The killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist leader, in Canada has begun new diplomatic strains between Canada and India, with Ottawa telling it doubts India’s involvement in the murder and New Delhi calling the allegations “absurd”.
According to the Khalistan Extremism Monitor of the New Delhi-based independent Institute for Conflict Management, Hardeep Singh Nijjar was born in 1977 in Jalandhar district in the Indian northern state of Punjab and shifted to Canada in 1997, where he served as a plumber.
According to India’s counter-terrorist, National Investigation Agency that Nijjar was at first related to the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) Sikh separatist group.
India has recorded BKI as a “terrorist organization” and states it is funded by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, an accusation Pakistan declined.
According to a 2020 Indian government statement Nijjar later became chief of the militant group Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) and was “vigorously involved in operationalizing, networking, training, and financing” its associates.
India officially ranked him as a “terrorist” in the same statement, stating he was involved in “exhorting seditionary and rebellious imputations” and “trying to create disharmony among various communities” in the nation. For allies urging a so-called independent Sikh state of Khalistan, Nijjar was a well-known leader and a firm voice for the reason.
He was elected as the head of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurudwara, a Sikh place of worship, in Surrey, the Vancouver suburb where he resides. He had that position at the time of his death.
Najjar was killed, shot dead, outside the exact gurudwara on the evening of June 18.
More than hundreds of people protested outside the Indian consulate in Vancouver after his killing, alleging foreign hands were involved in his death, local media reported at the time.
