Pakistan where he visited as a part of an entourage on the festival of Baisakhi. There is a picture of him at the rooftop of the lodge in Gurdwara Nankana Sahib in Pakistan where he can be seen standing with three others, including Jagtar Singh Tara. It is believed that during this time he also received train­ing in arms and use of explosives from Pakistan’s ISI with Tara’s help. On his part, Nijjar sent one million (in Pakistani currency) to Tara. The money, Indian authorities believe, came from illegal drug trade and extortion. With Tara, Nijjar planned several terror activities in Punjab, including killings. He planned to launch a big attack on the Dera Sacha Sauda headquarters in Haryana, but this could not be achieved. He kept using his module to target several individu­als, including those he believed were acting against the “Panth.” In 2020, he asked a prominent Punjab gangster Arshdeep Singh Gill alias Arsh Dalla to kill a father-son duo in Bathinda. In the attack, the father, Manohar Lal, was killed, but his son managed to escape.

In 2021, says a dossier prepared by the IB, Nijjar forcibly made his cousin step down as the president of the Surrey gurdwara. By this time, it says, he was acting as the chief of operations for KTF since Tara had been deported to India after his arrest in Bangkok in January 2015.

Sometime around 10 years ago, the Khalistani extremists in Canada, Pakistan and elsewhere began to use a complex net­work of operatives to carry out terrorist activities and to smuggle drugs and weapons into India. This is significant as Punjab shares around 550km of international border with Pakistan and there are more than 400 villages in close vicinity of the border. They also developed a unique way of carrying out killings that would have a lasting effect on the law and order scenario in Punjab. This involved forming an alliance with major gangs in north India to carry out targeted killings of individuals. According to NIA, this nexus began in 2012. With it, the profile and influence of indi­vidual gangsters also rose sharply. From 2015 onwards, these gangs had established themselves in three major regions of Punjab.

The first incident took place in January 2015 when a gangster, Harjinder Singh alias Viky Gounder killed another gangster Sukha Kahlon in Phagwara while he was being taken back to jail after a court hearing. As he and his accomplices held several policemen hostage at gunpoint, Gounder indulged in a maca­bre dance around the slain gangster’s body (he was later gunned down by the police in 2018). The Pakistan-based Sikh extremist Hardeep Singh contacted a gangster Dharmender Singh “Gugni” to target Hindu rightwing leaders. Gugni was in Ludhiana jail, but through his contacts he managed weapons and other support for assailants who went on to kill prominent Hindu leaders in Punjab like Jagdish Gagneja, the vice-president of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Punjab, and Shiv Sena leaders like Ravin­der Gosain and Durgadas Gupta. Gagneja was killed in Jalandhar on August 6, 2016, when he had gone to a neighbourbood market with his wife. It was followed by the infamous Nabha jail break in November that year, resulting in the escaping of two dreaded terrorists, Harminder Singh and Kashmir Singh. Harminder was rearrested later, but Kashmir Singh managed to escape to Nepal. This, the NIA investigation later revealed, was planned by gangster-turned-terrorist Ramanjit Singh Romi and Gurpatwant Singh Pannu. Among people killed in this spate of killings was Balwinder Singh Sandhu, a Shaurya Chakra awardee, who had in the heydays of Punjab militancy opposed (and fought against) the Khalistani extremists. He was shot dead outside his home on the morning of October 10, 2020 in Bhikhiwind, Tarn Taran.

As gang wars persisted, a man rose among them to become so powerful in less than 10 years that he came to be seen as the D Company equivalent. The man, Lawrence Bishnoi, has been in jail but that has not impacted his network that he uses for or­ganised crime like contract killings, protection money rackets, gun-running and land grabbing. To hire new recruits, Bishnoi and other gangs would offer money and fancy things like fashionable clothes. They also promised them that after their involvement in criminal activities, they would be helped to immigrate to Canada or other countries. It is in this way that noted personalities like Sidhu Moosewala were killed.

Bishnoi, the NIA investigation says, became an associate of Rinda. Through his friend, the gangster Goldie Brar, he also came in touch with Landa, creating what the NIA calls “a symbiotic terrorist-gangster network.” Bishnoi, and Brar, whose real name is Satinderjeet Singh, met in Panjab University sometime around 2010. In 2017, Brar went to Canada on a student visa, but the two remained in touch. As Bishnoi became involved in criminal ac­tivities, he made a gang of sorts with Brar and others. Over the years, theirs became a powerful syndicate with connections in countries like Thailand and the UAE.

“Bishnoi does it so comfortably that he has not bothered to even apply for bail in any case against him,” says a senior NIA officer. The agency’s investigation claims that a significant part of their money generated through activities like extortion is sent to Canada, Dubai, Thailand and Australia to their associates, and some of it also goes to Khalistani networks there. “You can say that Bishnoi’s operational base is Canada,” says the NIA official.

Bishnoi also forged alliances with several other gangs outside Punjab. Prominent among them were the ones run by Sandeep alias Kala Jatheri and Virendra Pratap alias Kala Rana in Hary­ana (both under arrest), and Anandpal in Rajasthan (killed in a police encounter in 2017) and Jitender Mann Gogi in Delhi (killed in a court by a rival gang in September 2021). Using Rinda and Landa’s Pakistan network, Bishnoi and his gang also began smuggling drugs and weapons from Pakistan through drones. For their operations, they also took help, say NIA investigators, of an Uttar Pradesh resident, Shahbaz Ansari, who was arrest­ed in December last year. He is believed to have visited Dubai several times under the pretext of sell­ing women’s garments where he came in touch with a Pakistani hawala oper­ator. The operator in turn introduced him to an arms dealer whom the NIA identifies as Hamid. He is believed to have told Ansari that they had sup­plied sophisticated arms to Bishnoi and Brar’s gang.

The money collected in India through extortion and arms and drugs smuggling was being sent to Goldie Brar and another person called Satbir Singh alias Sam, who invested this in yachts, movies and organising Cana­dian Premier League, the NIA investi­gation has revealed. According to NIA, between 2019 and 2021, Bishnoi also sent around `35 lakh each month to an alleged hawala operator in Thai­land who runs a chain of nightclubs and a restaurant there.

It is on the instructions of Landa, who is now in Canada, men sent by this syndicate attacked the Punjab Police intelligence headquarters in Mohali in May 2022 with rocket-propelled grenades. The grenades and other weapons were provided by Landa. One of the persons involved in the attack, Deep­ak Surakhpur, was provided shelter in Nepal by Kashmir Singh.

But the Surrey poison ivy does not end with Nijjar. The In­dian authorities are now pursuing the case of the Sikh extremist Arsh Dalla, aged 27, who lives in Surrey with his wife and a child (he is believed to have left India in mid-2020). He is from Dalla village in Punjab’s Moga district. According to an extensive inves­tigation by Delhi Police’s Special Cell, Dalla was in touch with ISI through his network of Sikh extremists to create communal dis­turbance in India by killing Hindu religious leaders and sadhus. In January this year, the cell arrested Jagjit Singh “Jagga” and Naush­ad from Delhi’s Jahangirpuri area. The two had lured a Hindu boy, Rajkumar, to their rented house in Jahangirpuri’s B Block where they slit his throat and made a video of the act, which was then sent to one of Dalla’s associates in Pakistan, Suhail, through the Signal chat app. Dalla was close to Nijjar and another slain Canada-based extremist Sukhdool Singh Gill, who was killed recently. Gill had fled to Canada in 2017; prior to that, he used to work as a peon in the deputy commissioner’s office in Moga. Like several others, Gill got attracted to the criminal world that he found glamorous through videos put up by gangs on YouTube and Facebook.

While the Indian agencies have cracked down on this network here, it continues to thrive in Canada. The spectre of Nijjar’s giant posters looming large over the Surrey landscape is not good optics for a country that is concerned about its sover­eignty while it turns a blind eye to India’s concerns about what some of its citizens are trying to create in Punjab.

Arshdeep Singh GillGangster Lawrence BishnoiIndia-Canada relationshipJustin TrudeauKhalistani operativesSikh extremists