Commentary
By Jagdeesh Mann

In 2018, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi, a vocal critic of the Saudi royal family, had come to collect some documentation pertaining to his marital status. Once inside the consulate, he would be drugged, strangled and dismembered by killers tasked by the Saudi government. The CIA, in a subsequent report, said the order came from the top, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto head of the Saudi royal family.

The murder of Khashoggi was a savage act of violence that shocked the world.

The audacity of the Saudi regime to order an extrajudicial execution of a national — especially in a foreign country — is, however, now seemingly being challenged by what once would have been an unlikely competitor, India.

The country that gave the world Mahatma Gandhi, and that led the Non-Aligned Movement in the post-colonial era, has been accused by Ottawa of orchestrating the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen killed on Canadian soil.

If the accusations are true, it’s a sharp falloff for a country that has already been downgraded from a democracy to an elected autocracy, according to Sweden-based V-Dem Institute. The Hardeep Nijjar assassination may be the milestone that marks India’s permanent departure from its ideals as an open and secular society to one more in the company of despotic regimes like Russia, Iran and China.

It would be a new low for India’s government, a democracy with a dismal human rights record, particularly against its own religious minorities.

Putting out “contracts” against former Indian citizens living abroad would mark the opening of a new, even darker chapter in the attenuated Khalistan narrative — one in which the source of violence would now be, rather than holed-up extremists, a hyper-aggressive Indian state ignoring international law to send agents to foreign countries to terminate their own Jamal Khashoggis, albeit with firearms instead of bone-saws.

The former premier of British Columbia, Ujjal Dosanjh, knows the violence of Khalistani secessionists as well as anyone. As a longtime critic of the Khalistan movement, he was the victim of a vicious beating at the hands of pro-Khalistan extremists in the mid-1980s, when the movement was at its apex.

It’s not a secret that he does not support the formation of an independent Sikh state in India. It’s a view he actually shares with most Sikhs living in the Indian state of Punjab where, since the insurgency and violence ended two decades ago, the matter has become a nonstarter. Dosanjh, in a CBC interview this week, also expressed dismay, like his former political peers, at the possibility the Indian state is the prime suspect in the gunning down of pro-Khalistan supporter Hardeep Nijjar.

“If it is true, it is very very troubling and it changes the perception of India as a country.”

That contrast between its preferred brand image as the world’s biggest democracy with a hug-happy PM in Narendra Modi leading the way versus its alter ego as a thuggish murdering regime closer in functional reality to the House of Saud comes into even sharper relief when peering more closely into the life of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Unlike Jamal Khashoggi, who was a prominent Washington Post journalist with an international following and a regular panelist on major media platforms, Nijjar was an ordinary citizen by most measures. Whereas Khashoggi could nudge the needle of public opinion on Saudi Arabia, a country desperate to remake itself in the rapidly coming post-oil future, Nijjar could not. He neither possessed a mass media following nor any political cachet in India.

Punjab-based journalists interviewed by the New York Times this week were stumped as to who Nijjar was. Jagtar Singh, for example, a reporter who has covered Punjab politics for decades said, Nijjar “was and is totally unknown here,” and that he “had never heard of or about him.”

A plumber by trade, Nijjar was like many other Canadian immigrants from Punjab, a man with a family and children who, when not working, could be found volunteering at his local Sikh gurdwara. In his case, he served on the temple executive as its president. And yes, he was also an outspoken advocate of Khalistan, as well as a supporter of the recent (non-binding and non-official) Khalistan referendum. To the consternation of the Indian government, thousands turned out to vote and rally for the cause at the Surrey Guru Nanak Temple.

Conceiving someone like Nijjar to be any kind of serious security threat to a major power halfway around the globe seems far-fetched in the most generous terms.

For context, Indian authorities have claimed Nijjar to be the head of a listed terror group, the Khalistan Tiger Force. He denied those allegations and has been described by Canadian Sikh groups as an activist.

The political advocacy and human rights campaigns of Khalistan supporters living abroad can be an irritant for India but in terms of magnitude, it’s on the scale of the mosquito circling an elephant. By any risk-reward measure, there would seem to be little to gain — and a great deal to lose in terms of a permanently tarnished public image — for the Indian state to assassinate a Canadian citizen who was exercising his free speech rights in his own country.

At this stage, it’s only possible to speculate whether this was potentially an underreach on the part of the Indian government in targeting someone of such a minor profile, or an overreach as in the same vein as China setting up “police stations” in Canada, to monitor and harass former nationals.

Yet either way and with a national election looming on the horizon in spring 2024, India’s possible involvement in Nijjar’s murder is being either vigorously defended or played up as a heroic act on social platforms by many in the country’s compliant media and jingoistic online mobs, which are regularly deployed to control the media narrative. In a mere three decades, India, thanks in large part to its current highly communalized politics, has spiralled from exhorting mobs to smash mosques to projecting a Bollywoodized chest-thumping faux-machismo that leads its vast online mobs to attack anyone questioning the country’s trajectory.

India — along with China, Iran and Russia — has already been implicated as possibly meddling in Canada’s elections. And as a part of its new muscular self-image, it is inevitable, and justifiable, that the country will project its strength across the globe as it emerges as an Asian counterweight to China. The question at this point is will India continue down the ramp as a downgraded democracy or will it rise to the ideals of its secular constitution.

The country is clearly at a fork in the road.

And its decision will ultimately determine if its coming governments treat its Hardeep Singh Nijjars — abroad or at home — as allies to be heard or enemies to be permanently silenced.

Jagdeesh Mann, is a freelance journalist based in Vancouver.