Canadian PM Trudeau claims ‘need to put a chill on India’ led him to reveal allegations in Nijjar killing

OTTAWA: Amid the India-Canada standoff, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday claimed that he had made public allegations against India in the killing of Hardeep Nijjar as there was a need to put a ‘chill on India’ in the light of what was being reported in India, Canada-based CTV news reported.

Trudeau was speaking to the Canadian press in a year-end interview on Monday. Trudeau noted that he made the announcement on September 18 because he expected that information will be eventually leaked though the media. He asserted that he wanted Canadians to know the government was on top of the situation

“Too many Canadians were worried that they were vulnerable”, Trudeau said in the interview this week, adding the Sikh community in B.C. had been raising concerns since shortly after Nijjar was killed.

“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”, he said. “And therefore, put a chill on them continuing or considering doing anything like this”.

The allegations made by the Canadian Prime Minister had been out rightly rejected by India’s Ministry of External Affairs which had dubbed them absurd and motivated.

According to CTV News, Truedau on Monday also claimed that the Indian government chose to attack and undermine them with misinformation after he had made the allegations public. “They chose to attack us and undermine us with a scale of misinformation and disinformation in their media that was comical”, Trudeau said.

He added, “(It) would have been more comical had it not had real implications for people’s lives and relations between our two countries that are so deep in terms of people-to-people ties, and people depending on the flow of connections between us.”

In his year-end interview with the Canadian Prime Minister said the message he delivered in the House of Commons that day was intended as an extra “level of deterrence” to keep Canadians safer.

“We knew it would be difficult conversations, but we also knew that this was an important moment for India to be demonstrating its leadership on the world stage with the G20,” Trudeau said. “And we felt that we could use that as a constructive opportunity to work together.”

CTV News reported that when asked whether he felt those talks were constructive, Trudeau was blunt saying, “No”. Trudeau also said Canada had warned India that what it knew would eventually come out, and that while Ottawa had managed to keep things “on a diplomatic level” leading up to the G20 summit, it could not control much beyond that.

Trudeau also said he did not know whether it would come out through leaks, the public inquiry into foreign interference or because things had reached a threshold “in which we had a duty to protect Canadians” by going public.

Trudeau’s September 18 announcement was met with immediate calls for evidence, not just from India, but also from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who told Trudeau to “come clean.”

India’s Ministry of External Affairs which recently instituted an enquiry into inputs shared by the US related to the nexus of organised crime, trafficking in the context of an alleged murder attempt on a US national, maintains that Canada had given no evidence about its allegations and so the question of equitable treatment for the two countries does not arise. (ANI)