Trudeau says he's sensed a 'tonal shift' from India since U.S. reported alleged murder plot

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he believes India's relations with Canada may have undergone "a tonal shift" in the days since the unsealing of a U.S. indictment alleging a conspiracy to murder a Sikh activist on American soil.

The prime minister made the remarks in an end-of-year interview with the CBC's Rosemary Barton.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government reacted with scorn and flat denials when Trudeau stated publicly in the House of Commons on September 18 that there was credible intelligence linking India to the June 18 shooting death of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside a temple in Surrey, B.C.

Last month, a U.S. indictment alleging that Indian government agents were both the instigators and the financiers of a murder plot in New York City was unsealed. The indictment said that American authorities had thwarted an assassination plot linked to India in their own territory — one with ties to Nijjar and a scheme to kill Canadians.

Last week, Trudeau said he went public with the allegation after weeks of fruitless quiet diplomacy in order to "put a chill on India" and deter any Indian agents who might be thinking of carrying out further attacks on Canadian territory.

While Modi himself stayed above the fray, Indian government officials — including Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar — initially suggested that the Canadian government was making things up and had no evidence to back its allegations.

That tone softened somewhat when the Modi government saw other G7 countries — particularly the United States — line up behind Canada in the dispute.

The White House leaked the fact that U.S. President Joe Biden raised the issue directly with Modi during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in New Delhi, a week before Trudeau made his explosive allegation in the House.

The public didn't know at the time that the U.S. was pursuing its own investigation of a plot to assassinate Sikh activist and U.S.-Canadian dual citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

The indictment alleges that Indian officials in New Delhi offered $100,000 to a drug dealer named Nikhil Gupta to hire a hitman to kill Pannun in New York.

The indictment says that U.S. authorities have intercepted phone conversations and video conferences between Gupta and officials in New Delhi in which they discussed the Pannun plot and, at one point, debated tasking Gupta with the Nijjar hit.

The indictment says that, within hours of Nijjar's murder, an Indian government contact texted Gupta a photo from the crime scene and told him he could stand down.

The U.S. indictment appears to have convinced the Modi government to adopt a more sober tone, said Trudeau.

"I think there is a beginning of an understanding that they can't bluster their way through this and there is an openness to collaborating in a way that perhaps they were less open before," he told Barton.