New Delhi: India’s former high commissioner to Canada, Sanjay Kumar, has finally broken his silence. In an interview with Canadian network CTV Sunday, he categorically denied all allegations that he had links to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Verma was part of a dual expulsion of diplomats by India and Canada last week. This came after Canada said it had evidence allegedly linking the Indian high commissioner and five other diplomats to Nijjar’s killing in Surrey, British Columbia, last June.
In the interview with CTV’s Question Period anchor, Vassy Kapelos, not only did Kumar slam the Canadian government’s accusations as being “politically motivated,” he also said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was deliberately destroying relations with India. He said Trudeau was relying on intelligence and had no evidence to support his claims of India orchestrating killings on Canadian soil.
Claiming that Sikh separatists “are being encouraged all the time,” Kumar also alleged that “some Khalistani extremists and terrorists are deep assets” of the Canadian intelligence agency CSIS.
While the written version of the interview—‘Expelled Indian diplomat denies involvement in Sikh leader’s murder, claims “no evidence presented”’—was not available on the network’s website, with the official link leading to an “Access Denied” page, it was still accessible on the CTV YouTube page at the time that this article was being written.
‘India is not the friend Canada thought it was’, The Globe and Mail editorial declared Saturday, coming down on Trudeau for prevaricating on taking action against India and having “some faint hope of co-operation with Indian officials”.
It was referring to the prime minister’s comments last week when he said Ottawa was not trying to “provoke or create a fight with India” at the inquiry into foreign interference in the country.
“This just in: Canada is already in a fight with India, serious enough to merit the expulsion of the country’s top diplomat,” the editorial said. “Still, Mr. Trudeau seems curiously unwilling to acknowledge that India is, if not an enemy quite yet, certainly an adversary.”
It suggests that India, under “increasingly autocratic Mr Modi”, is auditioning for the “rogues’ gallery”—countries that are no longer willing to operate within mutually accepted boundaries—including China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
The harsh editorial concluded that Canada, itself, is hardly living up to the responsibilities of being part of a highly enviable western alliance.
In its weekly Canada newsletter, The New York Times Saturday said Canada’s words were “unusually forceful”.
“While the details of the operation, which includes allegations that India used criminal gangs to carry out its work, were not laid out, the rhetoric at both news conferences was unusually forceful for anything involving international diplomacy,” journalist Ian Austen wrote in the newsletter titled ‘With Unusually Forceful Words, Canada Charges India With a Criminal Conspiracy’.
Separately, the Financial Times reported that a Sikh separatist leader had vowed to keep fighting India from Toronto. In the report, 35-year-old Inderjeet Singh Gosal, who took over as “head of the Khalistan movement” after Nijjar’s death, told FT journalist Ilya Gridneff he’s “not afraid to die for an independent Sikh homeland in India’s Punjab region”.
The report said that, to Gosal, the Canadian government’s accusations against the Indian government did not come as a surprise. He also alleged that an attempt on own his life was also made earlier this year.
“He claimed that in February, months after he took over leadership of the Khalistan movement, a bullet was fired into a window at a site run by his construction business. An Indian account on X had posted about the shooting before police arrived,” the FT reported.
Gosal had been warned by Canadian authorities in August that he was the target of a murder plot. He told the FT that it was “absolutely” tied to India.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that India and China have come to a resolution on patrolling across the Line of Actual Control in a monumental first step towards addressing the border crisis that’s been brewing in the Galwan Valley since 2020.
In an article titled ‘India, China strike border patrol pact that could ease ties, top official says’, journalist Krishn Kaushik reported the news announced by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri Monday, adding that the patrolling arrangement can lead to disengagement.
“Over the past four years, slow progress on diplomatic and military talks to end the standoff hurt business relations between the world’s two most populous nations with New Delhi tightening scrutiny of investments from Chinese firms and halting major projects,” Reuters reported, noting that there was no immediate response from Beijing just yet.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)