WORLD NEWS | Khalistani advocacy meeting fails in Brisbane, Australia, only few people show up

New Delhi [India]March 19 (ANI): An advocacy meeting by Khalistan sympathizers in Brisbane, Australia, for what they called a referendum on Sunday failed and failed as only a few people attended.

ANI spoke to Australia Today, a news outlet focused on multicultural communities and the Indian subcontinent, whose correspondents are on the ground today.

Read also | Who is Pips Bunce? All about non-binary gender and gender fluid senior director at Credit Suisse.

“I don’t want to call it a Sikh referendum, it’s a Khalistani referendum and it sort of miserably failed to gain the support of the Sikh community. We have a strangely strong community of 15,000-20,000 in Queensland (the state Brisbane is located),’ Jitarth Jai Bharadwaj, founder and editor-in-chief of Australia Today, who is also at the location, told ANI in an interaction.

“However, on the ground, you can imagine 100-150 people coming almost an hour, and they had to close voting at 4 o’clock, but, they wanted to finish by 5 o’clock. There was absolutely no one to vote. They had to close at 4 Point it off. That’s a sad case of their dour faces.”

Read also | Bol News was taken off the air by Pakistan’s media regulator for live coverage of clashes between PTI staff and police in Islamabad.

He also said that the few Khalistan supporters who attended the campaign tried to mobilize people to join, but their outreach attempts were too unsuccessful.

“Many insiders have told us that they are trying to mobilize, calling Gurudwaras to arrange some buses, calling hundreds of phone numbers asking them to bring their families. I think this is a good show of unity in the Indian community,” Bharadwaj explain.

“In Australia, nobody cares about Amritpal Singh. Amritpal is nobody. If we talk about the 200,000+ strong Australian Sikh community, hardly one percent of the population would know who Amritpal is. For us Indian-Australians , we can always make fun of this guy whoever he wants to be, he’s nothing but on the ground.”

Amritpal Singh heads “Waris Punjab De”, a radical group started by actor and activist Deep Sidhu, who died in a traffic accident last February.

When asked what the Indian-Australian community thought of the advocacy session, the larger community wasn’t at all concerned.

“A lot of them (whom I spoke to) said we don’t know much about him … they don’t know that the police have cracked down … some of them may have seen videos of him, but No one in the larger community was worried that something would happen to Amripal,” he said.

In a quick follow-up, he was asked if the self-styled activist could be called non-existent. He said, “Of course, what does it mean if most people in the community don’t even know him and his name? He’s not all there. He’s not a big problem for them to spend their time and energy on. He Of course it doesn’t exist.”

Finally, he was also asked whether the activists could try again to organize a campaign in the coming days.

“What they do is their business. We are concerned that instead of trying to poison the community, divide the community, they are not trying to attack the Australian Hindu community as they have been doing for the past few weeks,” he replied, adding that their activities have implications for the wider world Has no impact and meaning.

In the first week of March, the Shree Laxmi Narayan Temple in Brisbane, Australia, was vandalized by pro-Khalistan supporters. In early January, the Shri Shiva Vishnu temple in Australia’s Carrum Downs was vandalized with anti-Hindu graffiti.

Also on the night of January 15, 2023, Khalistan supporters attempted to rally support for their referendum through a car rally in Melbourne. However, they failed miserably as fewer than 200 people reportedly gathered in Melbourne’s community of nearly 60,000 people. Less than a week ago, on January 12, the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in Mill Park, Australia, was painted with anti-India and anti-Hindu graffiti.

Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently raised concerns with the Australian Prime Minister and kept the Indian community safe as a particular priority.

“I assure him that Australia is a country that respects people’s beliefs. We will not tolerate the kind of extreme behavior and attacks that we see on religious buildings, whether it is a Hindu temple, mosque, synagogue or church.” This in Australia There is no foothold,” Albanese told a news conference during his recent visit to India, which was reported by ANI on March 11. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)