India-Canada row: Who killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar?

A July poll found that Canadians thought Justin Trudeau was the worst prime minister the country has had in the last 50 years. (Photo: Reuters)

At a press conference on Friday in British Columbia, Canada, the province’s Premier David Eby said that he found the information that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had shared with him about the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar “frustrating”.

Trudeau, who told the Canadian parliament that there were “credible allegations about potential links” between the killing and the government of India, had a briefing organized for Eby by David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). But, said Eby, “the briefing (consisted of only) open-source information, which is available to the public on an internet search.”

Does that mean Trudeau’s claim is based on Google searches? For example, tweets in Punjabi by Nijjar’s supporters that he had been killed by an Indian agency and pictures of placards outside gurdwaras run by Sikh radicals?

Mind you, there is no reason to believe that Eby has any love lost for India. He belongs to the New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Jagmeet Singh, a known Khalistan sympathizer. The NDP’s support for Trudeau’s Liberal Party is critical for Trudeau to stay in power. British Columbia has the highest percentage of Sikh population (5.9 percent) among all the provinces of Canada.

Eby was in fact complaining that CSIS would surely have more credible information on India’s involvement in the killing but Trudeau was not being transparent with it. He said that he strongly suspects that the government is “holding back information that could help the province protect its residents with connections to India from foreign interference”.

This came just a day after the state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran a story quoting unnamed government sources that Canada had “human and signal intelligence” and inputs from an ally from Ottawa's Five Eyes intelligence network, including communications involving Indian officials based in Canada. The intelligence-sharing Five Eyes group of the Anglosphere comprises the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

So if Trudeau can’t give a hint of what his agencies have discovered to his most critical political ally which is headed by a Sikh, other than what someone in Sonepat with time on their hands can find on the net, whom can he share the information with?

There are two potential explanations for this.

One, Trudeau has nothing much more than a stack of Google search result printouts. But he is currently in the biggest trouble he has ever faced in his political career. Poll after poll shows that if elections were held today, the rival Conservative Party would win a majority comfortably. In fact, a July poll found that Canadians thought Trudeau was the worst prime minister the country has had in the last 50 years.

In these circumstances, it is absolutely crucial for him to not lose his Sikh vote bank, in which Khalistan supporters are the most vocal, visible and politically active. Nijjar, a well-known Khalistani who also ran a big gurdwara, was killed three months ago but the culprits have not been found yet.

Is it likely that Nijjar was a victim of gangland rivalry? It is an open secret that Khalistani Sikh gangs are involved in activities like drug-smuggling, gun-running—how else would Nijjar be firing an assault rifle, as seen in a video no one has denied, in a country where these weapons are banned?—and human trafficking—getting Sikhs from Punjab to enter Canada illegally and settle there; apparently the current going rate is over Rs 50 lakh per person.

If the police conclude that Nijjar was indeed killed by a rival Sikh gang—or a non-Sikh gang— it does not help Trudeau’s electoral prospects at all. The open secret about Khalistani criminal activity then becomes official fact for all Canadians. This can only reduce Trudeau’s votes among all Canadian communities, including Sikhs. It is far better to accuse India of the murder.

The other explanation for what Eby is grumpy about is that the Canadian agencies do have some evidence that Indian intelligence was involved in the killing, as the CBC report claims. But revealing such information may be problematic for Trudeau.

The Indian economy is more than one-and-a-half times larger than Canada and is the fastest-growing major economy in the world. Canadian GDP shrank 0.2 percent in the second quarter of this year and is predicted to shrink more in the quarter ending September. Per capita GDP has now declined for four straight quarters.

Today, India is, quite simply, a much more important entity in the world than Canada is.

This is why Canada’s allies have refused Trudeau’s requests to condemn or even rebuff India, instead opting to employ words like “grave concern”—diplomatese that actually means “Yes, OK, we hear what you’re saying.” On Saturday, David Cohen, US ambassador to Canada, said that "there was shared intelligence among Five Eyes partners that helped lead Canada to making the statements that the Prime Minister made".

But if Trudeau does not make some more information public, he risks getting weaker domestically.

Some analysts have suggested that the US is using Trudeau to impede India’s attempts to become a voice of the Global South. While India is a key ally of the US to serve as a bulwark against China, Washington certainly would not want India to become too independent an entity on the global stage. So using Trudeau to tarnish India’s image by accusing it of extra-territorial executions could make sense.

But, if this theory is true to any extent, Trudeau may end up as the fall guy. As things stand, he is likely to lose the next election, and no one—from the African Union to even the youngsters from Punjab aspiring to land up in Vancouver—really takes him seriously.

As Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official who denies any US hand in Trudeau’s actions, wrote recently: “(What) essentially was rhetoric meant for the domestic audience snowballed into an international incident… The US-India relationship is simply too important to sacrifice for the venality of a Canadian politician who increasingly shows himself to be shallow and unserious.”

Trudeau has not only not helped his own cause in Canadian politics, he has also ended up bolstering Narendra Modi’s domestic image as a muscular nationalist and potentially got him more votes. After all, no Opposition party in its right mind will say that if Indian agencies did kill a terrorist on foreign soil, they should not have done so.

As Trudeau ties himself up into knots, he should realize that he has tried to punch much above his weight and paygrade.