Moon Desk: The Sikh problem came to the attention of the world in a way that India and its prime minister least expected. The allegation by Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, in a speech on September 17 at the Canadian national assembly made an allegation that proved to be a bombshell.
The prime minister said that the Indian government may have been behind the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, who had migrated to Canada and acquired Canadian citizenship. He was born in the city of Jullundur in north Punjab.
Jullundur was a centre of Sikh politics. He married in Canada and had two sons. Nijjar became active in the 770,000 Sikh diaspora in Canada and was leading those in his community who were working for the secession of the Indian state of Punjab which they wished would become an independent state of Khalistan. In a complaint recorded in 2018, India’s premier investigative agency, RAW, accused him of “conspiracy and planning to carry out a major terrorist attack in India”.
It also alleged that he planned to violently attack gatherings of the nationalist right-wing organisation Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, which is the basis of support of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A veteran Punjabi journalist, Jagtar Singh, said that Nijjar was little known in the Indian Punjab and that in decades of covering Punjab he “had never heard of him”.
One consequence of the back-and-forth between Canada and India is the reappraisal of the way Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, was conducting himself both inside his own country and now in the world outside.
He has alienated the non-Hindu segments of his country’s citizenry that make up 20 per cent of the population.
“Four leaders turning the world upside down” was the title of the column written by Thomas Friedman and published by The New York Times on October 4, 2023.
Grading the world leaders, he wrote, “I am talking about Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The four of them — each in his own way — have created massive disruptions inside and outside their countries based on pure self-interest, rather than the interests of their people, and made it harder for their nations to function normally in the present and to plan wisely for the future.”
He continued his observations by taking out the role the United States could play but is not involved in keeping the world order functioning. “America is still the tent-pole that holds up the world. We don’t always do it with wisdom, but if we were to stop doing it all — watch out. Given what’s already happening on in these three important countries, if we go wobbly, it will birth a world where nobody will be able to make plans.”
I would drop China and its leader from this list and replace them with India and Narendra Modi.
