Trudeau says he made allegations on Nijjar's killing to 'put a chill on India'

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that he chose to make a public statement about India's alleged role in the murder of Khalistan terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar to "put a chill" on India. Safety concerns in the Sikh community also played into the choice, he added.

Trudeau, in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, said the public allegations he raised against India in the House of Commons in September were intended as an extra "level of deterrence" to keep Canadians safer.

The Canadian PM alleged that there was credible intelligence linking India's government to the June 18 shooting death of Nijjar outside his gurdwara in Surrey, B.C. India has denied the allegations, which strained the relations between the countries.

"The Sikh community in B.C. had been worried about what could happen next," Trudeau said, adding that his public statement came after weeks of "quiet diplomacy" that included raising the allegations with India at the highest levels. 

Trudeau had a private chat with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit in New Delhi. "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."

However, Trudeau said the talks were not constructive. "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."

He claimed that Canada had warned India that this would eventually come out. Though Ottawa managed to keep things "on a diplomatic level" leading up to the G20 summit, it could not control much beyond that.

Trudeau also termed India's reaction to the allegations "a violation of the Vienna Convention". New Delhi temporarily suspended its visa services in Canada and threatened to strip diplomatic immunities of Canadian diplomats, following which Canada had to remove most of its diplomatic presence. 

"They chose to attack us and undermine us with a scale of misinformation and disinformation in their media that was comical," Trudeau said.

"(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."