Yesterday, the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase (who have a servile relationship with CSIS) broke a story that CSIS has “what they consider credible intelligence that India was behind the mid-June fatal shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar”, a Sikh separatist leader based in British Columbia. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh endorsed CSIS’ claim of having credible evidence. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre made his condemnation conditional on results of further investigation into Nijjar’s murder, seeking more information about why Trudeau came to endorse CSIS’ claim.
India is most definitely a repressive right-wing state which targets minorities both at home and abroad, and has intelligence agents in their foreign embassies. NPR noted that India had “accused the activist [Nijjar] of involvement in an alleged attack on a Hindu priest in India and had offered a cash reward for information leading to his arrest.”
Yet critical faculties need to be retained, because of who is making the claim, and how these allegations serve their interests.
Canadian and Indian intelligence have mixed relations. While the nations engage in intelligence cooperation, Canadian intelligence has been complicit in targeting India in the past.
CSIS’ fingerprints are all over the 1985 Sikh separatist bombing of Air India 182 which killed all 329 people on board, 268 of whom were Canadian citizens. The bombing came after Operation Blue Star led to the massacre of 5000 to 7000 Sikhs in 1984.
At minimum, CSIS knew about the bombing plot by Sikh separatists desiring the creation of a state called Khalistan from India’s Punjab region, and let it happen. (more...)
CSIS’ questionable history with India and Sikh separatists
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