New Delhi: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have been “provoked” to go public with the allegations against India after facing a barrage of criticism that his government wasn’t being transparent about “foreign interference” from China and its secrecy over national security matters, newspapers in the country analysed.
In an unprecedented move, Trudeau said that there were “credible allegations” of the Indian government being behind the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, who was accused of being a pro-Khalistan terrorist by the Indian government.
“For the first six months of this year, Trudeau and his team erred on the side of secrecy. For the last few months of this year, it appears they’ve decided to risk erring on the side of transparency,” analysed Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt, arguing that the Trudeau government was looking to avoid a rerun of its travails in the first half of 2023.
“For the first six months of this year, Trudeau’s government was battered by a constant barrage of media stories about foreign interference — mostly revolving around China. Some of them were single-sourced; some were problematic, according to the initial (and ill-fated) report from special rapporteur David Johnston. Yet in every case, Trudeau and his team seemed incapable of saying anything beyond the fact that they took the issue seriously. They were starting to look at best flat-footed, at worst incompetent,” she wrote in the opinion piece.
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The article pointed out that the Canadian National Security Advisor, Jody Thomas, had said in an interview that the government was taking a hard look at whether secrecy was “too excessive” around the matter of foreign interference. “These were all signs that Trudeau’s government was starting to see hyper-security around intelligence as a political liability.”
The article referred to Trudeau as telling reporters on Tuesday that Canadians “have a right to know and need to know when things are going on like this, and that’s why we made the decision to do this”.
The Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail published a column by Indian strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney who questioned the haste with which Trudeau has gone public with the allegations despite the investigations not being complete. He wrote:
“A wiser approach would have been to charge all the suspects and present evidence of any Indian government involvement in a court of law. But with no arrests, let alone evidence, Mr. Trudeau has dealt a major blow to Ottawa’s bilateral relationship with New Delhi by echoing the allegations of Canadian Sikh extremists who have held India responsible from the day Mr. Nijjar was shot.”
Chellaney pointed out that India has “never been accused of carrying out an assassination on Western soil, even though it has long been the target of major international terrorist attacks”.
“India’s concerns about the operations of Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists from Anglosphere countries go back to the 1980s, when an Indian diplomat was murdered in Birmingham in Britain and a bomb downed an Air India flight from Toronto, killing all 329 people on board,” he argued.
Another Globe columnist, Andrew Coyne, said that India may have had “ample reason over the years to be annoyed by Canada’s indulgence of Sikh separatists, in general, and Sikh terrorists, in particular”.
But, he noted that the argument was “irrelevant” in the context of the current allegations. “Regardless of whether Mr. Nijjar was merely a Sikh separatist or, as India maintains, a terrorist, he was a Canadian citizen, and entitled to the protections of Canadian law. The government of India had no right to kill him, or to do harm to him of any kind – not in India, and certainly not in Canada.”
Also read: ‘Not Trying to Provoke’: Trudeau Asks India to Take Nijjar Matter Seriously
Coyne wrote that the issue was not about sympathy for Nijjar or his aims, but about the obligation of national governments to act within the rule of law. “For now, the onus is on the government of India to cooperate fully in the investigation of Mr. Nijjar’s killing. At the least it could do Canada the courtesy of officially deploring it, as the Prime Minister demanded.”
Former head of the Canadian Intelligence Service Richard Fadden, who also served as the national security adviser to Trudeau and his predecessor Stephen Harper, told The Globe and Mail that Canada should suspend intelligence-sharing or cooperation with India.
He said Canada should prepare for a long period of chilly relations with India but should also attempt to find a way to ensure New Delhi never does something like this again.
Meanwhile, there was some anxiety in the Canadian media that the US was not coming as strongly as expected on behalf of its closest neighbour, but was perceived to be more neutral and not taking sides.
The Washington Post’s article that claimed that Canada’s proposal for a joint statement by the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance was rebuffed was widely reported, which led to a formal denial from the Canadian foreign ministry.
Terming the report as false, Ottawa said that Canada had only briefed its allies. “The claim reported in The Washington Post that Canada asked Allies to publicly condemn the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and were subsequently rebuffed, is false,” Emily Williams, press secretary to Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, said in an e-mailed statement.
Reuters also quoted a Canadian “source” as saying that Ottawa “had been working with the US very closely, including on the public disclosure yesterday”.
The Canadian public broadcaster reported that a “senior US administration official reached out to CBC News to dispute that characterisation”.
“Reports that Canada asked the US to publicly condemn the murder and that we refused are false and we would strongly push back on the rumours that we were reluctant to speak publicly about this,” the official said.
“In fact, we very clearly and very publicly have done the opposite by expressing deep concern shortly after Prime Minister Trudeau made the announcement,” the anonymous US official told CBC News.
A former Canadian national security analyst and an international relations professor, Stephanie Carvin, said that Canada should not expect strong rallying support from allies in the same way it was roundly backed during its campaign against China’s jailing of two Canadian nationals by China.
“India is a much harder case, because everyone’s trying to woo India right now. And no one wants to risk upsetting that,” she said. “At the end of the day, you have to consider the fact that India is useful [in] countering China and we’re not.”
Analysing the US comment, Carvin said it backed Canada’s version of events but was muted in its criticism against India. “I think that this is the best we could probably hope for in this situation.”