TORONTO: Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that safety concerns for the Sikh community and the need to “put a chill on India” prompted him to go public about a possible role of the Indian government in Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s killing.
“Too many Canadians were worried that they were vulnerable. We felt that all the quiet diplomacy and all the measures that we put in and ensured that our security services put in to keep people safe in the community needed a further level of deterrence, perhaps of saying publicly and loudly that we know, or we have credible reasons to believe, that the Indian government was behind this (Nijjar’s killing),” he said in an interview to Canadian newspaper Toronto Star.
“And therefore put a chill on them (India) continuing or considering doing anything like this,” he said, adding that the Sikh community in British Columbia had been raising concerns shortly after Nijjar was killed.
In September, Trudeau had spoken in the House of Commons of credible intelligence linking India’s government to the June 18 murder of Nijjar outside a gurdwara in British Columbia’s Surrey. His statement, however, worsened Ottawa’s ties with New Delhi that rejected the allegations as absurd.
Trudeau told Toronto Star that he went public after weeks of “quiet diplomacy” including a conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit in New Delhi, where the two leaders met behind closed doors for 16 minutes.