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A poster declaring “I am Merah” or “I am Yigal Amir” would rightly be seen as scandalous. Even Tamil extremists would have had a hard time getting away with “I am Prabhakaran.” So why do Sikh extremists often get a free pass in this country — even after Air India awakened us to the problem? Is it the banal fact that Eurocentric reporters and politicians simply have trouble telling one Singh from the next? Or do we regard the internal politics of the Indian state as too opaque for scrutiny?

It is true that the Indian government and military apparatus, of which Beant Singh was part, made some terrible mistakes in the battle against Sikh extremists in the 1980s — including mass killings that continue to scar the nation’s conscience. The world shouldn’t forget the innocent Sikh victims of government brutality who perished during that period. But such remembrances do not change the fact that terrorism is terrorism.

The campaign against violent creeds should be a universal one — not just confined to the fight against militant Islam. For it is all part of the same pathology. In the case of Sikh and Muslim terrorism, they even are headquartered in the same place: The leader of the Babbar Khalsa terrorist group (which is banned in Canada) is now at large in Pakistan, where he reportedly receives protection from that country’s intelligence service, the ISI — just like many Taliban leaders and even, possibly, until last year, Osama Bin Laden himself.