Reuters World News - How the killing of a Sikh plumber in Canada led to a diplomatic war with India

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

On this special podcast episode, we examine the fallout from the killing of 45-year-old Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. What we have learned so far in the halls of Canada's parliament, what's at stake for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and why Canada's allies are treading lightly. Plus, we travel to Nijjar's birthplace and the heartland of India's Sikh community. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. *The podcast was updated to correct the name of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The killing of a plumber outside a Sikh temple in Canada's British Columbia in June had, until Monday, received little, if any, international attention. Now his death is the source of a major diplomatic dispute after Canada accused India of assassinating him. Diplomats have been expelled, visas canceled, and trade deals stalled as the war of words escalates. On this special episode, we examine the fallout. from the killing of 45-year-old Sikh separatist, Hardip Singh Najar. What we've learned so far in the halls of Canada's parliament,

what's at stake for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and why Canada's allies are treading lightly. Plus, we travel to Najar's birthplace and the heartland of India's Sikh community. I'm Christopher Waljasper in Chicago. I'm David Jungren in Ottawa. And I'm Sunil Kataria reporting from Punjab and India. Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, dropped a diplomatic bombshell this week.

There are credible reasons to believe that agents of the government of India were involved in the killing of a Canadian on Canadian soil. India's response to Canada's accusation was swift and furious. It rejected the allegations, calling them, quote, absurd. My colleague, David Yungrin, has been following the twists and turns of the story. David, remind me how we got here. So in June, this gentleman, Mr. Hardeeb Singh, Nidja, was shot dead in British Columbia, which is Canada's Pacific province, where the Sikhs have a very strong and influential community. And at the time, no one seemed to link it to anything other than a crime.

I believe the local police at the time said there was no link to Mr. Nidja's larger political activities. Now, he has been, the Indians have formerly branded him a terrorist. They say that he is one of the people pushing for Khalistan, which is a kind of a Sikh homeland in Punjab in northern India. So he had clearly been on their radar screens for quite a while. And then it was complete and utter silence until Monday afternoon when we got five minutes advance warning that the Prime Minister was going to stand up in the House of Commons, which is the Parliament here, and make an emergency declaration about a matter regarding national security, which I've been here more than 20 years, and I cannot ever remember anything like that happening.

So we stood up and he said, Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardip Singh, Nijar. And then things basically unraveled very quickly after that. And what evidence does Canada have to support this claim? Well, right now, officially, we don't know, because the Prime Minister has been asked on many occasions this week

what evidence they have, and all he will say is that they have credible evidence of a potential link with India. Now, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is citing an unnamed source as saying that in fact signals intelligence is involved, that an unnamed member of the intelligence sharing network that Canada belongs to the Five Eyes provided information and that one of the bits of information is in fact tapped phone calls

from an Indian diplomat. Whoa, let me interrupt you there. What is Five Eyes? So Five Eyes is an intelligence sharing network which groups the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Now, it is an intelligence sharing network, but in the case of Canada, for example, 90% of the sharing comes from the states. So the overall relationship with the USA, Canada sends 10% and the Americans account for 90%.

And tell me about the Sikh community in Canada? Canada has the largest population of Sikhs outside Punjab. It's about 800,000 people reporting Sikhism as their religion. and they're very influential in British, Columbia politics, both local and national. And if you're going to win a federal election in Canada, you certainly want to have the Sikhs on site because they are influential in enough parliamentary seats to be able to make a difference in a tight election. And Trudeau is in a minority situation, so he doesn't have enough seats in Parliament to govern completely by himself. he has to rely on the legislators from the smaller New Democrat Party who are led by a Sikh.

So the Indian accusation has been Trudeau is soft on the Khalistan movement because his political future depends on a Sikh. Now, the Indians are drawing all sorts of conclusions here, which may not necessarily be accurate. But this is certainly the feeling that we see from the more hard-lined Indian commentators is that Trudeau is basically politically being held hostage by a Sikh, and therefore, in the Indian mind, it's often what they see as pro-Halistan activity. Hardip Singh-Nijar left India for Canada 20 years ago, but his home still stands in rural Punjab. Our journalist Sunil Katario visited the spiritual home of Sikhism and filed this report.

Bha-Singpura is an obscure village surrounded by lush paddy fields with few houses here and there. But over the past few days, it has seen a stream of visitors. mostly journalists who come to take a look at the house of Hardeep Singh, Nijer. Out here, there are very few memories of the man who left his village over two decades ago. Nijer's uncle, Himmuth Singh, applauded Canadian Prime Minister

Justin Trudeau's courage to stand up to India. We think it was very brave of Trudeau for the sake of one ordinary person he should not have taken such a huge risk for his government. Our Indian leaders would never do that, no matter what, he said. Niger supported a Sikh homeland in the form of an independent Khalistani state and was designated by India as a terrorist in July 2020. Sikh separators demand that their homeland Khalistan, meaning the land of the pure,

be created out of Punjab. The demand has risen many times, most prominently during a violent, insurgency in the 1980s and early 90s, which paralyzed Punjab for over a decade. Then Prime Minister Indra Gandhi sent the military into the holiest shrine for Sikhs, the Golden Temple, to evict armed separatist leaders and supporters, which angered six around the world. A few months later, Gandhi was assassinated by her sick bodyguards at her home in New Delhi. Although the Khalistan movement has little support now in India, it has still support now, it has small pockets of backing among sections of the Sikh diaspora in Canada.

Members of the Sikh community are worried over the deepening crisis between India and Canada, saying it is the people who suffer in the fight of politicians. People like Harkarat Singh in Amritsar. Either is it the Khalistan issue or is it the actual Indian government is involved in Killing of a Canadian citizen. So till now we are not able to know what is the right news. or what are the facts? David, before Trudeau's accusation, what did the relationship between India and Canada look like?

I mean, the Canadians and the Indians have been talking about a trade deal. Earlier this year, they announced that they thought they might get the outlines of a trade deal by the end of this year. The Canadian trade minister was supposed to be leading a delegation to India next month in October. And then that got canned. A few weeks ago, the Canadians suddenly said they wanted a reset of the trade. The trade talks got frozen. And we are told by sources close to Trudeau that the reason the trade talks are frozen was because

of this murder affair. And then the trade delegation got canceled, which is kind of rare. Trudeau and Canada now hope for public support from allies to have India investigate the assassination. Here's U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan earlier this week. We are in constant contact with our Canadian counterparts. We are consulting with them closely. We support the efforts that they are undertaking in this investigation,

and we have also been in touch with the Indian government as well. David, did Canada underestimate how much its allies would come to its support? That is an excellent question. I'm not sure they underestimated it, but I think they've come into this at a big disadvantage, because if they can't prove anything, then why would the Allies even stick their noses out? I think the Canadians are learning that India is a big,

important country that the United States and others would rather woo as a kind of a counterweight to China. The Canadians are telling us they aren't asking their allies necessarily to come out and condemn India, but they would like the allies to come out and express concern and pressure India to cooperate with the Canadian investigation. So we are kind of stuck, and it may well be this fades, or it may will be the Indian society to teach the Canadians a lesson. It's very unclear to know what's coming, but this really has arrived out of the blue. Three weeks ago, the chances of world headlines being dominated by Canada and India smacking each other around, I think, would have been zero. India's response was really strong this week, most recently suspending visas for Canadians.

Will Canada step back as pressure from India mounts? I'd say two things. Canada may well be the world's second largest country by landmass, but it only has 40 million people. So it is a very small player internationally. Okay, it's a member of the G7 and the rest of it. So it doesn't really carry much weight. And this particular liberal government of Prime Minister Trudeau has been very keen to travel the world, stressing the importance of sticking to international law and the principles of democracy. So they're being kind of caught in a bind. A visa freeze is clearly a big move, but I think it's unlikely that the Canadian government is going to back down on this, if only because this year we already had a major political brouhaha over alleged Chinese

interference in Canadian politics, and the Trudeau government supposed ineffective reaction, even when presented with clear proof that Chinese agents were harassing people here and also back in China. So whether India thinks the visa freeze is going to force Trudeau to modify his position, I can't see how that's going to happen, because they've already been so badly burned by what happened over Chinese interference allegations. That's it for this special edition. We'll be back with our daily headline news show on Monday. Special thanks to Sunil Kataria, Manage Kumar, David Yungren, and everyone else who contributed

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