Glavin: Trudeau's India accusations abruptly change the channel in Canadian politics

The story about the killing of a Sikh activist requires that we take the prime minister at his word, and for the most part it seems to be working.

Published Sep 20, 2023 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 6 minute read

An image of Hardeep Singh Nijjar is displayed at the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple in Surrey, B.C. on Sept. 19, 2023. Photo by DON MACKINNON /AFP via Getty Images

You have to hand it to Justin Trudeau.

The resumption of Parliament on Monday was expected to be the opening scene of a grim season for his caucus. The fall sitting of the House of Commons was supposed to focus on sky-high rents, off-the-charts house prices, rising food and fuel costs and other such miseries afflicting Canadians and largely attributable to the Liberal government’s own maladministration of a shrinking Canadian economy.

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A summer-long battering in the opinion polls had ended with a Liberal caucus retreat where MPs took pains to put a brave face on things, but now they had to face the music. They were not exactly looking forward to facing a grinning Pierre Poilievre on the Opposition’s front bench, fresh from a Conservative policy conference where the mood was chipper and plucky, and everyone was spoiling for a fight.

Monday was also the first day on the job for Judge Marie-Josée Hogue of the Quebec Court of Appeal in her capacity as the commissioner of the public inquiry into foreign interference that the Liberals had fought so tenaciously to ambuscade and scuttle. And you can’t blame them for those roadblocks, given what a proper inquiry might further reveal after nearly a year of shocking revelations about Beijing’s profound influences within the circles of Liberal power in Canada.

Then, when Monday finally came round, Trudeau pulled the pin, and boom.

Within 24 hours, Trudeau had contrived to place himself at the centre of attention in the NATO capitals with a gripping international story in which Trudeau plays himself as the story’s gallant leading man. And so far, it’s working. The story grabbed banner headlines around the world, from the Washington Post and the New York Times to the Times of London and Al Jazeera, and across Canada, from Victoria to Newfoundland.

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The headline version: After weeks of “quiet diplomacy,” Trudeau was forced by events to say a frightfully indelicate thing out loud: The wicked and authoritarian Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had arranged the murder of a harmless Canadian citizen in a cold-blooded assassination, outside a place of worship here in Canada, no less.

This isn’t exactly what Trudeau said, of course, but this is exactly how what he said was intended to be understood.

The story served an immediate purpose of explaining away Trudeau’s “world stage” humiliation in Delhi, where he’d been politely ignored by his fellow G20 leaders, and where he’d been reduced to suggesting gender-inclusive language and Indigenous reflections in the summit’s closing communique.

Modi had been rude to him. The Indian press had made fun of him. Trudeau missed the launch of the Global Biofuels Alliance and skipped the closing grand banquet, then found himself stuck for several hours after his CC-150 Polaris was judged incapable of flight. He then had to stew for another 24 hours waiting for a replacement Polaris to arrive from CFB Trenton after turning up his nose at Modi’s offer of an Indian Air Force Boeing 777 to ferry him home with his entourage.

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Aside from the part with the botched itinerary and the gibbled airplane, the story about Trudeau’s gentlemanly and diplomatically reluctant entreaties regarding Modi’s team of assassins explains all of it. What happened in India wasn’t a story about Modi upbraiding him about the safe haven he was providing Khalistani terrorists in Canada or the threat Trudeau’s intimacies with the Khalistanis posed to India’s national unity and national security after all. No, not at all.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (C) meets Members of Parliament at the Central Hall of the Old Parliament building in New Delhi on Sept. 19. Photo by AFP PHOTO/Indian Press Information Bureau (PIB)

The unpleasantness was about Trudeau’s diplomatic efforts to cause Modi and the rest of the G20 to take notice of the foulness of what happened on June 18, when two gunmen killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar just as Nijjar was pulling out of the Guru Nanak Temple in Surrey, B.C., where he served as president, in his Dodge Ramp pickup.

Amazing as all this is, the most fascinating part is that all we know is what Trudeau is telling us. And the story requires that Trudeau be taken at his word, and his alone, and for the most part it seems to be working. Ferociously denied by Modi’s government, widely condemned as a calumny in the Indian press, Trudeau’s allegations have been accepted, in the main, in Canada, at least if the news media is anything to go by.

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But all we have to go on is what Trudeau said in the House of Commons on Monday. “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.”

There is nothing new about any of that, except for what Trudeau introduced in the words “credible allegations of a potential link.” Canada’s security agencies have been clear from the beginning that they are investigating Khalistani activists’ claims that “Indian agents” may have been somehow involved in the gangland-style hit. Trudeau is now saying their claims are credible. That’s what’s new, and “potential link” offers Trudeau a great deal of wiggle room. So does the term “Indian agents.”

In Khalistani-dominated gurdwaras, the term “Indian agents” can mean pretty well any Sikhs brave enough to actively defy the Khalistani catechism, which glorifies violence and reveres Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale, the 1980s-era Sikh supremacist whose demagoguery led to thousands of deaths and communal violence and a political crisis in India that did not end with the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. And some Sikhs are quite defiant, and some may well be as trigger-happy as the cult that has grown up around the “martyred” Bhinderanwale.

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And for all anyone knows, or will say on the record, it could well be that anti-Khalistani “agents” were behind Nijjar’s killing, and his killers may have been bent on revenge for the targeted killing of the pro-Modi, reformed Khalistani Ripudaman Singh Malik, a year earlier.

In that same Khalistani cult there is also an open adulation of Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind behind the 1985 Air India bombing, as a “saint.” Nijjar’s face now appears along with Parmar’s in Khalistani billboards and posters from Brampton, Ont. to Burnaby, B.C., and on “Sikhs For Justice” leaflets offering a $10,000 reward for the home addresses of India’s High Commissioner in Canada and the addresses of his consuls-general.

If you can revere the perpetrators behind the most outrageous terror attack in the history of civil aviation prior to Sept. 11, 2001 — the Air India atrocity that dragged 329 people out of the sky to their deaths off the Irish coast in 1985 — you can believe any old thing. If you can believe the Air India plotters were the good guys, it takes no effort at all to believe that Narendra Modi took the time and trouble to dispatch assassins to murder Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside a Surrey temple this summer.

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The thing is, there are people who believe these things. They have preyed upon Canada’s innocently devout Sikhs for decades. They can be found in leadership positions in several major Sikh temples, and they can be found in gun-running rackets and drug smuggling rings. It’s a gang culture thing, and after Trudeau’s endorsement of their claims about Indian spies on Monday, they have been further emboldened. It’s been a long process of normalization in Canada, and it’s what Modi has been banging on about all this time.

So you have to hand it to Justin Trudeau. By taking sides in a Surrey gang war and rubbing Modi—’s nose in it for the humiliation he had to put up with in Delhi, Trudeau may well have made life for the Liberal caucus this fall a lot more pleasant.

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.