As it now transpires, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has blamed Unio home minister Amit Shah, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and former Secretary (R&AW) Samant Goel for the murder of Khalistan Tiger Force terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18, 2023.
Of course, all this is only on the basis of some sundry intelligence input and not hard legal evidence as Trudeau has himself admitted.
Barring US and UK, Australia and New Zealand have asked for evidence against India from Trudeau before they support Canadian allegation as a Five Eyes alliance partner.
The US has its own axe to grind in the issue as it has indicted two Indian nationals including an ex-intelligence officer for conspiracy to murder proscribed SFJ counsel Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in June 2023.
Pannun holds dual citizenship and is the chief weaponiser of the Sikh community against India in the US-UK and Canada. He is the person who has admitted that he has been feeding information with Trudeau on so-called Indian activities against Khalistanis.
It is the same activist who has filed against Ajit Doval and Samant Goel in New York district court this year based on the Department of Justice indictment while saying that he will file against Prime Minister Narendra Modi later as he presently has legal immunity as head of government.
While legal jurisprudence in Canada demands proof beyond reasonable doubt to be declared guilty of a criminal offence, Trudeau with the support of the US intelligence has turned the law on its head by declaring the Modi government guilty without any hard evidentiary proof. The question is why is Canada after Amit Shah, Ajit Doval, and Samant Goel ?
The answer to this question lies in the fact that all three are fierce nationalists and believe that India should forge its own identity in the world. They are unvarnished Indians with no colonial white hangover or inferiority complex. All three are work-driven and their behaviour borders on anti-social. They are neither anti-US, nor anti-Russia, just pro-Bharat.
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Amit Shah believes India’s time has come
Like his leader and mentor Narendra Modi since his teenage days, home minister Amit Shah believes that India’s time has come and is not willing to take anything lying down when it comes to defending Bharat.
Since Narendra Modi took over in 2014, Shah has not travelled to any foreign country and has no desire in future. Ask him and he will say that he has no votes to seek abroad.
He does not meet foreign diplomats and the last time a US ambassador met him as the BJP chief, Shah gave him an earful on the massacre of Native Americans by white New Englanders as the diplomat wanted to discuss human rights in India.
With a deep sense of Indian historical and cultural past, Shah is not enamored with Americans, what to talk of Canadians and Britishers. He believes that India’s enemies must be dealt severely but only under the due process of law.
National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is made of the same fiber as Shah and has talked to US, UK and Canadian interlocutors bluntly on their tacit support of Kashmiri and Khalistani separatists from his days in Intelligence Bureau and now as a principal security advisor to PM Modi.
He has been asking for evidence in the Nijjar case from his Canadian counterparts since Trudeau took the floor in the Canadian parliament and blamed India.
Ajit Doval- Patient listener, blunt in his replies
A quintessential spy, Doval, like Shah, is a patient listener and also blunt in replies. He is a strategic thinker as well as an operational planner to the last detail. With first-hand experience of terrorism promoted by Pakistan and West in Jammu and Kashmir as well as Punjab, Doval is totally committed to Bharat and believes in pre-empting any threat to India, notwithstanding whether the threat is based in Pakistan, China, US, UK or Canada.
But that does not mean that he runs a hitman squad or uses criminals to take care of terrorists like Nijjar or Pannun. Meticulous in paperwork, Doval painstakingly prepares the case against India’s adversaries and then uses the law to take the enemy down.
Trained as a counter-terror operative in Punjab, former RA&W chief Samant Goel has been tracking Khalistani terrorism since he was SSP Gurdaspur, Batala and Amritsar in the 1990s under super cop K P S Gill.
In India’s external intelligence agency, Goel was doing the same when posted in London but ran afoul of British intelligence agencies who found him and his methods rather inconvenient. Goel was instrumental in getting black lists of Sikhs removed in Canada, UK, and US as he believed that Khalistanis represent only a minuscule section of the otherwise patriotic Sikh community.
Like the above two, Goel is a hardcore nationalist and a true believer in Bharat. In March 2023, it was Samant Goel who bluntly told visiting CIA chief William Burns that Pannun was an asset of US intelligence and that is the reason why Langley goes out of the way to protect him.
He took up the case of Nijjar and anti-India activities by Khalistanis with his Canadian counterpart as head of RA&W. Goel liked calling a spade a spade even when he was informing the top Indian leadership including his boss Doval about threats facing India. He has not travelled to either US or Canada during his four years as intelligence chief.
Even the attempted murder of Pannun is based on indictment of freelance agents purported to be acting on behalf of India and the case is still to be proven in court. So what is this Western play against India all about?
While the Anglo-Saxon West has been exercising the doctrine of preemption all over the world using assassins, economic hitmen, and armed drones, the Caucasians cannot accept the fact that Indians also have a right to defend themselves and stop innocents being bled by terror proxies.
Until the US was hit by Islamic jihadists in 9/11, the US State Department believed that freedom fighters were acting with the political support of Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir.
The West also gave asylum to Khalistanis in the name of deteriorating human rights conditions in Punjab. Not a word in support of India despite thousands of innocents being killed in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and the Indian hinterland from 1980 onwards till 2014.
West wary of India’s rise as economic and military power
The big picture emerging from the Nijjar-Pannun affair is that the West is wary of the rise of India as an economic and military powerhouse. Like China, it would prefer India to remain a regional power.
Trudeau is just an agent provocateur. After the restoration of peace in Jammu and Kashmir post abrogation of Article 370, the West and India’s other adversaries cannot let go of Khalistani leverage over the Modi government. The fingerprints of Western intelligence agencies, who have the largest presence in huge embassies in New Delhi, can be seen in so-called farmers’ agitation, communal instigation through social media, and shoring up the Opposition against the Modi government.
The Khalistanis also suit them as they vote for Democrats in the US, Liberals in Canada, and Labour in the UK, and also fund them big time electorally.
That India’s rise will be contested by other powers was evident when even a close ally like Japan used its UN envoy to take potshots at Indian democracy and its media carped about Modi’s failed foreign policy in the neighborhood.
With India notching a growth rate of seven per cent annually, it is expected to become the third largest world economy by 2027 end as it will cross Japan next year as Nippon is only growing at one percent annually.
Rather than let its leadership and intelligence agencies be targeted by the West and China, India needs to further sharpen its capability against adversaries. Fact is that Indian intelligence needs to hone its capabilities as it is still wary and circumspect about what the Western intelligence has against India in the Nijjar-Pannun cases.
This is because Indian intelligence still feeds on scraps from their associates in the West rather than building capacities and capabilities in China, Pakistan, and the West. The Nijjar-Pannun case is just the beginning as it is in nobody’s interest to see India sit on the global high table.
