By: Shahzeb Khan
Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a leader of the Khalistani movement residing in Canada, was gunned down last June by two masked men while exiting a gurdwara. Possibly, the blatant and crude attack was made to look like a hate crime, but within a few months, the government of Canada declared that it suspected the government of India to be behind the murder.
A government sending assassins to kill its domestic enemies who are residing abroad is a rare event. It is something you would expect of harsh authoritarian leaders. For example, the Communist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who was Joseph Stalin’s political rival, was living in exile in Mexico when he was sentenced to death in a Moscow show trial in 1936. A few years later, in 1940, a suspected Soviet agent assassinated him in Mexico City by striking his head with an ice pick. More recently, in 2020, another Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, is suspected of orchestrating an assassination attempt on his political foe Alexei Navalny who was living abroad. Kim Jong Nam, half-brother of Kim Jong Un, was poisoned by what is widely believed were North Korean Agents, while he was residing abroad.
The democratic credentials India built over the last seven decades has already been torn up in many ways during the chaotic years of Narendra Modi’s rule. The state of India authorizing the murder of a Canadian citizen would be the most egregious example yet, in the eyes of the international community. If the Indian government can go this far, then just think of what they are capable of doing to separatist leaders in Kashmir, including those in India’s custody. The Indian authorities might not kill them outright in a blatant way, but can subject them to conditions that raise their mortality rate significantly. Their slow-poisoning is not beyond India. Kashmiris are not even agitating to break up India. Their right to self-determination is enshrined in UN Charter, with several UN resolution favoring Kashmiri’s right to self-determination through a plebiscite while they are under Indian occupation, but India wants to exploit Kashmiri land and is therefore denying them that right. In 2019, India illegally abrogated their special status as a state administered under Indian occupation.
If the allegation made by the Canadian government is true, it implies that India’s premier military intelligence agency R.A.W, and by extension the Indian state, is a manifest terrorist entity. Previously, Narendra Modi was on list of terrorists and was not allowed entry to US on account of same. Now, the state of India too has reached the status of a moral outcast, if not a diplomatic one.
Zeenia Satti 