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Justin Trudeau claims Canadian authorities have intelligence Indian government was behind slaying of Canadian Sikh leader in British Columbia
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- Title
- Trudeau accuses Indian government of involvement in killing of Canadian Sikh leader | CBC News
- Published
- Sep 18 2023
- Word count
- 111 words
Like other comments here im actually amazed this accusation is being made publicly. Things must be grim behind the scenes indeed. I think I'm going to follow this one more closely.
If I may go slightly off topic, the below quote is the most refreshing thing I've read in ages. Conservative leader putting politics aside and standing behind PM for what is right. Seems out of place in todays political climate. Especially from the conservative party. Credit where credit is due.
There’s been bad blood between these two heads of the states for years now:
Modi scolds Trudeau over Sikh protests in Canada against India
Modi ‘screwed’ Trudeau during 2018 India trip — and it’s become a poll issue in Canada now
India’s ties with Canada have come to a ‘standstill’ after Trudeau’s controversial visit
It's an assumption on my part, but it strikes me as very suspicious and convenient that this announcement came out almost immediately after Modi snubbed Trudeau at that India summit recently (the one where Trudeau's plane broke down). And yes, there has been bad blood between them for some time.
Pure conjecture, but it's likely the Canadian government tried to approach the Indian government quietly and it didn't take.
This is likely the result.
My expectation of responsible heads of state is that they wouldn't blame an assassination on their soil on another country unless their intelligence apparatus had given them pretty iron clad evidence, but we've also seen a long history of the western world's intelligence apparatus being blatantly wrong and proved so after the fact. So, I'm very mixed on this statement by Trudeau, but I've also been watching the growing unrest developing in India and have to admit to being a little concerned by the violence breaking out, the overall governmental policies that seem to be pushing it back into deep ideological and theological conflict. If that narrative that I seem to be witnessing is accurate, it wouldn't be shocking for them to quell a "Rabble rouser" in Canada that is questioning India's hold on former countries/existing territories. Hell, even if my bead on this is completely off, how would the US government feel if another country was inciting succession?
Edit: I wanted to add an asterisk to my comment, after coming back and thinking about how knowledgable I am about the topic. The statements I made about watching India these last few years may make it seem like I am watching them closely and that couldn't be further from the truth. I am aware that my fears are mostly based in how little I understand about India and the issues the state is grappling with, which probably heightens that fear. I would hate to perpetuate hateful, ignorant, or even racist fears from my comfy place in the US, as many Americans are prone to do. Please, if you read my comment, understand that I'm a reasonably ignorant American who is just fearful of the aspects of geopolitics they don't understand and not someone who's opinion should be taken as factual or researched.
It’s important not to confuse American political cleavages to Indian contexts. The opposition party’s leadership was literally the one that organized pogroms against Sikhs in retaliation for them assassinating the then prime minister, who happens to be the grandmother of their current party leader.
This is not a partisan issue in India. Khalistani separatism is a minority view among the Sikh community in India and abroad, and the militant ones are are widely regarded as terrorists, akin to how we viewed the Branch Davidians or Bundy Ranch guys here. It just happens to have taken particular root among the Sikh diaspora communities in Canada and the UK through immigration policy around granting asylum to people India puts warrants out on for terrorist activities, founder effects, and diaspora communities generally ending up more hardline in political and social views compared to the people back home.
The fact that it would be a dumb thing to do with very little actual benefit (like this guy was sort of a nobody all things considered) makes me doubt Trudeau’s claim here. It’s possible someone with some involvement with Indian government was involved, I guess, but the Indian intelligence agency is one of the most thoroughly penetrated in the world. Their reputation in terms of being savvy operators isn’t that stellar. It’s just as likely whatever government plant was tying up loose ends around a gun running deal. The only thing that makes me take it seriously is that Trudeau was really willing to go out on a limb with it.
Please stick to the actual words I have typed instead of trying to read in motivations that aren't there.
India is a large, pluralistic country with an independent civil service and well established bureaucratic apparatus that maintains continuity across individual political leaders. Commentary on India is, apparently, only capable of talking about anything happening in India or by the Indian government as if Modi has a series of dials on his chair labeled "sectarian violence" and "riots" that he turns up and down. Targeted hits like this are actually difficult to pull off and it strains credulity that the leadership would go out on a limb like that to organize a hit on some random fugitive of a fringe movement that doesn't pose any real threat to the government or the party.
This reads like fantasizing. Trudeau's announcement was dripping with hedges. "Investigating" "credible allegations" "of involvement by" "agents linked to the Government of India." There are, like, 12 degrees of room for either walking back or moderating the accusations once credible facts start being put on the table.
The most plausible version of the story I can imagine would be that someone who works in or for the embassy or foreign office might have been mixed up with the guys who did the job and Trudeau has opted to throw out the most maximalist interpretation of it to bully the Indian government into cooperating with their investigation. The idea that this is "definitely true" seems rooted more in what people want to believe based on general animus towards Modi/BJP than anything that's actually been established. But this is bad. Shit like this just causes a "rally-round-the-flag" effect and Modi's polling and approval ratings, which were starting to show signs of flagging, will surge because of this.
This is probably the root of my fear, from what little I have read, about the rise of religious persecution in India by the majority party. It may not be as bad as I have been lead to believe, but I know India will likely be a powerhouse in the next century and it's scary to hear the rumblings of such vehement religious judgement. My perception Hindus, based on the few I've met, is that they likely don't deserve any of this and I'd hate to see such a large country rise to prominence right as they're embracing Theocracy of some kind.
But, as I added in my edit, I am admittedly ignorant of the goings on over there and it is possible all of my fear is just based in media outrage or selective bias.
Up until now I’d have said the Trudeau government’s reputation with India had nowhere to go but up. Shows me I guess.
The perception there is that he’s in the pocket of Khalistani nationalists who are running guns and drugs into India to fund the separatist movement. There have been numerous reports of violence and discrimination against Indian immigrants and Indian students that don’t make much news in Canada and the US but are big deals in India every time they happen. And the spate of vandalism on Hindu temples and Indian cultural centers hasn’t helped either.
Basically none of that actually affects Sikhs in India though. Sectarian violence is almost entirely directed at Muslims with a little bit that ends up aimed at American missionaries operating in tribal regions, which gets outsized amounts of press because they complain to the American government. Sikhs in India are also dramatically overrepresented in the government, police forces, and military of India. They are decidedly not a marginalized community in the Indian context and have been overrepresented in senior administrative roles and the military officer corps since before independence.
I am telling you the perception of Trudeau in India. Whether you like it or not, that is how he is viewed there. And it's basically a fact that Canada is a font of Khalistani separatism, including funding and logistical support for separatist movements operating in India as well as maintaining some safe harbor for fugitives from the law. Nijjar himself was on the run for hatching a conspiracy to assassinate a priest, among other acts of terrorism.
This is basically ignorant of Indian history and is, once again, imposing a Western framework on Indian politics. Not all countries work like the US and Canada. The standard narrative of there being a supremacist "White" group suppressing all the other minority ethnicities and religions doesn't apply there. (It barely applies here but that's a separate conversation). The country's problems and sectarian tensions didn't begin with Modi. Modi is a (unfortunate) response to them.
Khalistani separatism was on the rise in India in the 70s and 80s but has been basically dead as a functional political movement there since the Air India hijackings. It survives today mostly in the hearts of diaspora Sikhs who have kept the flame burning from abroad. They are analogous to the Cuban expat community in Florida. The rest of the world has moved on, but they specifically are not ready to let it go. The Khalistani movement was one of extremist Sikhs who wanted to create an religious ethno-state, with all the ethnic cleansing and government mandated rules about things like how long your beard must be included. They were exactly the sorts of ultra-conservative, violent extremists that we're talking about when we talk about the BJP. They just happen to be Sikh instead.
People from that era will tell you stories of going to the temple and having guns pointed at themselves or their parents and being sternly interrogated about they clothes, their facial hair, etc. The rise in this sort of activity over the past decade has nothing to do with a reaction to the BJP. They, and the extremist fringes of the BJP, are both growing due to the same mechanisms behind the rise of every type of extremist ideology the world over. It's the result of state actors and troll farms juicing up impressionable people through social media. Radicalism sells.
I mean yeah, this is an article that summarizes the sharp increase in hate-crimes and then minimizes it with a sarcastic subtitle.
The core problem is that “Hinduism” isn’t a real thing. It’s a generic term used to apply to all of the myriad spiritual traditions that are indigenous to India. “India” and “Hindu” come from the same Persian root word. It’s a demonym.
People didn’t actually self-identify as Hindus until well into modern times. Before that they identified primarily with the particular traditions and practices of their caste and clan groups, which were many and varied. There was a general civilizational identity as being Hindu, but it was very amorphous and never clearly understood as a unified group.
The modern religion we call “Hinduism” is an intellectual framework that created a unified philosophical system that could effectively syncretize any number of other indigenous spiritual traditions and practices under itself. Basically, if you were any kind of devotee of any kind of deity, Upanishadic philosophy, by virtue of being polytheistic, was able to absorb and contextualize that practice as part of itself. This is where the confusion comes from. What we call “Hinduism” is more like a “theory of spirituality and theology” that spreads open like an umbrella to cover a bunch of separate, distinct spiritual traditions.
The idea of there being a single, monolithic Hindu identity is a very modern thing. It was mostly foreign to the majority of Indians outside the intellectual, English speaking, upper caste circles. It only became common with the advent of mass media. And, in India, many communities have only recently gotten connected into the mass media distribution in this way.
Creating a unified sense of “Hindu” identity has been a long term project of the Hindu right, because when they look at the general openness and diversity of the panoply of spiritual traditions that comprise Hinduism they see isolated, disorganized communities that will be preyed upon by Muslim and Christian evangelists. These different subgroups fight constantly. They aren’t a common culture and don’t work like a unified front in any real sense.
These fears are rooted in a great deal of historical trauma because the other thing to note is that you would have to go back to the 1200s to find the last time the political and economic life of a large chunk of India was organized according to what you might call “Hindu” norms. Islamic conquerors brought down the last of the mighty Hindu empires around then and then the British ruled it after. So India’s government wasn’t meaningfully established to uphold any coherent sense of “Hinduism.” If anything, it represents a transfer of the British Raj from British people to Indian people who were British educated and British socialized.
So in other words, it’s not so simple. Firstly, the governing and economic institutions of India weren’t organized by Hindus to uphold Hinduness the way the institutions of America were structurally set up to create and uphold whiteness. In fact, they were set up to do the opposite and sort of viewed folk Hindu practices as barbaric superstitions that people needed to be civilized out of.
Secondly the classification of India’s population as a monolithic block of “Hindus” is a mirage brought on by lumping a lot of diversity into one big category. These aren’t minor differences over the finer points of interpreting scripture. These are completely different philosophies, different deities being worshipped, entirely different rituals and traditions, that are all loosely glued together with some mortar that is Vedic/Upanishadic philosophy.
Like I mentioned before, flattening out all the diversity and creating a single, monolithic Hindu identity has been a long term project of the Hindu Right. And as more people move away from their traditional family and village structures into cities and modern lifestyles, they have begun to lose touch with their traditional ways of life and picked up the more generic rituals and practices from their new communities. So it has been steadily moving in that direction, but it’s not anywhere near there yet. And having strong identification with the label comes downstream of people’s political affiliation as often as not.
Where there’s an imbalance of power comes from the fact that Muslims and Christians have a clearly defined and specific religious community, which ends up setting them apart from everyone who is just sort of vaguely traditional and spiritual. But once you split the Hindu block along all the various ethnic, caste, linguistic, and cultural cleavages then no one group within it is that much bigger than Christians or Muslims taken as a whole.
Your points are well-argued. As a note, I think it's possible that someone very familiar with Christianity or Islam could make the exact same argument about how neither is the unitary religion it seems to be from the outside - but there's still value in thinking of them as a whole.
They'd have a valid point to an extent, but it would be a big reach to draw an equivalence. The modern idea of what a "religion" is and what it's place in society ought to be is, fundamentally, a Christian one. And specifically one based on the experiences of Europeans after the Protestant Reformation. But even before that, they tended to divide the world up into Christians, Jews and Saracens, and everyone else who were just pagans and heathens. Islam had a similar dynamic where the world consisted of Muslims, "People of the Book," and Kafirs. Some more ecumenically minded Islamic rulers in India did strive mightily to have Hindus classified as "people of book" based on arguments that the Upanishads and Vedas constituted very ancient revelations from Allah. But any honest reading of the material makes it clear that this was largely (well intentioned) cope on their parts.
Polytheistic religions don't have the same sort of dynamic. The religions themselves are ethnically bound (similar to Judaism). The norms and customs of the religion are for the religion's own adherents, but it's not believed to be universal. Your Gods are yours, other peoples' Gods are theirs. All these Gods and pantheons encompass each other while remaining distinct. Religious disputes are primarily ethnic disputes because the deities themselves are tied to the ethnic groups that worship them. They didn't (and don't) believe themselves to be universal, totalizing systems that supercede or subsume family or clan ties. The religion is a part of those family or clan linkages, not separate from them. This is in the same way many Jewish people will not really observe much of the religion but still consider themselves strongly Jewish through identification with the community and the culture. That strikes Christians as weird, but as part of Jewish identity the set of rules and customs are theirs. They consciously choose to engage or not engage with them, but whether they do or don't isn't as important as whether they identify with and participate in the community and its shared history. Judaism is also a very old tradition, (and likely was some flavor of heno/polytheistic in its earlier days) so they retain that more ancient way of engaging with divinity and communal ties.
These traditions are also characterized by an emphasis on practice rather than doctrine. There are doctrinal elements, but almost no lay practicioners care about them and there is no centralized authority to confer on priesthood to decide who does and doesn't have spiritual authority. It mostly comes through acclimation from the rest of society.
Islam, in practice, didn't used to be like this. The lived practice of Islam used to be much more syncretic in India and SE Asia. But starting with the modern era, it evolved significantly to be much more of a scripturalist, doctrinaire religious system and this has coincided with the rise of militant Islamism (as well as a general secular decline in religiosity within Muslim nations). My belief is that the same will happen to Hinduism if the Hindu right is successful in blending it all together into a standardized paste. They're just ~100 or so years behind Islam on it. But they also have a tougher uphill climb to do so since they need to assimilate an entire library, not just one book.
Not directly. India is a big country where shit like this happens frequently. The Manipur conflicts are an example though. It's violent conflict between tribal groups, but because the international press gets a lot of its reporting on the ground there from missionaries they can't help but over-emphasize the religious dimension of the conflict rather than the ethnic one.
I didn’t say the violence wouldn’t be as big of a deal. I said the reporting of the violence centers the religious differences between the groups rather than the myriad other historical and political differences between them because of how information trickles out to the international press.
This all compounds over time to create specific narratives about the dynamics in India that take root in the international media that start to look like a funhouse mirror.
I'm not qualified to speak re most of your comment but what you said about radicalism sells, most definitely yes. Not only that, extremism and hate and outrage correlate with social media engagement and time on platform. The big social media companies have been failing to moderate (especially failing to invest in content moderation for languages other than english) and remove pogrom inciting stories of dubious factual basis across many countries. Their algorithms promote and spread such content.
Max Fisher's book the Chaos Machine is an accessible long discussion of this behavior by big tech organizations and its consequences.
Somewhere, I have an Amnesty International report on this but I couldn't find the article.
In my mind, this is kind of what I'm thinking too. I wouldn't expect Trudeau to make such a public but not definitive accusation unless there was little to no doubt.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9969537/who-is-hardeep-singh-nijjar/
This article has more background on the guy.