It was 2001. I had just moved to Canada from India with my wife and a two-and-a-half-year-old son.

B.C. had its first Punjabi-born premier in Ujjal Dosanjh. We never imagined that one day my spouse, Rachna Singh, will also be sitting in the legislature.  

It was around then that famous Punjabi author Harpreet Sekha wrote a short story on hypocrisy within the Punjabi community in Canada. Do Rangi is about how many Punjabis here continue to hate migrants coming to Punjab from poorer Indian states for a better livelihood—even while enjoying all the benefits in their adopted country.  

Sekha was invited to a radio station along with me for an open-line reading of the story and subsequent discussion. When the lines were opened, several callers actually made disparaging comments about those migrants to Punjab from Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar.

This was a huge shock for me, but it reinforced what Sekha had written. When I tried to counter some of the callers by drawing parallels between Punjabi Canadians and migrants to Punjab—who too have contributed to the growth of our abandoned homeland—I faced a backlash.  

Later, when I joined Radio India as a broadcaster and tried to take a position against antimigrant bias in Punjab, I was repeatedly reprimanded by angry callers and some of my colleagues. Apparently, they did not want to see how this amounts to racism, much like what immigrants face in North America from white supremacists.  

This is despite the fact that a majority of them were Sikhs, whose religion is based on principles of equality and social justice and denounces discrimination in any form. So much so, the 10th master of Sikhism (also known as Sikhi), Guru Gobind Singh, was born in Bihar.

There, he spent the early years of his life during which he received lot of love from people of that region.  

Recently, Punjab's chief minister, Charanjit Singh Channi, made an outrageous statement suggesting that those coming from UP and Bihar have established their rule in the state and need to be ousted. This was even more disturbing as it came from the head of the state—the equivalent of a provincial premier in Canada—and from the leader of a party that claims to be secular and progressive.

Notably, Channi is a Dalit. He's a member of an oppressed community that has suffered caste-based repression for centuries. It was therefore disheartening to hear such offensive remarks coming from him about another marginalized section of the population.  

Although Sikh fundamentalists have been indulging in smear campaigns against migrants, who are predominantly Hindu labourers from those states in the past, such hatred gets legitimacy when comes from someone in position of power.  

Channi’s remarks echo those collective emotions that have spilled over to the Punjabi diaspora as well and we need to stand up against this.

Channi’s defence is that he was meaning to target the outside leadership of Aam Aadmi Party that is directly challenging the Congress. But that makes no sense as his choice of words reveal.

Instead of being specific about the individuals he is referring to, he made a sweeping statement about a particular group of people, who too have a right to participate in the electoral politics in Punjab.

Just imagine how we in Canada would have taken it had any politician said similar things about our Punjabi-born elected officials. As a matter of fact, some right-wing politicians have been attacking New Democratic leader Jagmeet Singh because of his turban and we get upset every time it is reported.

So why allow politicians in Punjab and their apologists in Canada to spew venom against migrants?    

That said, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has criticized Channi by accusing him of creating divisions even though he has no moral right to do so.

Considering how attacks on religious minorities, especially Muslims, have grown under Modi's watch since 2014, he needs to put his own house in order first before pointing fingers at others.  

For the record, Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is locked in a political tussle with Congress at the national level. Whereas Congress has time and again played divisive politics for pragmatic reasons to polarize the Hindu majority, Modi's BJP is determined to establish Hindu theocracy through social engineering.

It is the political wing of a Hindu supremacist organization called RSS, whose founders justified the Holocaust, praised Hitler and believe in a brutal caste system.