An act of terror committed by Sikh extremists who killed an elected chief minister of Punjab in India, a fellow Sikh, is making news in Canada — 17 years later.

You may be surprised to learn the suicide bomber and his accomplice are being hailed as heroes, not just in the privacy of the homes of their supporters, but publicly. Inside our parliament, in the Ontario legislature, on the grounds of the House of Commons, and of course, vociferously on Twitter.

On August 31, 1995 in the Indian city of Chandigarh, a Sikh suicide bomber blew up himself killing Punjab’s chief minister Beant Singh and 17 others.

The dead terrorist belonged to the banned outfit known as Babbar Khalsa, as was his backup bomber Balwant Singh Rajoana, who was later convicted to be hanged for the murders.

The hanging was scheduled for March 31, but has now been “stayed” after protests in Punjab and here in Canada demanding clemency for Rajoana. The terrorist accomplice, though, remains unrepentant of his crime and has refused to ask for clemency, thus adding to his appeal to some radical Sikh youth still clamouring for a separate state of Khalistan.

Last Wednesday, hundreds of Sikhs came out to demonstrate in support of Rajoana on the steps of Parliament Hill. Ostensibly this was a protest against capital punishment, but the posters displayed reflected a hero worship of the unrepentant terrorist.

In principle, I believe Rajoana should be spared the death sentence, which should be abolished, in India. But any display of admiration or sympathy for a terrorist who planned to be the backup suicide bomber, is repugnant and should have no place in Canada.

Expressing this sentiment triggered a flurry of hate messages on my Twitter feed.

One McMaster undergrad Sikh student sent me a profanity-laced tweet and also added I should have died of cancer. Another threatened me to a physical engagement, writing: “Let’s meet up tough guy. Calling Sikhs terrorist … Seems like you can talk a lot on twitter.”

If it had been just these twits on Twitter, one could have shrugged it off, but the sympathy for the terrorist went right up to our legislators.

NDP justice critic, Jagmeet Singh, stood up in the Ontario legislature and suggested Ontario use its trade relations as a bargaining chip to save the backup suicide bomber. In his speech, the NDP Justice critic failed to tell his colleagues the man he was promoting was a convicted terrorist who had a hand in assassinating the equivalent of the Ontario Premier.

I asked MPP Jagmeet Singh whether he considered Rajoana a terrorist, and why he didn’t mention this fact in his speech. He refused to answer my question. I asked him if he supported the Khalistan movement and got no answer. His assistant e-mailed me that Jagmeet Singh would respond to my questions only if I guaranteed to show him this column before it went to press. She also wanted an assurance that Singh’s response would appear verbatim in the Sun in its entirety.

The questions asked were straight forward and should have been easy to answer, but apparently Jagmeet Singh and many other supporters of the convicted terrorist think otherwise.

It’s a sad day for Canada when our lawmakers won’t clearly condemn the acts of a terrorist when invited to do so. It’s more evidence of how multiculturalism is permitting the most outrageous of ideas to take root in our society.