Hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi is due to arrive in the US for a three-day official visit, the White House today had a meeting with a group of Sikhs who support the Khalistan movement. They were promised “protection from any transnational aggression on its soil” by the White House.
According to the White House, it is dedicated to “protecting American Citizens” from danger while they are inside US boundaries. This development coincides with worries that Khalistani separatists are receiving sanctuary and asylum from the US and Canada.
In India, there are prohibited groups that support the Khalistan separatist movement; in the past few decades, some of these groups have engaged in terrorist activities.
Regarding “giving shelter” to such groups, the US has remained silent, but Canada has referred to it as its “freedom of speech”. “India respects and practices freedom of speech, but freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to support separatism. It does not equate with freedom to threaten foreign diplomats or allow political space to elements advocating violence,” stated Jaishankar. “In any rule-based society, you would imagine that you would check people’s background, how they came, what passports they carried etc,” he said.
“If you have people whose presence there was itself on very dubious documents, what does it say about you? It actually says that your vote-bank actually is more powerful than your rule of law,” Mr Jaishankar added to the prior statement.
Hours before PM Modi was scheduled to arrive in the US for the Quad summit in Delaware and to speak at the UN General Assembly in New York at the “Summit of the Future” event, a meeting was held at the White House.
Pritpal Singh of the American Sikh Caucus Committee, together with representatives from the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund (SALDEF), attended the meeting, which took place inside the official White House building.