Toronto: A few hundred members of the Sikh community in Canada protested the unsolved murder of one of their leaders last month in the Vancouver area on Saturday outside the Indian consulate in Toronto.
They claimed that Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the president of a Sikh temple and a supporter of the establishment of an independent Sikh state they hope to call Khalistan, was murdered by the Indian government.
"When an Indian agency and system commit a crime, they have to be held accountable," said Kuljeet Singh, a representative of Sikhs for Justice, the US-based group that organised the demonstration.
On June 18, Nijjar, a wanted terrorist according to India, was shot and killed in Surrey, a Vancouver suburb with one of the country's largest Sikh populations.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), according to another protester and lawyer Hakirt Singh, "should investigate this murder" as a political assassination.
"You see tweets and responses from politicians when there is vandalism against a member of Parliament. Here, a Canadian citizen was murdered on Canadian soil. That is foreign meddling.
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Nijjar argued in favour of carving out a separate Sikh state from portions of northern India and possibly Pakistan. Nijjar was accused by India of carrying out terrorist attacks there, a claim he vigorously denied.
"Khalistan! Khalistan!" was yelled by the demonstrators, who were almost exclusively male and carried yellow flags with blue logos to represent their separatist movement.
They travelled from the Toronto suburbs to the Indian consulate, where they were met by about 50 diaspora citizens who were in favour of the Indian government.
There is a poster here urging the murder of Indian diplomats. We are worried because these groups have previously carried out terrorist acts and because politicians are doing nothing, according to Vijay Jain, an IT consultant who was a member of the counterdemonstrators, who spoke to AFP.
One Sikh protester was arrested after breaking down a barrier and running to the other side as a queue of 20 police officers intervened to separate the two groups. Intensities between Canada and India have increased as a result of the murder of the Sikh leader.
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Ottawa is frequently charged by New Delhi with being careless in how it handled Sikh protesters in Canada.
Arindam Bagchi, a spokesman for the Indian foreign minister, stated on Thursday that "we have asked the Canadian government to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of our diplomats."
The majority of Sikhs outside of their native Punjab, India, reside in Canada.