India slams Canada for holding a moment of silence for a ‘terrorist’

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The Indian government is lashing out at Canada after its House of Commons gave a moment of silence for a man that New Delhi considered a wanted terrorist.

On the afternoon of June 18, the assembled House of Commons stood for a moment of silence to mark the one-year anniversary of the Surrey, B.C., shooting death of Sikh separatist figure Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Speaker Greg Fergus announced the moment of silence by saying it had been agreed upon by “all parties in the House” before inviting MPs to rise “in memory of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, assassinated in Surrey, British Columbia, one year ago today.”

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Official Parliamentary video then shows MPs from both the government and opposition benches rising in quiet commemoration.

In a press briefing last week, a spokesman for India’s External Affairs Ministry said the moment of silence amounted to “giving political space to extremism and advocacy of violence.”

Although the gesture went mostly unremarked in Canada, it received widespread coverage in India, where Nijjar was a listed terror suspect wanted in connection with a 2007 cinema bombing in Punjab. Since 2016, Indian intelligence authorities have also publicly accused Nijjar of running terrorist training camps in Mission, B.C.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited India in 2018, Nijjar was on a list of nine alleged terror operatives handed to him by then-chief minister of Punjab Amarinder Singh.

Although the RCMP has not confirmed whether they’ve ever acted on India’s warnings, at the time of Nijjar’s death he was on a no-fly list and his bank accounts were frozen by Canadian authorities.

At a Thursday press availability in Vancouver, Punjabi-language journalist Gurpreet Sahota asked Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland why Nijjar had been memorialized by Parliamentarians despite being subject to flight and financial restrictions at the time of his death.

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Freeland replied that the gesture was to recognize “the murder of a Canadian in Canada … and that that is entirely unacceptable.” She then praised Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his condemnation of the murder.

“I think all of us should feel safer and more secure knowing that (Trudeau) will stand for Canadians and against the killers of Canadians,” she said.

Nijjar was shot to death last year in a coordinated attack outside Surrey’s Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara. Last month, the RCMP arrested three Indian nationals in connection with the murder, and they now face first degree murder charges.

In September, the Nijjar killing would become the centre of a public breakdown in India-Canada relations after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian government of staging Nijjar’s assassination.

“Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar,” was how Trudeau announced it to the House of Commons.

Canada has never publicly provided any evidence to this effect, but in November, an unsealed U.S. indictment laid out the details of an alleged assassination ring operated by Indian government operatives. The indictment includes testimony from a police informant allegedly alluding to Nijjar’s assassination in Surrey.

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Last week, supporters of Nijjar also marked the anniversary by massing outside Vancouver’s Indian consulate bearing Khalistani flags and staging a mock trial and execution of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Nijjar always denied the Indian terror allegations, and said that his support for Khalistani independence was purely peaceful.

In 2016, he told Postmedia, “This is garbage — all the allegations. I am living here 20 years, right? Look at my record. There is nothing. I am a hard-worker.”

The Parliamentary moment of silence was staged just five days before the anniversary of the 1985 Air India bombing, a terrorist attack staged by Sikh extremists that still ranks as the deadliest mass murder in Canadian history.

It’s for this reason that Canada has enshrined the June 23 anniversary as the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism.

The Air India anniversary did not yield a moment of silence in the House of Commons before Parliament adjourned for its summer break last Wednesday. Its only mention on the parliamentary record came on June 18 via Liberal MP Chandra Arya, who used the anniversary to warn that Canada was failing to contain “the dark forces” that caused it.

“Unfortunately, many Canadians are not aware that even today the ideology responsible for this terrorist attack is still alive among a few people in Canada,” he said.

In a statement on Sunday, Trudeau said the Air India bombing “reminds us of the senseless violence that terrorism perpetuates and of our shared responsibility to unequivocally condemn terrorism.”

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