Relations between Canada and India are in a tailspin. PM Justin Trudeau has alleged India was behind the June 18th killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent British Columbia Sikh leader who was wanted in India on murder and terrorism charges. India has rejected the charge as “absurd” and angrily denounced Canada as a “safe haven” for “terrorists, extremists and organised crime” – language normally reserved for Pakistan.
Trudeau’s choice of words was ambiguous: Canadian agencies are “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link” to Indian agents, not credible evidence of direct involvement. In effect Trudeau said to Modi: we know you are guilty. Now help us prove it. Yet, the onus is on Trudeau to convince India, allies and Canadians, not on Modi to prove the negative. Arindam Bagchi, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, says India is “willing to look at any specific information that is provided to us. But so far, we have not received any”.
The correct procedure would have been to let the police complete investigations, charge alleged killers, give evidence of official complicity in the form of forensic analysis, witness testimony, CCTV and surveillance photo, audio and video corroboration, and only then request Indian assistance in joint investigations and, if required, extradition to facilitate court proceedings in Canada.
This was the template followed by India after the 2008 attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based terrorists, and by Turkey 10 years later in the murder of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan went so far as to offer up details on Saudi complicity in an op-ed in the Washington Post. The failure to provide more detail and evidence has generated disquiet even in Canada with the opposition leader, the centre-Left Globe and Mail and the centre-Right National Post all saying that Canadians deserve the full truth.
The main focus of Indian anger is perceived pandering to Khalistani separatists by Trudeau whose minority Government is reliant on the support of the New Democratic Party (NDP) to stay in power. The movement for an independent Khalistan died out in India three decades ago but left a bitter legacy of separatist terrorist outrages and its brutal suppression by police and army units, culminating in the assassination of PM Indira Gandhi and an anti-Sikh pogrom in which 3,000 Sikhs were butchered. Khalistan had more support then in the diaspora community, especially Canada, than in Punjab. In 1985, Sikh extremists blew up an Air India plane flying from Canada to India, killing 329 people including 268 Canadian citizens, the biggest mass murder in Canadian history.
In a Pew Research Survey in 2021, a stunning 95% of Sikhs said they were extremely proud of their Indian identity; 70% said anyone who disrespects India is not a good Sikh; and only 14% said Sikhs face significant discrimination in India. In Canada, however, pro-Khalistan Sikhs exert an outsized influence over Government policy as one of the most politically organised and active communities. Their geographical concentration in Ontario and British Columbia suburbs gives them a critical role in determining the outcome of close elections. Unfortunately, as noted by Omer Aziz, a former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau, diaspora-courting domestic politics often distorts foreign policy priorities.
Trudeau leads a minority Government that depends on the NDP to stay in power. Its Sikh leader Jagmeet Singh is viewed in India, with some justification, as “a known Khalistan promoter and supporter”: a sympathiser at best and an activist at worst. While Indians are exasperated with Trudeau’s pandering to diaspora ‘vote bank’ politics, many Canadians feel growing unease at migrant communities importing the troubles of their homeland into Canada. In a widely-circulated video, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, Nijjar’s U.S.-based lawyer, has urged Hindu Indo-Canadians to go back to India.
Trudeau has been surprisingly indifferent to the sensitivity of the Sikh factor in Canada-India relations and unwilling to vigorously target terrorist financing from Canada. The issue tainted his previous trip to India in 2018, during which Punjab’s Sikh premier Amarinder Singh gave Trudeau a list of wanted terrorist fugitives that included Nijjar’s name. It resurfaced with his unnecessarily meddlesome support for agitating Sikh farmers in 2020. Indians feel irritated by Trudeau’s supercilious virtue signalling and self-righteousness that has glamourised race- and gender-obsessed identity politics.
Nevertheless, if an uncooperative India is proven guilty in the world court of public opinion, it will deserve unqualified condemnation. But so too will Trudeau if he is judged to have jumped the gun with grave allegations that cannot be substantiated. He will damage his standing in Canada and internationally and worsen already strained relations with India. Attention will focus on the foreign policy risks of diaspora communities and Canada’s reluctance to rein in their excesses. Another example from South Asia is the presence of significant numbers of Sri Lankans and their role, many under coercion from activists, in financing the Tamil Tigers in that country’s civil war.
So far, as noted by the Washington Post and also by Canada’s main national newspaper the Globe and Mail, Canada’s allies have offered only tepid support while attempting to walk the tightrope between an old ally and a growing strategic partner. Canada is a dependable ally but not a first-tier global power and has no realistic alternative to security dependence on the U.S. Its soft-power credentials are a liability when the world has pivoted into a hard-power moment. India is the anchor of the West’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Canada is outside both the Quad group (Australia, India, Japan, U.S.) and Aukus (Australia, UK, U.S.) as the main bulwarks of the emerging resistance front against China. More than putting India in the dock, Christopher Sands, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Centre in Washington, told the BBC, Trudeau’s allegations have exposed Canada’s “moment of weakness”.
Modi has cultivated a strongman persona as a muscular nationalist. In the unlikely event that it is confirmed that India executed a successful hit on a wanted alleged terrorist in Canada, international reputational costs notwithstanding, it would give a massive boost to his popularity leading into next year’s elections. In the context of how Western-based diaspora communities can encourage covert operations and military interventions, as in Iraq in 2003, it could also cement India’s reputation in the Global South as a country able to stand up for its interests.
In his address to the UN General Assembly on September 26th, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar chose the statesman route to refer to the controversy only obliquely yet nonetheless with some pointed remarks that would have played well throughout the Global South. He decried the reality that “it is still a few nations who shape the agenda and seek to define the norms”. This cannot persist indefinitely and will be challenged. Rule-makers cannot go on subjugating rule-takers and we must not “countenance that political convenience determines responses to terrorism, extremism and violence”.
The geographical focus of India’s external intelligence agency is its own neighbourhood and the tools of its tradecraft are bribery and blackmail more than guns. In a public conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations the same day, in answer to a question on the Canada charges, Jaishankar said two things. India had told Canada that such assassinations are not Government policy, but that it would look into specific and relevant information and evidence if such were provided by Ottawa.
Ramesh Thakur, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He is the Editor of The nuclear ban treaty: a transformational reframing of the global nuclear order. This article was first published by the Toda Peace Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Article content aside, how I long for a world where the name ‘Trudeau’ is a just a footnote referring to Canada’s darkest hour and relating to a man who languishes in prison for crimes against humanity…
Hear, hear.
Agree 100%, but we all know that’s just a fantasy. I mean, a good old assassination or ‘very rare adverse event’ from a certain bioweapon that he pushed on Canadian citizens would do me, I’m not fussy. He, and his ilk, are the carbon I want to reduce. Speaking of which, if anybody here lives in these areas please do your best to stay out of hospital. They are evidently run and staffed by soul-sucking, reality-denying dementors pretending to be actual medical/healthcare professionals who care about patients;
”From today, patients and visitors at the Alexandra, Kidderminster, and Worcestershire Royal Hospitals are being asked to wear facemasks in all clinical areas to protect themselves, their loved ones, and hospital staff against the risk of Covid infection.
With the number of Covid-positive patients in our hospitals increasing and with Covid-related staff sickness also on the rise, we want to do everything we can to protect the people we care for from the risk of infection, and we are grateful for the support and understanding of our patients and visitors.
Masks are required in all inpatient and outpatient areas and will be made available to all patients and visitors on arrival.”
https://twitter.com/WorcsAcuteNHS/status/1707017845190586794
I have never worn a mask and never will and that is across more hospital visits than I would have wished these last three years. I’ve had some good ding dongs with the staff though over refusal and including the desire to push a twizzle stick in to my brain.
But you know what this signifies don’t you? Now those dratted fraudulent Covid tests are in existence both them and Covid will never become a thing of the past. They get to recycle this garbage scaremongering hoax indefinitely. The only way hospitals would be able to put out the above crapola ( ”With the number of Covid-positive patients in our hospitals increasing..” ) is by performing the tests, therefore lo and behold, we end up going full circle back to 2020 again, and the Covid theatre never ends.
Gone are the days when we used to just go by the symptoms a patient presented with and say they had flu, an umbrella term for many ‘Influenza-like Illnesses’ caused by different viruses, and we certainly didn’t perform a test to establish that. So now I’m wondering if hospitals are going to have testing of in-patients as protocol if we aren’t going to once again see the coincidental disappearance of flu and the faux dominance of whatever Covid scariant is on trend this winter. Because as the recent past has shown us, you can’t find what you’re not looking for, and with the myopic focus on Covid, and testing only for that specific pathogen, are we going to experience a repeat performance?
To state the obvious, if hospitals stopped testing, which they declared a while ago that they were, then this would automatically be a non-issue. As we know, this ‘issue’ is entirely manufactured and I’ll bet money that anyone testing positive is ‘incidental’ and has gone into hospital for something completely unrelated. And as for the ”Covid-related staff sickness on the rise..”, well I think we can all hazard a guess as to what might be going on there.
Mogs, your analysis is spot on as usual. Obviously keeping the fear going with the hooky tests will help enormously when the time comes for the annual ….’the NHS is on the point of collapse’ headlines.
Personally I have no interest in the fear porn because I know each little strand is only intended to facilitate their depopulation goal. For me, you and many on DS their propaganda is far too crude and lazy to have any effect.
With all that is happening in the world today I might as well be honest about ‘strained diplomatic relations’ between India and Canada – I CGAF.
Let’s run this story again when the headline reads:
“Sikh Nationalist assassinates Turdeau in black face revenge attack.”
This is funny because he’s dead right. A clip of Prof Fenton talking about the ever-present 77th Hamster Penis Brigade. They’re watching us now, sat in their bedrooms wearing their grubby Y-fronts, because having an objective which involves being a voyeur of what people post online makes them feel like actual soldiers! FFS..LOL
Cue the pilot fish chowfest!
https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1707372905409958174
A bit off topic but well worth a watch, if the sight of brainwashed schoolchildren chanting a woke mantra doesn’t give you the creeps. It did me.
https://youtu.be/vmooBea0Y0k?si=WHISkMRgWcFygpSd
‘kin hell.
Those poor children.
Indeed, and the psychotic teachers who did that to them.
So, let me get this straight: Should an Indian prime minister chose to have Sikhs living abroad murdered, this would boost his standing with the electorate in India? No wonder that 95% of the Sikhs in India pay emphatic lip services to their Hindu overlords. From a more European angle, murderous barbarians with assault rifles would come to mind as a phrase here.
I have a list if you have contact details…..
Turdeau certainly seems determined to drag Canada as far down the lavvy as he can before he us booted out.
But then Canadians voted him in, twice, so… just deserts I suppose.
I think it would be fair to say that India has been seen as a less ‘committed partner’ to the USA than Washington would like..and it’s recent improvement in it’s ties with China will no doubt have rankled a few people.
India has adopted neutrality toward Russia and has abstained from successive votes in the UN Security Council, General Assembly, and the Human Rights Council that condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine and thus far has refused to openly call out Russia as the instigator of the crisis.
It is considered by the US as a major democratic strategic partner ….and they are not unaware that India is a strong ally in the Indo-Pacific…..but it has not really given the ‘fealty’ that the US demands of its ‘partners’…nor the out right condemnation of Russia that the US insists on….
The G20 was held in New Delhi in September….and unlike Bali, the year before, Elenskyy was not extended an invitation ….. and critics felt that the strong condemnation of Russia in the Ukraine was ‘considerably watered down’ in New Delhi…
I suppose I could ignore all of this, and call me a sceptic but I can’t help thinking that maybe India is being given a ‘warning’ for not know-towing to the ‘rules based order’…just a gentle reminder of who is in charge?
After all several reports have said that the information given to Turdeau about the assassination came from “Intelligence gained by the “Five Eyes” network …of the US, UK, Canada Australia and New Zealand..and according to the New York Times it came directly via the USA…..which is indeed very fortuitous….
Talking of Canada…
https://youtu.be/n-mQyhwGWGc?si=HlnDC943k6lbJOsA
Wow when you throw accusations at people, they stick, sort of like Russell Brand recently. Looks like it is Justin’s turn. So many accusations….many of them disturbing. Just wondering if his masters have decided that he is no longer useful? Starting to look that way.