View: Is airing of Nijjar’s killing footage aimed to polarise Punjab voter?

A plausible theory is that the airing of CCTV footage and the imputations are to polarise the Sikh voter in India for the forthcoming 2024 General Elections.

Published on: Mar 10, 2024, 10:39:50 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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It has been nearly nine months since plumber turned Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) operative Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in British Columbia but the Justin Trudeau government to date has not been able to provide a shred of evidence to substantiate the Canadian PM’s allegation that Indian government was behind the murder of the terrorist who seized control of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurudwara in Surrey.

Poster at Surrey Gurudwara where terrorist Nijjar was the president.

Yet on the eve of a planned pro-Khalistan activist protest against Indian Ambassador Sanjay Verma’s visit to Edmonton tomorrow, the Canadian government funded CBC aired a documentary containing the CCTV footage of Nijjar’s murder. The so-called investigative documentary builds a narrative to point the needle of suspicion against India for the so called political assassination of Nijjar.

ALSO READ: View: Radical politics the driver in Punjab & Canada, the target is PM Modi

However, the documentary provides no fresh evidence but based on interviews of known pro-Khalistan activists to build a case against India. The same CCTV footage was aired by another Canadian channel some days prior to this ‘investigative’ documentary, which is full of innuendos and imputation as if trying to justify PM Trudeau’s statement to Parliament on September 18, 2023.

It largely relies on the indictment filed in the US against an Indian origin national in an alleged plot to assassinate pro-Khalistan instigator and rabble rouser G S Pannun at the behest of an unnamed Indian official who had links with Indian para-military forces.

Given the advancement in crime detection technologies, it should not be difficult for the five Eye alliance agencies to get the registration number of the Toyota Camry that apparently blocked Nijjar’s car and the faces of the two alleged assassins seen approaching the truck of the terrorist before he was repeatedly shot.

Either the airing of the government documentary is a precursor to Canada coming out with evidence to nail the Indian government on assassinating Nijjar or this has been done to keep the Khalistani pot on permanent boil for political gains as Sikh extremists are a vote bank for Trudeau.

A plausible theory is that the airing of CCTV footage and the imputations are to polarize the Sikh voter in India against the Narendra Modi government for the forthcoming 2024 General Elections.

The timing of the airing of the documentary by Canadian government media comes also at a time when the pro-Khalistan activists are planning to hold a referendum in Sacramento on March 31 and a protest was held outside the Indian consulate at San Francisco today.

The protest at Surrey against the visit of Indian Ambassador Sanjay Kumar Verma and Consul General Manish on March 1 fizzled out with handful of extremists turning up for the protest. At Nijjar’s gurudwara, the extremists have put up a billboard targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Ambassador Sanjay Verma.

According to Canada watchers, rather than using CCTV footage to further radicalize the Sikh diaspora, the Trudeau government should either come out with a proof of Indian hand or stop interference in India’s domestic politics as Canadian diplomats posted in India have been doing in the past.

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.Read More

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