India urged to co-operate with probe

U.S. ‘very concerned’ about Ottawa’s allegations as Trudeau tries to calm Indo-Canadians’ fears

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried Friday to allay IndoCanadians’ fears about growing diplomatic tensions as the U.S. urged the Indian government to cooperate with a probe into stunning allegations that it was linked to the assassination of a Canadian Sikh leader in June.

America’s top diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said Friday that he raised the issue directly with India’s top diplomat, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, when they met Thursday in Washington.

“We’re very concerned about the allegations that have been raised by Canada, by Prime Minister Trudeau,” Blinken told a news conference.

“We have been in close contact with Canada about that. At the same time, we have engaged with the Indian government and urged them to work with Canada on an investigation and I had the opportunity to do so again in my meeting yesterday with foreign minister Jaishankar,” he said.

“Those responsible need to be held accountable, and we hope that our friends in both Canada and India will work together to resolve this matter.”

The political fallout from Trudeau’s revelation in Parliament that federal security agencies are investigating “credible allegations” agents of India were involved in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil was front and centre as Trudeau visited a Brampton community centre Friday.

It has triggered tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions by each country, with India warning against travel to Canada and halting travel visas for Canadians. India called the allegation absurd, “primarily politically driven,” and demanded Canada produce “specific information” to back up its claim.

The visa suspension is a growing concern among Sikh, Muslim and Hindu Indo-Canadians, with community and business leaders raising worries to federal and Ontario cabinet ministers, sources told the Star.

On Friday, according to The Canadian Press, several in the Brampton crowd asked Trudeau to address the diplomatic tensions as he moved from table to table.

The prime minister repeatedly spoke about the need for Canada to stand up for the rule of law, even as he acknowledged the potential for spillover tensions among Canada’s Sikh, Hindu and Muslim communities.

“It’s very, very complicated times right now and the last thing we want to see is any tensions between and within the larger Indo-Canadian community,” Trudeau said.

Sources say that Canadian Sikh leaders have expressed fears to the government that other outspoken activists could be targeted next by India. And Hindu leaders have expressed concern about inflammatory rhetoric against Hindu Canadians, and complained that the Liberal government has not engaged with them on foreign interference. It’s a politically fraught affair. All parties in the House of Commons are trying to walk a fine line between expressing outrage over the potential involvement of a Hindu nationalist Indian government in an extraterritorial, extrajudicial killing, and not inflaming tensions at home.

The long-standing divisions within India’s religious communities have heightened during the tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who has cracked down on religious minorities and his own critics in political, journalistic and academic communities.

Indian government officials and Indian-based media commentators accuse Trudeau’s government of harbouring sympathizers for those who seek a separate Sikh homeland, and of being unwilling to crack down on what India calls “terrorists” and Khalistani extremists who fundraise in Canada to support the separatist movement in northern India.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has declined the offer of a classified briefing, says Trudeau should reveal the evidence he has to support his claim in Parliament.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who was given a classified government briefing on Sept. 21, said he believes Trudeau had cited “credible” information that implicates the Modi government, and called the killing of Nijjar an “attack on our sovereignty by a foreign government.”

Singh and several other NDP and Liberal MPs have condemned the Conservatives’ “silence” on the matter, with one NDP MP linking it to the close ties between Modi’s government and former Conservative leader Stephen Harper.

Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal echoed that sentiment in an interview with the Star, and said contrary to Poilievre’s demand for more evidence, constituents he met with Friday at a gurdwara did not demand proof of the prime minister’s allegation against the Indian government. He said they understood that could jeopardize a criminal investigation. Instead, Dhaliwal said, he met many people who were “very thankful” for Trudeau’s public statement.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot to death in June outside a Surrey, B.C. gurdwara. No one has been arrested or charged in connection with his death.

It’s not even clear whether the Indian diplomat Ottawa expelled was directly connected to the assassination.

Nijjar was a prominent supporter of the Khalistan separatism movement that promotes the creation of a Sikh homeland in northern India, and was designated as a terrorist by the Indian government in 2020.

The temple where Nijjar was slain is in Dhaliwal’s riding of SurreyNewton, and Dhaliwal said many there are “intimidated” by what he described as the Indian government’s threats to silence dissent. He said the India government punished him in 2010 after he introduced a petition in Parliament on behalf of constituents that called the wave of 1984 violence against Sikhs in India a “genocide.” India denied him a travel visa for three years, Dhaliwal said.

In Brampton, Trudeau told one group of listeners that, “We just have to be unequivocal about the rules and the law, and nobody’s above the law and we need to make sure that we’re making sure that all Canadians are safe.

“You know, people come to this country from every corner of the world and they need to be safe when they get here.”