The Harper government vowed to review its immigration rules
after Canadian visa officers in Indiatouched off a furor by barring dozens of people on the grounds that their
service in army, police and intelligence units made them complicit in
human-rights violations.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney issued an apology on
Friday, saying Canadian immigration officials should never have cast aspersions
on India’s
institutions. The incidents, he said, showed visa officers have too much
latitude.
For a deeply embarrassed Harper government, the pledge and
apology were an effort to repair relations with a country it has been
assiduously courting: India’s
booming economy makes it a major target for attempts to build trade ties to the
East.
And at home, the visa flap won’t help Conservative efforts
to woo a diaspora of more than one million Indo-Canadians; some were offended
by the insult, others by the apology.
Canadaand India now chalk up the
incidents to overworked immigration officers in the New Delhi embassy, where about half of the
360 staff members work on immigration matters. Canadaand India,
Mr. Kenney said in a statement, work closely together on security.
“The Government of Canada therefore deeply regrets the
recent incident in which letters drafted by public service officials during
routine visa refusals to Indian nationals cast false aspersions on the
legitimacy of work carried out by Indian defence and security institutions,
which operate under the framework of democratic processes and the rule of law,”
he said.
The apology didn’t end there: It came with a pledge that Canada will
review its policy on declaring foreigners inadmissible. The incident, he added,
“has demonstrated that the deliberately broad legislation may create instances
when the net is cast too widely by officials, creating irritants with our
trusted and valued international allies.”
The visa denials certainly provoked outrage in India. It
spilled onto front pages and every TV news channel. It led India Foreign
Minister S.M. Krishna to complain that the letters were “entirely
unacceptable.” Canada’s
high commissioner was summoned to explain. The visa officers’ letters were
taken as a national insult written under official Canadian letterhead.
Some of the fuel for the controversy came from a widespread
feeling that Canada was
hypocritical, given its record with detainees in Afghanistan. India has fought low-level wars in its outlying
areas for decades, and considers Canada a relative newcomer to
counterinsurgency.
“They themselves are deployed in Afghanistan,
and who knows what kind of human-rights violations they’re involved with
there,” said a reporter on NDTV, India´s largest private
broadcaster.
The uproar started two weeks ago, when a retired constable
named Fateh Singh Pandher complained to the local news media about his
treatment. After his daughter’s marriage in 2002, he and his wife visited her
in Edmonton; he was seduced by Canada’s beauty and its “law and
order,” he said, and sought to move there.
Those hopes were dashed when he received a letter dated Dec.
8, 2009, from a Canadian diplomat. It noted his service as a constable in the
Border Security Force as a concern.
“The BSF has engaged in systematic attacks on civilians and
has been responsible for systematically torturing suspected criminals,” the
letter said, according to the retired constable.
For months, like others who received similar notices,
Constable Pandher did nothing.
“I was in shock,” he said. “Then I pulled myself together
and wrote letters.”
After his story emerged in the media, others started coming
forward. Indian newspapers and TV reported on every new case, which included
members of India’s
army, police, paramilitary and intelligence forces. Many had similar
complaints: that Canadian visa officials had broadly interpreted the rule that
forbids entry for war criminals.
Canada’s
immigration law bars anyone who has committed war crimes or has “engaged in
terrorism, systematic or gross human rights violations, or genocide.”
During his years as a police chief in India’s troubled districts near the Pakistanborder, Ranbir Singh Khatra says he took extraordinary care to avoid harming
innocent people. Even when insurgents occupied a town and provoked a three-day
standoff with security forces, he said, his men stayed at the outskirts until
all residents evacuated, then fought their enemies with light weapons: no
airstrikes, no artillery, no civilian deaths.
“Nothing like your big wars in Afghanistan,” he said.
He received a June, 2008, letter informing him the judgment
against him was based on his rank. He’s now a senior superintendent of police
in Punjab, but Canadian visa officers focused on his history as a police chief
in Amritsar.
“You were at the very least willfully blind to the crimes against humanity
committed by Punjab police in Amritsar,” the
letter said, claiming government forces killed 6,000 Sikhs in Amritsar from 1984 to 1994.
Supt. Khatra denies any civilians were killed on his watch.
He acknowledges he was investigated in connection with the death of a Sikh
student in 1993, but says he was cleared. “Is the law based on presumption in Canada?” he
said. “Because this is not the principle here in India.”
While speaking with The Globe and Mail in the sleepy town ofPatiala, 250 kilometres northwest of New Delhi, the police officer’s cellphones rang
constantly; several calls were from journalists based in Canada, where the Indian community
has followed the story with keen interest.
Gurpreet Singh, who is writing a book about Sikh militancy,
recently discussed the issue during his daily show on Radio India in Vancouver.
He said he’s hearing passionate opinions from two sides: those who say Indiahas been smeared by Canadian bureaucrats; and those who feel vindicated that
somebody is addressing the wrongs committed in recent decades.
“Some say they’re killers in uniforms, and others say that’s
unfair,” he said. “It’s really controversial. There were a lot of fireworks.” -
(Globe & Mail, Canada)
