A wanton disregard of international humanitarian and human rights law and violation of diplomatic norms was on display in Hardeep SinghNijjar’s assassination. While sponsoring that assassination India not only killed a devout Sikh dedicated to his religious avocation but killed the trust between Canada and India. The sedulous investigation of Canadian police and the supporting evidence pointed the blame at Indian agents masterminded by an Indian Intelligence handler in the guise of a diplomat. Prime Minister Trudeau broke the news during the latest UNGA session which shocked the world except India that dubbed the claims as absurd. National Investigation agency of India (NIA) had branded Hardeep Singh as a terrorist in July 2022, a sobriquet he had disowned protesting his innocence as an ardent Sikh nationalist agitating for the political rights of his community.

The organizations like Sikhs for Justice in Canada had strongly supported his intense espousal of Sikh rights and considered him a suitable advocate for a nonbinding referendum on the issue of a separate homeland for Sikhs called Khalistan inside India. The persecuted Sikh community has been at the receiving end of India’s Hindutva driven xenophobia and misanthropy since the independence of India in 1947. The Sikh demands for political autonomy have always elicited a violent response by the Indian state apparatus that in the inimitable words of Nirad C Chaudry abhors “miscegenation of castes and creeds” and celebrates social stratification and concomitant discrimination as an article of faith.

Renowned Hindu author Nirad C. Chaudry in his classic treatise “The Continent of Circe” terms India historically as a continent of Circe, the Greek goddess that casts a spell upon people, to keep them tethered to their fossilized beliefs in racial purity. Millennia old aversion to racial miscegenation by Hindu ruling priest class, according to the author, has manifested itself in the shape of a caste system that deifies the human inequality. Another piquant observation by him is about Hindu way of life’s love for violence that runs like a scarlet thread in all Hindu hagiography and literature.

A propensity for violence and institutionalized inequality makes for a lethal concoction that so inebriates the Hindutva votaries of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that they consider bloodshed of minorities and low caste Hindus as a propitiating ritual for their deities. The classic manifestation of such sanguinary predilection is the riots of 2002 that were orchestrated by present Prime Minister of India i.e Narendra Modi to attain his petty electoral objectives. Such communal madness has been ratcheted up by Modi as a matter of habit with metronomic regularity. In 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots were engineered with an electoral outcome in mind that resulted in loss of 62 lives.

Another irresponsible act was orchestrated in 2019 when an internal incident was used as an excuse to launch aerial attacks against Pakistan. Those familiar with the nuances of nuclearized environment in South Asia would appreciate how rash that act was by a nation that never tired of chanting “Ahimsa” (peace) slogan as its religio-political creed. The Hindutva creed is a violent ideology that has replaced Nehruvian secularism, which lies buried in a somnolent state in Indian constitution, while Hindutva violence stalks the innocent and unsuspecting as far away as Canada. Sending hired guns to kill dissenting political voices abroad fits in with the pattern that Modi administration has foisted upon its own country.

A question arises as to why a large segment of population is clinging faithfully to the religious particularism disguised as Indian nationalism? The answer might lie in two factors. The first being a hunger for an economic rise being midwifed by “Modinomics.” It is a term signifying corporate profits and economic recompense for the dominant majority of Indians that have borne the colonial burden of exploitation since centuries. Second is the victimhood complex buried deep inside the collective Hindu memory that regards Christians, Muslims, and even Sikhs as colonists and exploiters who had kept the Hindus in servitude for centuries. Hindu majority therefore takes vicarious pleasure in the plight of their former rulers.

The imposition of Hindutva ideology and culture has become so blatant that all vestiges of opposition and alternative viewpoint are being erased through active connivance of all state institutions and the supra state ideologically motivated battalions of armed political activists of RSS, the veritable muscle arm of its political front i.e the BJP. All independent media voices are being violently muzzled by RSS goons employing state’s resources. Draconian laws like Unlawful Prevention Act are being used to arrest journalists that dare to speak truth. Meanwhile, the militant organizations patterned upon Nazi SA and SS are being let loose on political dissenters.

The mindset that ransacked BBC offices in India after screening of a BBC documentary film that exposed Hindutva’s anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujrat is in the same league as that of those who are arresting wheel chair bound staffers of Newsflick, a news website promoting freedom of expression in India. When that paranoid mindset is allowed to operate untrammeled by legal niceties and human rights considerations, the tragedies like Surrey murder keep happening. It will be a bigger tragedy, however, if the world takes refuge behind expediencies of geo-political realities to bail out India from this sticky situation.

The assassination of dissent by India at home might have been a distraction for the world inured to such acts, but its extension to sovereign territories of countries like Canada, is an egregious violation of international law and human rights that is simply unforgiveable.

The writer is the director of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute.

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