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'In the end, officials in India will be thrown to the wolves, quietly released a couple of years down the road and we'll never hear about them again.'
Author of Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project, Terry Milewski tells Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com how the diplomatic ruckus -- which seems to be headed to a point of no return currently in the wake of Canada and India expelling each other's high commissioners and other diplomats over the row surrounding alleged evidence produced by Canada in the murder of Khalistani separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18, 2023 -- will end in a murky deal that would allow both countries to save face.
"I do think there is further evidence that the Americans and Canadians have from wiretaps and surveillance operations which will come out at the trial, particularly of Nikhil Gupta (who was extradited to the US from the Czech Republic on June 16, 2024, as an accused being wanted in the conspiracy to kill another Khalistani separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York. Gupta has pleaded not guilty in a US court)," says Milewski indicating how the screws could tighten around India's neck when Gupta's trial begins in the US.
The first of a two-part interview:
What is your assessment of how India and Canada are posturing over the Hardeep Singh Nijjar murder case after Canada's claims that it has evidence to prove the Indian government's involvement in the murder?
You are right to use the word posturing. Both sides have made very serious mistakes and miscalculations.
Canada has for more than 40 years now disregarded and ignored the threat of Khalistani extremism (on its soil). They have shown a very lackadaisical attitude, and it's come back to bite them because they have allowed the display of posters glorifying terrorists and assassins, and normalised the glorification of terror in Canada. That mistake should be corrected.
On the Indian side, they have miscalculated what they can get away with in Canada. They got angry, obviously, and justifiably, in my view, about the Canadian relaxed attitude to the Khalistan threat.
It looks as though -- it's not proved yet -- they went too far. There's nothing in the diplomatic code that allows diplomats to go to other countries and murder people. That could be proved when these trials come to court.
Both governments are going to have to swallow their pride in the end and make a settlement that involves both admitting some mistakes.
Canada has now gone public that it has got some evidence to prove the involvement of Indian agents who took help of international gangs to kill Nijjar and India has, obviously, strongly rebutted these charges.
Do you think Canada is being preposterous? How can a country of India's stature get involved with criminals? How do you look at this?
I think an Indian source would be a better source to answer the question how it can happen. In my view, it's almost unbelievable.
These stories about Lawrence Bishnoi allegedly directing murder plots around the world on behalf of the Indian government from his jail cell; I cannot explain that. That it's nonsense would be one explanation; and if it's true, it's pretty frightening.
But the question before us is not just that diplomats or rather government agents on behalf of India were engaged in criminal activities or not so criminal activities like gathering information, which diplomats are perfectly entitled to do, but rather it revolves around the murder of Nijjar in Surrey last year.
That's really going too far. Pushing the envelope is one thing, but crossing the line is another. And there has to be a line drawn.
Many Canadians will feel that Justin Trudeau, regardless of his low political standing and the likelihood that he's probably going to lose power next year, is doing basically the right thing by standing for Canadian sovereignty and refusing to accept, mutely, without a murmur of objection to the idea that foreign agents can come to Canada and commit murder on Canadian soil. That's not going to be allowed.
He wouldn't be a very good prime minister if he were to allow that without defending Canadian sovereignty. Many Canadians think that and many Canadians just set up with Trudeau anyway and got to get rid of him.
They don't care about the rest of it.
Now that the US is saying that India need to cooperate in the investigation, how do you see this snowballing?
How do you see the India-Canada diplomatic relationship declining further given the US insistence that India needs to cooperate?
I think that many Indians have been sort of whipped into frenzy by the Indian media that the Canadians are bad and these allegations that India isn't cooperating are false and that Canada has produced no evidence. Now they have got the Americans joining in. This is terrible. It's a plot against India. Maybe the CIA is involved and so forth.
I think this is all baloney. These are conspiracy theories and it's not grown up talk. The Americans are involved because the same plot was supposed to be underway in New York.
In the United States, Americans have produced a detailed indictment with plentiful factual evidence to which FBI agents will swear when they come out, come to trial in New York in a fair and transparent court.
This is not a political organisation that will try Nikhil Gupta on the charge that he was hired by an Indian government employee to go and find a hitman to dispose of the head of Sikhs for Justice, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
Either the US will be able to prove their case or they won't. But they are not going to tolerate any more than the Canadians will tolerate foreign agents coming to commit murder on their soil. They (the agents who were allegedly recruited) didn't succeed because of the American vigilance in the US. But in Canada they did succeed.
But the idea put about by Indian officials at the moment that these are completely separate cases and that they can say to the Americans, 'Oh, we're taking these allegations very seriously, and then turn around and tell the Canadians that the same allegations are absurd' is absurd.
It just means that they are trying to push Canada around because India is a big country and Canada is not. But they realise they can't push the United States around. So India's got to get real, in my view, just as Canada has got to get real. Both sides have got to make some changes and that's the only way out of this.
In the end, you ask where diplomatic relations will go between the two countries in the future and I would say that they will go for a grubby little deal, a political deal, much of which will be hidden from public view, but that will involve a token amount of accountability on the part of officials in India who will be thrown to the wolves and quietly sentenced to a modest sentence on local charges only and then quietly released a couple of years down the road and there'll be no press release about it and we'll never hear about them again.
Meanwhile, India will have to tell its people that they have succeeded in one respect of this deal because Canada has agreed not to endorse the spectacle of members of parliament and cabinet ministers from the governing party or any party going to Baisakhi parades where the assassins and the bombers of Air India in 1985 (329 people on board Air India's Flight 182 Kanishka were killed when a suitcase exploded mid-air off the Irish coast) are celebrated as great men and heroic martyrs. We're not going to endorse that.
We're not going to normalise parades where you see illustrations celebrating the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. We're not going to tolerate that anymore. We're not going to approve it anymore, and we're not going to abolish freedom of speech.
But there is a line to be drawn and now we're going to draw it and that would be a victory for India.