Months after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada accused the Indian government of plotting a murder on Canadian soil, plunging diplomatic relations between the two countries to their lowest level ever recorded, the first arrests over the murder, that occurred on Friday, did little to demystify the base. of your claim.
Police offered no clues or presented any evidence that India had orchestrated the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh nationalist leader who was shot dead at the temple he led in Surrey, British Columbia, in June. What they did say was that three Indian men had committed the murder and that an investigation into India’s role was underway.
Before the arrests, Indian officials had maintained that Canada was trying to drag New Delhi into what they described as essentially a rivalry between gangs whose members had long been wanted for crimes in India.
After the arrests, a report by the CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting corporation, based on anonymous sources, also claimed that the suspects belonged to an Indian criminal gang.
But analysts and former officials said the possible role of a gang in the murder does not necessarily mean that the Indian government was not involved in the crime.
India’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has long been suspected of leveraging criminal networks to carry out operations in its immediate vicinity in South Asia. while maintaining denial.
Canada’s allegation, if proven, that India orchestrated Nijjar’s murder (and a similar allegation made soon after by the United States in a different case) may suggest that RAW is now expanding its workbook with criminals to carry out operations in Western countries. the analysts said.
U.S. officials have presented compelling evidence in their allegation that an Indian government agent participated in a foiled attempt to assassinate a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen. And Canada and allied officials have maintained that Canada has evidence supporting Trudeau’s claim that Indian agents carried out Nijjar’s murder.
But Canada’s failure to reveal any evidence that India was involved, nine months after Trudeau’s explosive accusation, leaves Nijjar’s murder in the realm of accusations and counter-accusations in what is a very tense political environment. in both countries. the analysts said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been flexing his muscles as a nationalist strongman, presenting himself during his current campaign for a third term as a protector of India who would go as far as necessary to combat security threats.
During speeches, he has boasted about how his government eliminates enemies by “descending on their homes.” While he has made such references in relation to the country’s arch-enemy Pakistan, right-wing accounts on social media had celebrated Nijjar’s assassination in Canada as a similar reach of Modi’s long arm.
Trudeau, on the other hand, had been facing criticism for his weakness in the face of Chinese election interference activities on Canadian soil, and his progress on the Nijjar assassination was seen as making up for that.
Canadian police announced on Friday that they had arrested the three Indian men in Edmonton, Alberta, on the same day and charged them with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit the murder of Mr. Nijjar. The suspects had been living in Canada for three to five years but were not permanent residents of Canada, police said.
The gang that the CBC reported The Hitmen Are Connected is directed by Lawrence Bishnoi, 31, accused of several cases of murder, extortion and drug trafficking. He has orchestrated much of this from an Indian jail, where he has been held since 2014. His members are believed to be behind the murder of a popular Punjabi rapper and threats of attacks on Bollywood celebrities.
Indian security officials have frequently arrested criminals linked to Bishnoi, often with accusations that the gang’s network extended into Canada and overlapped with those promoting from Canadian soil the cause of Khalistan, a separatist movement that some was once deeply violent with the goal of forging the Indian state of Punjab as an independent nation.
A large Sikh diaspora resides in Canada, many of them emigrating there after a violent and often indiscriminate crackdown by the Indian government in the 1980s against the movement for an independent Khalistan. While the cause has largely died out within India, it continues to have supporters among some segments of the diaspora. The Indian government has accused Canada and several other Western countries of not doing enough to suppress the separatists.
Analysts and former security officials said that in India’s immediate geographical vicinity, RAW has often been willing to venture into murky spaces to recruit assassins. Top officials in the Modi administration, including Ajit Doval, the famous former spy chief who now serves as his longtime national security adviser, have been accused in the past of reaching into the underworld to find hitmen willing to pursue objectives within the country. as well as abroad.
Bishnoi has demonstrated enormous power behind bars, even giving a television interview from prison last year to portray himself as a nationalist warrior rather than a criminal mastermind. That, a former security official said, was a sign that he was trying to align himself with the nationalist ethos for a possible deal.
“I am a nationalist,” Bishnoi said in that interview. “I am against Khalistan. “I am against Pakistan.”
Ajai Sahni, a security analyst who heads the South Asia Terrorism Portal in New Delhi, said the exploitation of criminal gangs by spy agencies to carry out denial operations was something that “happens all over the world.” .
“It’s definitely possible that agencies like RAW use gang rivalries rather than exposing their own undercover operators,” Sahni added. “But the fact that this is generally how you would expect it to be done doesn’t necessarily mean that we know that this is exactly the case in the Nijjar murder.”
The failed plot on American soil had some of the sloppy characteristics of an agency trying to extend an old playbook into a different, unfamiliar space.
An indictment filed by the United States in November presented evidence including electronic communications and cash transactions between the hired hitman (who turned out to be an undercover police officer), a boastful middleman and an Indian intelligence handler whom The Washington Post recently identified as Vikram. Yadav.
The Indian government’s response suggested concern: India’s top diplomat said the action was not government policy, while the government announced an investigation into the matter and pledged cooperation with the United States.
The case of Canada has developed very differently. The country has not publicly revealed any evidence supporting Trudeau’s claim, even as allied officials said in September that Canadian officials had found “irrefutable proof”: intercepted communications from Indian diplomats in Canada indicating their involvement in the plot.
Indian officials have responded to Trudeau’s claims with the kind of aggression that suggested he was not involved or confident in his denial.
The Indian government expelled the Canadian diplomats and doubled down by publishing a list of people on Canadian soil who it said had long been wanted as part of what it described as a crime-terrorism nexus.
Last week, Modi government officials jumped on stage at an event Trudeau had attended to say it showed his accusations were simply to appease what they say is a Sikh vote bank for him. They pointed to videos of an event where Trudeau was the chief guest and where chants of “long live Khalistan” were shouted. Trudeau, in his speech, said he will always be there “to protect his rights and his freedoms, and we will always defend his community against hate.”
After the speech, India’s foreign ministry summoned Canada’s second-most senior diplomat in New Delhi to file a complaint.
“His statements illustrate once again the kind of political space that has been given in Canada to separatism, extremism and people who practice violence,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said at a news conference.