Trudeau’s hollow talk

CANADIAN Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has lost no time in drawing parallels between the Hardeep Singh Nijjar murder case and the US indictment of Indian-origin narcotics smuggler Nikhil Gupta and an unnamed Indian government official on murder-for-hire charges. ‘The news coming out of the US further underscores what we have been talking about from the very beginning, which is… India needs to take this seriously,’ Trudeau said on Wednesday, over two months after he caused a diplomatic furore by declaring that the alleged role of Indian government agents in Nijjar’s killing was being investigated. He has urged New Delhi to work with Canada to complete the probe into the murder of Canadian citizen Nijjar, who was designated as a terrorist by India.

American prosecutors have charged Gupta with involvement in a foiled plot to kill a US citizen (another India-designated terrorist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun), allegedly on behalf of an Indian government official. Treating the matter with utmost seriousness, India has already constituted a high-level committee to investigate all aspects of the case. According to the Ministry of External Affairs, the US has shared inputs about the nexus between ‘organised criminals, gun-runners and terrorists’.

Trudeau is wrong in equating the Nijjar case with the US incident as Canada has neither filed a chargesheet nor shared credible evidence with India. In a recent interview, India’s High Commissioner in Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma made it clear that New Delhi was only asking for ‘specific and relevant information so that we can help the Canadian investigators reach their conclusion’. It’s ironical that an uncooperative Canada is advising India to cooperate in the investigation. Moreover, Ottawa’s reliance on the US case is misplaced as the charges levelled seem to be weak, with the prosecutors finding just a tenuous connection between Gupta, the Indian official and the purported hitman.