Sikh man, acquitted in 1985 Air India bombings, shot dead in Canada; police investigate motive
Toronto (PTI): The Canadian police have said they are still working to determine the motive behind the targeted killing of Ripudaman Singh Malik, a 75-year-old Sikh man acquitted in the tragic 1985 Air India Kanishka terrorist bombing case.
Malik was shot dead in Surrey, British Columbia on Thursday. Malik and co-accused Ajaib Singh Bagri were acquitted in 2005 of mass murder and conspiracy charges related to the two bombings in 1985 that killed 331 people, the CBC News said.
The report cited a witness who said he heard three shots and pulled Malik from his red Tesla bleeding from a neck wound.
Another witness from a nearby business identified that the victim of the shooting was Malik.
Surrey Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said a man shot at that location at around 9:30 am succumbed to his injuries at the scene. They say it appears to be a targeted shooting and are not releasing the victim's name.
The police said they located a suspect vehicle which was engulfed in fire, the report added.
Another report in ABC News said that while police had not initially released the victim's identity, it confirmed it after Malik's son, Jaspreet Malik, posted a statement on social media about his father's shooting.
The media will always refer to him as someone charged with the Air India bombing, Malik's son wrote on Facebook.
He said that his father had been wrongly charged in the case and the court concluded that "there was no evidence against him".
The media and RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] never seemed to accept the court's decision and I pray today's tragedy is not related, he said.
In a statement, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team said: "We are aware of Mr Malik's background, though at this time we are still working to determine the motive. We can confirm that the shooting appears to be targeted and there is not believed to be any further risk to the public."
The 1985 Air India bombing is among the worst terrorist attacks in Canadian history and in the history of the airline.
On June 23, 1985, the Air India flight 182, carrying 329 people, including 268 Canadian citizens and 24 Indian citizens, flew from Toronto and stopped in Montreal from where it was en route to London and then onwards to its final destination Bombay.
The plane was flying 31,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean when a suitcase bomb exploded in the front cargo, killing all on board.
Another bomb was meant to be planted in an Air India flight scheduled to take off from Japan but it exploded at Tokyo's Narita airport killing two baggage handlers.
The CBC News report said that reaction to Malik's death was mixed. While Malik's friends said they lost a hero of the Sikh community, former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh, a former acquaintance of Malik's, said he was a controversial figure.
"One of the other complicating factors is he made a recent visit to India where he wrote a letter in support of [Prime Minister] Modi and his policies and I think that may have reverberated and had implications within the community," Dosanjh said in the report.
The report added that in recent years, Malik had served as chairman with Khalsa School and managed two of the private schools' campuses in Surrey and Vancouver. He was also president of the Vancouver-based Khalsa Credit Union (KCU), which has more than 16,000 members.
He is survived by his wife, five children, four daughters-in-law, and eight grandchildren.
Inderjit Singh Reyat was convicted on various charges and spent 30 years in prison for helping to make the bombs, and for lying during trials, including Malik's. He was released in 2016 after serving two-thirds of his perjury sentence.
Reyat was the only person convicted for the Kanishka bombing blamed on Khalistani extremists seeking revenge for the Indian Army's action at the Golden Temple to flush out militants in 1984.
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Single higher education regulator bill tabled in LS; Oppn flags ‘centralisation,' JPC likely
New Delhi: A bill to set up a 13-member body to regulate institutions of higher education was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Monday.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, which seeks to establish an overarching higher education commission along with three councils for regulation, accreditation, and ensuring academic standards for universities and higher education institutions in India.
Meanwhile, the move drew strong opposition, with members warning that it could weaken institutional autonomy and result in excessive centralisation of higher education in India.
The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, earlier known as the Higher Education Council of India (HECI) Bill, has been introduced in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The proposed legislation seeks to merge three existing regulatory bodies, the University Grants Commission (UGC), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), into a single unified body called the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan.
At present, the UGC regulates non-technical higher education institutions, the AICTE oversees technical education, and the NCTE governs teacher education in India.
Under the proposed framework, the new commission will function through three separate councils responsible for regulation, accreditation, and the maintenance of academic standards across universities and higher education institutions in the country.
According to the Bill, the present challenges faced by higher educational institutions due to the multiplicity of regulators having non-harmonised regulatory approval protocols will be done away with.
The higher education commission, which will be headed by a chairperson appointed by the President of India, will cover all central universities and colleges under it, institutes of national importance functioning under the administrative purview of the Ministry of Education, including IITs, NITs, IISc, IISERs, IIMs, and IIITs.
At present, IITs and IIMs are not regulated by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
Government to refer bill to JPC; Oppn slams it
The government has expressed its willingness to refer it to a joint committee after several members of the Lok Sabha expressed strong opposition to the Bill, stating that they were not given time to study its provisions.
Responding to the opposition, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said the government intends to refer the Bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for detailed examination.
Congress Lok Sabha MP Manish Tewari warned that the Bill could result in “excessive centralisation” of higher education. He argued that the proposed law violates the constitutional division of legislative powers between the Union and the states.
According to him, the Bill goes beyond setting academic standards and intrudes into areas such as administration, affiliation, and the establishment and closure of university campuses. These matters, he said, fall under Entry 25 of the Concurrent List and Entry 32 of the State List, which cover the incorporation and regulation of state universities.
Tewari further stated that the Bill suffers from “excessive delegation of legislative power” to the proposed commission. He pointed out that crucial aspects such as accreditation frameworks, degree-granting powers, penalties, institutional autonomy, and even the supersession of institutions are left to be decided through rules, regulations, and executive directions. He argued that this amounts to a violation of established constitutional principles governing delegated legislation.
Under the Bill, the regulatory council will have the power to impose heavy penalties on higher education institutions for violating provisions of the Act or related rules. Penalties range from ₹10 lakh to ₹75 lakh for repeated violations, while establishing an institution without approval from the commission or the state government could attract a fine of up to ₹2 crore.
Concerns were also raised by members from southern states over the Hindi nomenclature of the Bill. N.K. Premachandran, an MP from the Revolutionary Socialist Party representing Kollam in Kerala, said even the name of the Bill was difficult to pronounce.
He pointed out that under Article 348 of the Constitution, the text of any Bill introduced in Parliament must be in English unless Parliament decides otherwise.
DMK MP T.M. Selvaganapathy also criticised the government for naming laws and schemes only in Hindi. He said the Constitution clearly mandates that the nomenclature of a Bill should be in English so that citizens across the country can understand its intent.
Congress MP S. Jothimani from Tamil Nadu’s Karur constituency described the Bill as another attempt to impose Hindi and termed it “an attack on federalism.”
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