Still no action ten years after killing
Thu, November 20 2008
The founding editor of the Indo Canadian Times was gunned down in Surrey on Nov. 18, 1998. Ten years have passed but police have failed to arrest the murderers of the first Punjabi journalist to be killed on Canadian soil.
“It’s a blot on free expression in Canada,” Julie Payne, manager of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), told the South Asian Post. On Tuesday, the CJFE co-sponsored a forum on Hayer’s 10th death anniversary at Langara College in Vancouver.
“Under Attack: Threats to Media Freedom in Canada 10 Years After the Assassination of Tara Singh Hayer” was attended by Hayer’s daughter Rupinder Hayer, who took over as Editor of the Indo Canadian Times after her father’s death.
Payne, who could not attend the event, expressed her continuing concern about the case.
Hayer’s family strongly believes that he was murdered for political reasons.
“I don’t want to repeat that. It’s already known to the media. Even the police know who killed him and why, but the soft laws are stopping them from brining the killers to justice,” Hayer’s MLA son Dave Hayer told the South Asian Post.
Hayer died a critic of Sikh extremists, but was earlier a supporter of Khalistan, a separate Sikh homeland, and had glorified the militants in his newspaper.
He parted ways with the extremists and later became a witness in the 1985 Air India bombing investigation. The bombing has been blamed on the Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh terrorist group. Hayer had survived a previous attack that left him paralyzed in 1988.
His daughter Rupinder Hayer admitted that her father was sympathetic to the Khalistan movement in the early 1980s.
“Back then, like most of the Sikhs living in North America, he too was sympathetic to the cause of Khalistan because of the treatment of the Sikhs in Punjab by the Indian government,” she said.
Hayer was also upset at the infamous Operation Bluestar, the Indian military attack on the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984.
The attack was launched to flush out Sikh extremists who had stockpiled weapons inside the temple complex.
His views changed when he became aware of the excesses of the militants,” said Hayer’s daughter.
In a selfless act, a Punjabi poet and a director of the Central Punjabi Writers’ Association, Surjit Singh Madhopuri, overpowered the man who had first attacked Hayer in 1988. This led to the arrest and conviction of Harkirat Singh Bagga.
“This was an attack on freedom of expression,” says Surjit Madhopuri. “We strongly urge the police to arrest his killers.”
By Gurpreet Singh
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