The words, we later learned from men who were there: “A man who first burst into my court with a knapsack and a limping mule now raises up his heel, trying to seize the throne for himself,” King Henry II raged. Four of the King’s barons, so one near-contemporary biographical manuscript records, rode out to punish the rebellious priest. “Hugh Mauclerk, the most wicked of all men, approaching him as he lay, put his foot on his neck and thrusting the point of his sword into his head spread his brains on the pavement, crying out and saying, ‘Let us go, the traitor is dead.’”
Like that infamous murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral eight-and-a-half centuries ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rewriting the killing of pro-Khalistan preacher Hardeep Singh Nijjar as a morality play, where he defends high liberal principles against a barbarous tyranny.
Little actual evidence for this story has so far been made public. Moreover, the trial of the four Indian nationals charged with the killing has been adjourned five times as the prosecution hands over tens of thousands of pages of evidence to lawyers for the men.
This evidence might prove—or not—that India’s intelligence services did indeed execute Nijjar. The real story, though, is more complex than either country admits. For years, the Trudeau government has been extraordinarily permissive of public calls to violence by pro-Khalistan groups, when posting Islamic State propaganda to TikTok has earned six-year prison sentences. Little action has been taken against Khalistan fundraising, used to pay hitmen to conduct murders in India.
For a sceptical audience, Justin Trudeau’s morality play will be hard to distinguish from low farce. Even though international law generally opposes assassinations, the great powers—including the United States—have routinely used them since 9/11 against terrorists sheltered in safe havens. India is learning that lesser nations must pay a price for invoking the principles that govern the great.
Taken at the well-known arms bazaar in Pakistan’s Darra Adam Khel in 1989, the photograph hanging over the dining hall in the Guru Nanak Gurdwara shows Talwinder Singh Parmar cradling a machine gun. Talwinder, the architect of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, and multiple other terrorist attacks, was killed by the Punjab Police in 1992, near Phillaur. The photograph was installed in 2019, when Nijjar won elections to take charge of the Gurdwara in the town of Surrey, in British Columbia, as part of the resurgence of pro-Khalistan forces in the community.
“We will have to take up arms,” Nijjar told the congregation, in a videotaped speech obtained by journalists Nancy McDonald and Greg Mercer, “We will have to dance to the edges of swords.” Those who advocate peaceful methods, the Khalistan operative went on, “We need to leave them behind. What justice will we get this way?”
Even though Nijjar had no intention of returning to India—the $18 million in assets the Gurdwara controls helped the one-time plumber acquire a second and third home in Surrey, McDonald and Mercer report. His name appeared in at least a dozen cases involving bombings and the attempted assassination of heterodox Sikhs and Hindu nationalists.
Likely, political patronage helped some pro-Khalistan activists embed themselves in Canada. Nijjar, who arrived in Canada on a counterfeit passport, was initially denied asylum. A second effort, involving a fake marriage, again ended in rejection. Even though authorities recorded he did not face persecution, he was granted citizenship in 2007.
The actual evidence assembled by the Punjab Police in these cases was anaemic. Three men accused of bombing a cinema in Ludhiana on Nijjar’s orders were acquitted; a fourth died while being tried. There was, however, little effort within Canada to seriously investigate ties between pro-Khalistan groups and criminals they hired to carry out acts of violence in India. This was true to a long-standing pattern. Tarsem Singh Purewal and Tara Singh Hayer, both witnesses to the Air India case, were shot dead; there were no arrests.
Even after the Air India bombing, pro-Khalistan figures such as Balbir Singh, Darshan Singh, and Kulwinder Singh remained active in the Babbar Khalsa’s hierarchy, apparently without inviting the wrath of the highly-rated Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The assassination of prominent Communist leader Balwinder Singh Sandhu, who engaged in armed combat with pro-Khalistan terrorists in the 1990s, was one of several cases involving links to Canada.
Although Canadian authorities responded that there was no hard evidence linking, there’s plenty to suggest they weren’t looking very hard.
Also read: India has a Trudeau problem, not a Canada one
“Little Guantanamo”, it was called: Long rows of single cells stretching across the maximum-security prison at Terre Haute in Indiana, with the prisoners under constant surveillance. Khalid Awan’s journey to the prison began in the weeks after 9/11, a haze of toxic dust still covering lower Manhattan, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received a call about suspicious Middle-Eastern men operating out of an apartment in New York. There were no Middle-Eastern men, it turned out—just a group of Pakistani immigrants engaged in credit card fraud.
Four years later, serving time for this crime, Awan bragged to a Sikh prisoner, Harjit Singh, that he had transferred tens of thousands of dollars from the fraud to Khalistan Commando Force terrorist Paramjit Singh Panjwar on the instructions of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. From prison, he called Panjwar, showing off his close ties.
Later, Awan told FBI investigator John Ross, he knew the money “was going to be used for bad things [like] shooting and killing of innocent people.” Harjit Singh testified that Awan had talked about taking him to Pakistan following his release to meet Panjwar and undergo training on “how to use the guns, how to make the bombs.” Awan was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Then, he returned to his homeland, Canada. There was no serious effort to follow up on the case, either in the United States or Canada.
Also read: Key closed-door legal ‘conference’ to set stage for trial in Pannun murder-for-hire case in US
Ever since 9/11, the legal philosopher Michael Davis notes, nation-states have employed assassination—illegal in international law, except under special circumstances—with growing frequency. The killing of the unarmed Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad would, by most standards of law, have constituted murder. The practice of targeted killing drew on Israeli reasoning, employed since 1973, which stressed that there was no other viable means to punish terrorists sheltered by hostile nation-states.
The legal scholar Kristen Eichensehr warned however, that the increasing use of targeted killing would have inevitable consequences: “Having opened Pandora’s box and begun down the slippery slope of targeted killings, the United States cannot hope to control other parties’ employment of the policy.”
Even today, as it prosecutes alleged Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW)—funded assassin Nikhil Gupta—charged with the attempted murder of Nijjar’s friend, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun—the US seems sensitive to the complexity of the issue. The country has not allowed the assassination attempt to taint the wider strategic relationship nor sought to claim high moral ground. Faced with clear and present threats, the United States has acted much like India, after all.
Flailing politically because of economic mismanagement—and facing allegations that it failed to confront China’s interference in its domestic affairs—Prime Minister Trudeau’s government has taken a different course. The polemics unleashed by Trudeau and his ministers are directed at acquiring support from ethnic-Punjabi voters in some key constituencies. This is a low-risk strategy, given the minimal strategic equities Canada and India have in the other.
There are, of course, tough questions India needs to be asking itself. A long succession of alleged Indian intelligence operations outside the near-neighbourhood—among them, the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, the botched attempt to kidnap fugitive businessman Mehul Choksi, and the anti-Khalistan assassinations in North America—have ended in exposure. This casts serious doubts on the competence and capabilities of India’s intelligence services.
Even more important, the failure to build persuasive legal cases against suspects has long undermined India’s case.
Following 9/11, there was genuine opportunity to build a transnational consensus against terrorism, and its use by nation-states as a tool of foreign policy. The Nijjar case is the outcome of the loss of that opportunity, because of opportunism, political venality and moral double standards.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
