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Justin Trudeau may take Jagmeet Singh line and target Hindus in Canada for political survival

NDP leader and former Trudeau ally, Jagmeet Singh has been targeting Canadian Hindus for being opposed to both Sikhs and Muslims.

Updated on: Oct 16, 2024, 10:51:58 IST
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New Delhi: To avoid harassment by Justin Trudeau backed pro-Khalistani elements, six Indian diplomats, withdrawn by India, headed by High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma have started packing their bags and will reach India latest by Saturday afternoon through different flights and discreet flight itineraries.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canadian Sikh leader Jagmeet Singh.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canadian Sikh leader Jagmeet Singh.

The Indian diplomatic representation in Canada will be reduced to nine , while Canadian representation will still have 15 diplomats in India after six diplomats were expelled by the Modi government and asked to leave by Saturday afternoon. When India and Canada ties were not hit by the politics of Trudeau, India used to have 12 resident diplomats in Ottawa and 62 resident Canadian diplomats in Delhi.

Also Read | ‘Simply not true’: India rejects Canada PM Justin Trudeau's evidence claims, say reports

While Canadian government has broken the unwritten convention of not targeting diplomats through criminal cases, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to side with pro-Khalistani New Democratic Party of Jagmeet Singh and use his political line of targeting Canadian Hindus on grounds that they are opposed to both Sikhs as well as Muslim for his own survival. Trudeau is also expected to seek support from other Canadian political parties to target India for the murder of terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18, 2023.

Also Read | Trudeau will use the RCMP and Interference Commission to unilaterally indict India

Canada watchers say that for his political survival, Trudeau will use the Foreign Interference Commission and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to nail India in the terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar case.

“If it was such an open and shut case on Nijjar as Justin Trudeau has been stating, then why has the investigating agency, Royal Mounted Canadian Police, filed a charge-sheet till date ? Why has the Canadian government not shared any evidence linking Indian agents with murder of the Khalistan Tiger Force terrorist?,” said a top diplomat.

It is quite evident that in pursuit of Khalistani votes in Canada, Trudeau will use the statements of counsel for proscribed SFJ to Foreign Interference Commission to indict India as inquiry did not allow any counter-view organization to join the public hearing. PM Justin Trudeau is slated to appear before the Commission on October 16, a day after the Safety Minister deposes before the Commission. “ It is a one-sided inquiry….a sham….and the whole idea is to defame India and its government,” said a top security official.

Also Read | India livid after Canada wanted to interrogate its diplomats over Nijjar murder

While RCMP has not even filed a charge sheet in the Nijjar murder case, Trudeau for his extremist Sikh vote declared India guilty last September 18 in the Canadian Parliament. It is understood that the Canadian next move will be to make one of the four arrested Sikh youth for murder for Nijjar to turn approver and use his statement before RCMP to indict India. As all of the arrested are either Canadian citizens or asylum seekers, they will be more than happy to indict India in the court with no Indian legal representation.

Already a bounty of half a million Canadian dollars has been put on the head of High Commissioner Sanjay Verma with Khalistanis ‘shooting and burning’ his effigy in Vancouver last Saturday.

Even though Trudeau wants to indict India on foreign interference in Canadian election processes, there is evidence with Indian intelligence that officials of Canadian High Commission in Delhi and its consulate in Chandigarh were surreptitiously engaging the ruling party in Delhi and Punjab. The Canadians were also trying to radicalize the Sikh community in Punjab by fueling the so-called farmers' movement as well as orchestrating the human rights narrative against the Modi government.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta

Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.

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