Today, Explained - Murder, Canada Wrote

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

Canada’s unprecedented decision to publicly accuse India of assassinating a Canadian citizen in Canada is upending the two countries' relationship. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Serena Solin, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So on June 18th, Hardeep Singh Najjar was in the parking lot of the Sikh temple where he serves as president. It was still broad daylight outside and it was still busy. And he was in his truck when two masked gunmen shot and killed him in the parking lot. Last night's homicide was a brazen act of violence outside a place of worship. The gunmen fled. Nobody knows who they were. The getaway car had been found later, but the police at the time said that they believed it was a targeted murder. Make no mistake, Surrey RCMP and the Integrated Homicide Investigation team

will put all resources that we can behind this. We'll follow the trail of evidence. Coming up on Today Explained, how the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar opened up a diplomatic abyss between two democratic allies, Canada and India. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA,

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You're listening to Today Explained. A lot of people say Sikh, but most Sikhs say Sikh. Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered outside of a Sikh temple in the Vancouver area in June. But the wildest thing about this story didn't happen till last week. And since then, it's just kept snowballing. Nadine Youssef's been covering it for the BBC from the jump. There are two competing narratives of who Hardeep Singh Najjar is.

So it depends on who you ask. In the Sikh community in British Columbia, he is a very well-respected community leader, temple leader. Everyone is so, like, feeling so sad here because he was so good guy. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Nijer. He was a very nice person and he was a very able leader. He also advocated for the creation of a separate independent state for Sikhs in India called Khalistan. India, home for the Hindu majority, Pakistan created for Muslims. But Punjab, overlapping the new border, left Sikhs without the independent state they wanted.

Today, some Sikhs in Canada continue to call for an independent Khalistan, wanting to claim a large area over northern India. And he basically always said that he was a peaceful advocate for this. Just hours before he was killed, Nijer talked to the congregation about a referendum he was helping organize for an independent Khalistan.

So that's sort of like the narrative of who he is within Canada and when you ask his supporters. Okay, so community leader, all-around good guy, peaceful separatist. What's the other story? Right. So the second narrative is the one which the Indian government considers a terrorist group. tied him to the assassination of a Sikh politician in India. And as recently as 2020, he was on India's sort of most wanted terrorist list. And last year, I believe the Indian government even issued a cash reward for any information on him. So, you know, up until very recently, he was very much on the Indian government's radar as a wanted terrorist.

In 2022, the RCMP's National Security Division warned Nijar he was under threat of assassination. All right, so that's a bit of background on Hardeep Singh Nijar. How do we go from his death in June to what happened just several days ago when Justin Trudeau said on the floor of Parliament that India was behind this killing. So, like I mentioned earlier, Hardeep Singh Najjar was very much respected in his community in British Columbia. And, you know, as soon as he died, the Sikh community had always been very vocal about their suspicions that India was behind the murder. Back in July, there were protests across the country, specifically in Vancouver and

Toronto, that were held by supporters of Hardeep Singh Najjar, supporters of the Khalistan movement. And so these protests were staged across the Indian consulates and the Indian High Commission to demand accountability. We believe that there's foreign interference involved in this, that

the government of India wanted him eliminated. And we feel as a community that he was made a target for that reason. You know, I should say that of Canadian residents, 2% of those are Sikhs. And so, you know, we're talking about a large community, a sizable community with a lot of influence and with very deep roots in the country from coast to coast. At the G20 summit in early September, which was held in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada had a meeting. And by all accounts, it was a very tense meeting. Canadian government officials acknowledged that Justin Trudeau's relationship with host Narendra Modi is not good. Modi today pushed Trudeau to rein in six separatists in Canada and Trudeau says he pushed back on Indian interference in Canada.

It was just in the few days after that that Justin Trudeau made this bombshell and it really was a bombshell declaration in the House of Commons on the record. He stood up and said Today I'm rising to inform the House of Commons on the record. He stood up and said... Today I'm rising to inform the House of an extremely serious matter. 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, Hardeep Singh Nijjar. He was very careful with the words that he chose, but I think the fact that he said it out loud in such a public forum kind of speaks volumes in and of itself. Did he present or allude to any smoking gun, to any evidence that would tie the Indian government and Narendra Modi to this assassination? So of course, Trudeau was questioned a lot about this at the onset of him making this accusation. At first, the Canadian government was pretty quiet on the nature of the

evidence that they have or even the source of the evidence. They did say that it was shared with their allied countries. So for example, the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, they all operate under this network called the Five Eyes with Canada. And so all of those countries were privy to that intelligence, but they kept it pretty quiet on what the intelligence actually is. Since then, thanks to the work of journalists at CBC and the New York Times, we've learned that Canada has been briefed on the issue by U.S. intelligence after the death of Hardeep Singh Najjar. We also learned that Canada had intercepted communication of Indian diplomats, and whatever Canada was able to find within that communication contained the quote-unquote smoking gun that

linked the Indian government to the murder. Now, because this is sort of highly classified intelligence, again, we don't really know still much on what exactly the smoking gun was, or even what the U.S. has shared with Canada that sort of gave them the context to look into this. But we do know that it was, you know, compelling enough, at least to drive the prime minister to make the accusation so publicly against India. And as you said, just, you know, a week or so earlier, Justin Trudeau was in India shaking hands with Narendra Modi. It's not every day a world leader accuses another of committing an assassination in a sovereign country. How did India respond to this accusation? India has been very upset.

India has rejected allegations by Canada and calling the accusations absurd and motivated. That's the big breaking news that we are getting on our screens right now. Ever since Justin Trudeau came up and accused India publicly, they've been escalating day after day in terms of their response. So at first they denied any involvement with the murder. They said it was absurd. Then they expelled a diplomat, a Canadian diplomat from India. They have also issued a travel advisory to Indians wanting to come to Canada, basically saying it's unsafe. A threat assessment the Canadian government strongly disagrees with. People can read into that what they want. Canada is a safe country.

Other MPs were more blunt. Sounds like a joke. Just more recently, they've stopped issuing visas to Canadians that want to come to India. So India has really sort of escalated their response, first denying up until outright denying visas to Canadians to come to the country. Can you tell me how Canadians are responding to the accusation from Justin Trudeau and now to the reaction from India? So among the Sikh diaspora, there was no surprise in the sense that they have always suspected that India might have been behind this. And the reason is because, you know, there's widespread fear in the community. And this is just what I'm hearing

from, you know, Sikh people that we've talked to since all of this unfolded. There was always a widespread fear in the community that don't say too much, don't be vocal, you know, you could be a target, you might not be able to go back home to India. There's always fear that, you know, they're under surveillance or being watched by like agents of the Indian state. And so when they heard that, you know, one of their own might have been murdered on Canadian soil, you know, by somebody who's related to the Indian government, it confirmed their suspicions, but they were still shocked that it was said so openly. And I think there's just widespread shock among the rest of Canadians, because I don't think we've ever seen something

like this. I don't think we've ever seen such a public accusation. And it raises the questions of, are our borders safe? Is Canada safe? You know, and what can we do about it? Not saying India didn't, but if they did, why they might feel like they could get away with it, when we're back on Today Explained. Thank you. So you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained. Ramp.com slash explained.

R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC., terms and conditions apply. You're listening to Today Explained. Sean Ramos from joined now by Professor Irfan Nooruddin, Indian Politics, Georgetown University. We asked him what he made of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's accusations. What Mr. Trudeau is accusing India of is pretty unheard of between two democratic countries that have a large diasporic connection and where there's been lots of progress on trade talks and all sorts of other cooperation. So it's hard to understate the seriousness of the allegations made.

And unfortunately, the response of the Indian government has mounted and the tit-for-tat going on with Canada suggests that the worst is yet ahead in terms of the bilateral relationship between these two countries. One hopes that calmer heads will prevail and eventually we'll be able to talk to each other about what actually happened. But for right now, there's much more noise than there is clarity of thought and reason. And the timing here couldn't be worse because India is trying to cultivate a very different image globally, right? India has been working incessantly for the last decade, maybe longer, to really establish itself as a player on the world stage. And 2023 was the culmination of all of those efforts.

You had the high-profile state dinner for Mr. Modi, hosted by President Biden. Toast to our partnership, to our people, to the possibilities that lie ahead. Two great friends, two great nations, and two great powers. Cheers. Mr. Modi followed that up with the chief guest at France's Bastille Day celebrations in July. So there you have that hug between Prime Minister Modi and President Macron. The warmth, Gaurav, between these two leaders has been on display for the last two days. India just hosted the G20 summit as president of the G20.

A little over two hours to go before Central Delhi is in lockdown. So coming to the United Nations this week should have been a real coming out party for India as now a recognized player on the world stage, a member of the Quad, all sorts of accolades and recognition that India is not just a country that's poor and large and democratic, but in fact, one that is a counterbalance to China,

a country that has a role determining what the future of the world could look like. For Delhi, this allegation by Mr. Trudeau could not be worse. It changes the script of what they were hoping the conversation could be in New York City, really a conversation about how successful G20 had been under India's watch and what would come next. And instead, everyone's talking about this bombshell allegation made by the Canadian government. India would love for the conversation to be about anything else than this, because partly what it does is reopen a lot of conversations that India

would much rather avoid, conversations about its record under Mr. Modi, about human rights, democratic backsliding attacks in the press, and indeed a long troubled relationship with the country's religious minorities. All the reporting we have suggests that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have tried to maintain the image India was trying to boost on the world stage. He spoke to Modi about this privately at the G20 summit in India. Why do you think he went public? Impossible to know for sure, of course, but most plausible explanations are two.

The Sikh population in Canada is long settled, politically influential, and very critical to Mr. Trudeau's political survival. The New Democratic Party, which provides support to Trudeau's government in Parliament, is headed by a Sikh Canadian. You have a community that is very politically empowered and a sense that this murder in June was going unaccounted for, no justice, has got to have been a source of mounting pressure domestically for Trudeau. So one possibility is that if Trudeau saw no real progress happening in the private consultations with the Indian government, that he needed to score points at home by being seen to be doing something on behalf of the Sikh community and of Canadian citizens more generally.

The other is the possibility that this was increasingly a liability at home if, in fact, the news that there was credible intelligence collected by the Canadian authorities linking the Indian government was likely to be leaked to the media by other sources and that Trudeau would rather have gotten out in front of that rather than have it come out some other way. So for me, regardless of how we cut it, the truth is that this is as much about domestic politics as it is about the bilateral relationship on both sides. Let's assume that Justin Trudeau has receipts and that the intelligence is good. Why would India act so brazenly and assassinate a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil?

It's hard to imagine what India might have been thinking if, of course, this is in fact true. But there's a couple of ways in which you might speculate as to what could have been going on. The Sikh separatist issue that is now largely a diaspora talking point, there isn't really an active Sikh separatist movement in India and hasn't been really for many decades now. But it remains an emotive, mobilizing issue in the diaspora communities, in particular the Canadian and UK diasporas. Those have been a long problem for India that sees the Canadian government as appeasing a group of people that are avowedly advocating for separatism, right? India's rhetoric would say these are anti-national. The long history of that movement has struggled with active terrorist activities, including the bombing of a passenger airplane

flown by Air India. Air India flight 182 was en route from Vancouver to London and India on June 23, 1985. It exploded in the skies over Ireland. The suspects seek extremists hoping for an independent homeland in India. So there's a lot of blood on the hands of the separatist movements. And for the Indian government, this has been a longstanding grouse with Canada, the notion that Canada wasicial killings is unfortunately commonplace. The National Human Rights Commission of India documents some 800 plus encounter killings, which is the Indian parlance for an extrajudicial killing by the police in the last six years alone. It is so common that encounter has become a verb in Indian jargon. And the breaking news we're getting to you on the Atik Ahmed's son encounter cases.

We've got the first eyewitness account. So one could imagine a confluence of issues, a place in which the Indian intelligence services are using a tactic that they've used a lot on domestic soil, coupled with a sense that this was an emotive issue, that Mr. Najjar was the kind of person that they saw as being someone who was beyond their reach in terms of normal extradition kind of proceedings, but that if allowed to sort of continue, would just raise more and more issues for India. Is it bad for Narendra Modi at home? Because as you and I have discussed previously on this show, his extremist tactics in the past have boosted support for him.

Mr. Modi is likely to come out pretty unscathed at home. The truth is that the Indian public is so used to the notion of an extrajudicial killing that it's not like you're going to be raising any eyebrows, even if true. But more importantly, he's going to be able to spin this as a vociferous denial of the allegations, being willing to take on Canada on the world stage. And that plays to a particular form of nationalism jingoism in the indian public that really wants a muscular response for india on the world stage there's a deep resentment among a large part of the indian public that sees itself as having been pushed around for too long by the

west and modi is a master at tapping this anti-Western resentment that resides in the hearts and minds of lots of Indians, even as they aspire to a much deeper, closer relationship with the West. Everyone's going to be a rally around the flag kind of thing. They're going to deny the allegations. They're going to put the onus on Canada to make their receipts and intelligence public, betting that Canada is not going to want to do that for security protocol reasons. But the other part of it is that I think Modi is also calculating that whatever negative press gets played internationally is going to be short-lived

because Modi understands, and the state dinner in June confirmed this, Bastille Day in France confirmed this, the G20 in Delhi just confirmed this. That India is now increasingly seen as indispensable on the world stage. That the Biden administration has decided in a very old-fashioned, cold, realist perspective that whatever India's problems might be at home in terms of democracy, human rights, its value as a major economic power for trade, as a potential security partner to counter China, beats all of those other considerations. And so this is a case of Modi feeling quite sure that no matter what happens, he's going to be able to move on with the relationship with the United States, with the UK and other Western powers, because they need him much more than he thinks he needs them. So we're not saying India did it, but we are saying India thinks it can get away with murder.

Your words, not mine, but yes. Thank you. correspondent. Our program today was produced by Miles Bryan. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Serena Solon, and mixed by Patrick Boyd. And one last thing before we go on Today Explained, we are working on a very unrelated episode about Airbnb bans. New York City's game-changing limits on short-term rentals just went into effect. We want to hear about your Airbnb experiences, the good ones, the bad ones, the nightmarish ones. Give us a call and leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 202-643-0314.

We may very well use your message on the show. Again, the number 202-643-0314. Thank you.