Whoever killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C., in June of this year, it is another terrible and outrageous incident, like the murder of the Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It is horrific in itself, and if there is any truth to Justin Trudeau’s allegations, it is also an intolerable affront, but it cannot be allowed to undermine a vital international relationship.
The charge that India was responsible for the murder of this militant Sikh separatist seems to rest on Canadian official surveillance of Indian diplomats and confirmatory information from one of our partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (United States, UK, Australia, and New Zealand). None of those other closely allied countries—all of them enjoying and pursuing good relations with India also—has given any hint of their partiality between the irreconcilably different versions of the murder of Nijjar that the Indian and Canadian governments have given.
There has been no published record of Indian government acts of retribution against political opponents in exile, at least that have achieved any publicity in the West. This separates India from Russia and Israel and some other countries that routinely take out political enemies, in vendettas of the Kremlin’s in Russia’s case and apparently as authentic terrorist enemies of Israel in the case of that country.
This dispute situates itself within the larger controversy of Canada’s attitude to the Sikh independence movement in India. There are around 800,000 Sikhs in Canada in a worldwide population of about 40 million, and in India they number approximately 35 million in a total population of 1.43 billion. They have been prone to violent dissent through much of India’s 76 years as an independent country, and were responsible for the murder of prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.
Canada appears to be a leading centre of militant Sikh activity, which focuses on the ambition to carve an independent state of Khalistan out of the Punjab. One of the more exotic and disconcerting allegations that has flown around in the last week is that Canada tolerated the existence of a Sikh terrorist training camp for some years in Mission, B.C. What is needed is a sober, discrete, joint Indian-Canadian analysis of the aspects of Sikh issues that pose a threat to relations between the two countries. There have always been excellent relations between Canada and India, going back to prime ministers Louis St. Laurent and Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mr. St. Laurent’s visit to India in 1954.
India is increasingly, though cautiously, aligning itself with the United States in the rivalry with China, a country with which India engages in intermittent skirmishing in the Himalayas and with which it has an obvious rivalry. India developed an atomic bomb after China had done so, and India adopted the goal of economic growth after China had done that also.
It is well in arrears of China at economic development, but is now outpacing it in annual GDP growth and pulling tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty while building up an immense middle-class every year. It has now pulled ahead of all European countries except Germany in GDP, ranks fifth in GDP (also behind the United States, China, and Japan), and has the highest economic growth rate of any major power.
It is largely an English-speaking country and though dysfunctional in some ways, is incontestably a democracy. Its present prime minister, Narendra Modi, is probably the most successful leader India has had. He appears to be insuperably popular as a champion of economic growth and, more controversially, of a robust Hinduism that sometimes appears to blur the distinction between church and state, and that has given rise to intermittent suggestions of unseemly antipathy to Islam. This is always an explosive issue in India where, although Muslims are only about 15 percent of the population, with 200 million people, they make India the second-largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia.
There is an irrefutable catalogue of geopolitical reasons why relations between India and Canada cannot be allowed to deteriorate seriously. We are on the same side in most issues, and such an immense and quickly growing market presents huge commercial opportunities for us. The logical way to deal with the question of the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar was to propose comprehensive and confidential bilateral talks with India (which should have begun years before that very unpleasant incident), to hear Indian grievances about our allegedly excessive toleration of the extreme political goals of some of the Sikhs, and to achieve an agreement that would essentially be a Canadian promise to monitor alleged extremists carefully and suppress any violent conspiracies. This would be in exchange for an absolute Indian assurance not to intervene directly against any Canadian citizens in Canada.
It is hard to escape the impression that the Sikh extremist issue has simply been allowed to fester in Canada. It is a shocking fact that until forced by his caucus to change his opinion, at least in public, the leader of the New Democratic Party, Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh, attended a rally that honoured the alleged architect of the greatest terrorist act in Canadian history: the blowing up of the Air India 182 airliner that killed 329 people, including 268 Canadians, in 1985.
It is shocking and scandalous that a man who is effectively the deputy prime minister of Canada should have publicly held such views, though he has renounced them. After the Air India disaster at the latest, the government of Canada was obliged to get to the bottom of this problem, adopt a policy consistent with our system of civil liberties and respect for the sovereignty of other countries—especially friendly and important ones like India—and make a more comprehensive effort than we apparently did to prevent the sort of escalation in tensions with India that have brought us to this unfortunate state.
At this point, the Indian government is giving a much more sternly worded denial of any responsibility for the Nijjar murder than Prime Minister Trudeau’s more ambiguous references to the existence of ”credible allegations” of Indian responsibility. That certainly does not mean that the Indian denials deserve to be treated more credulously than our prime minister’s allegations. But Justin Trudeau has put himself in the unnecessary and difficult position of having to prove a heinous charge against a friendly country in order to salvage his own credibility.
This is a box he should never have got himself into, and if he cannot substantiate what he said, he will have mortally compromised his moral authority as head of the government. If he can substantiate it, he will have unnecessarily created an unworkably awkward relationship with a very important and friendly country.
If everything he says is true, he would have been better off making these points through diplomatic channels and requiring the assurances we are now going to have to seek in public that the government of India must desist from any such provocations.
If India were a country with irreconcilable strategic or ideological differences to ours, the prime minister’s outburst in the House of Commons on Sept. 18 would have been acceptable and perhaps appropriate. However, in the actual circumstances and under any plausible scenario, it will be difficult for him to justify it.
