Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in Washington Thursday and urged India to cooperate with Canada’s probe into the killing of a Sikh leader on its soil, which Ottawa alleges was carried out by agents backed by New Delhi.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar speak to ... [+]
In a brief address made to the media following their meeting, neither Blinken nor Jaishankar mentioned the issue, which has triggered a major diplomatic row between India and Canada.
The probe was also not mentioned in the State Department’s readout of the meeting, which focused on the upcoming “2+2 Dialogue”—a joint meeting format featuring India’s foreign and defense ministers and the U.S. secretaries of state and defense.
Citing an unnamed U.S. official, Reuters reported that “Blinken raised the Canadian matter in his meeting” and urged New Delhi to cooperate.
Prior to the meeting, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller had told reporters that Washington has “consistently engaged” with India on the issue and urged them to cooperate with Canada in its investigation.
Earlier on Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he expected Blinken to raise the issue in his meeting: “The Americans have been with us in speaking to the Indian government about how important it is that they be involved in following up on the credible allegations that agents of the Indian government killed a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.”
Last week, Trudeau told the Canadian parliament his government was pursuing “credible allegations” of links between “agents of the government of India” and the killing of Sikh leader and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down in Surrey, British Columbia earlier this year. The Indian-born Nijjar had been labeled a “terrorist” by New Delhi for his support of the separatist Khalistan movement, which calls for the creation of an independent homeland for Sikhs carved from India’s territory. It was later reported that Trudeau’s allegation was backed by information gathered from surveillance Indian diplomats in Canada and intelligence received from a fellow member of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, which includes the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. India has strongly denied involvement in the killing, calling Trudeau’s allegations “absurd and motivated.”