Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in a bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the G20 Summit in New Delhi, India, on Sept. 10.Sean Kilpatrick/The Associated Press
Any Canadian who reads the U.S. indictment, made public last week, related to the failed Indian government plot to assassinate an American Sikh activist in New York is bound to feel outraged.
The facts laid out in the indictment, which have not been tested in court, forge a link between an Indian government official and the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh gunned down in his car in Surrey, B.C., on June 18.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shocked Canadians and angered the government of his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, in September when he announced in the House of Commons that “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.”
The allegation, made in an information vacuum because of Ottawa’s reflexive instinct to keep Canadians in the dark, resulted in a major diplomatic row with India.
The usual diplomats were rounded up and expelled on both sides. But officials in Mr. Modi’s government exploited the lack of public evidence to pounce on Canada. They flatly denied the accusation, absurdly accused Canada of harbouring Sikh terrorists and stopped issuing visas to Canadian citizens. (India resumed visas for Canadians on Nov. 22.)
The public had no idea whether Mr. Trudeau had blundered by making a grave allegation he couldn’t support, or was speaking from a position of strength.
The U.S. government indictment is compelling evidence for the latter scenario. It is a huge embarrassment for Mr. Modi, whose pugnacious response to Canada in September now comes across as manufactured outrage designed to cover up an ugly truth: that a government official in the Indian capital tried to organize the assassinations of multiple Sikh targets in the U.S. and Canada.
It’s all there in the indictment in black-and-white. In May, a known government official in New Delhi approached the sole suspect charged in the indictment, Nikhil Gupta. The official promised Mr. Gupta, who was also in New Delhi, that he would secure the dismissal of criminal charges against him if he arranged the assassination of an advocate of Sikh independence living in New York. Those charges were promptly dropped; “nobody will ever bother you again,” the government official told Mr. Gupta.
The rest is history. Mr. Gupta contacted an acquaintance in New York for help hiring a hit man. The acquaintance turned out to be a U.S. government informer, who promptly put Mr. Gupta in touch with an undercover police officer who acted as the desired killer for hire. All their electronic exchanges were intercepted, including a photo of the handover of a US$15,000 advance payment.
Mr. Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic on June 30 at the request of the U.S. government, and the New York hit was never carried out.
But before the plot fell apart, the government official all but confessed to arranging the killing of Mr. Nijjar. The very day of that murder, the official sent Mr. Gupta a video of Mr. Nijjar’s slumped and bloody corpse. In a subsequent phone call, he told Mr. Gupta: “We didn’t give to [the undercover officer posing as a hit man] this job, so some other guy did this job … in Canada.”
Mr. Modi has been understandably subdued in his response to the U.S. indictment. Faced with evidence that’s been made public, the postured outrage has vanished; instead, his government has vowed to have a “high-level” committee investigate the allegations.
That’s satisfying, in its way. But Canadians are still in the dark. The Foreign Minister, Mélanie Joly, won’t comment on the U.S. case. She won’t say why Canada failed to stop a plot that the Americans were able to prevent. We don’t know what the state of the RCMP’s investigation into Mr. Nijjar’s killing is, or if India is now co-operating with Canada on the case, or whether the “guy” who killed Mr. Nijjar is still at large in Canada or has left the country. We don’t know anything at all.
All Canadians ever get from Ottawa is condescending admonitions to trust the government and stay out of the way. But this entire episode is proof that, if you’re going to make a serious allegation public, then the evidence can also be made public without jeopardizing the related investigation.
The public deserved the truth in September. It deserves it even more now.