Diplomatic sound of silence: What the US indictment leaves unsaid about Delhi, Ottawa, and Nijjar

The Bishnoi gang’s indictment by a US court in California for the June 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, is covered in four crisp paragraphs of a 38-page chargesheet, which also contains extortion and drug-running activities by the gang.

The indictment, the US equivalent of a chargesheet   that has been  approved  a court, does not mention Indian official involvement in the killing of the prominent Khalistan leader — an allegation that was first made by then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in September 2023 and that, a year later, plunged India-Canada ties to an unprecedented low. India recalled its then High Commissioner Sanjay Verma and several others posted to the mission in Canada after they were named as “persons of interest” in the killing.

Does the indictment mean the end of the Canadian investigation over the alleged Indian links to Nijjar’s killing? In May 2024, the RCMP arrested four persons for Nijjar’s killing and their trial is expected to begin in March or April next year. The Canadian investigation linked the arrests to the Bishnoi gang, and Canada alleged that Indian officials had been in touch with the alleged assassins, pushing bilateral ties to their lowest point in decades.

The US investigation, called Operation Hardball, was spread over several years and carried out by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in close co-ordination with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and European law enforcement agencies against three transnational Indian criminal gangs. Two of these, the Bishnoi gang and the Bhagwanpuria gang, are Punjab-based criminal gangs, and the third, the Dhanda gang, came up in Canada’s British Columbia province.

A press release from the federal attorney’s office for California on July 8 after the indictment of 37 members of the three gangs, said it was a “years-long federal investigation” into Indian crime syndicates that “engage in racketeering, targeted killings, shootings, extortion, the trafficking of bulk quantities of narcotics across international borders, and other crimes around the world whose impact is especially felt in the Indian diaspora.” It did not specify which year Operation Hardball was launched.

After the indictment was unveiled on July 7 in the US, it was reported as ruling out Indian involvement. “There’s no evidence to suggest through this organised crime investigation and the charges and the indictment laid forward that Indian officials were charged or involved,” said Lisa Moreland, deputy commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 

But the indictment does uphold the Canadian finding that the Bishnoi gang was involved in the crime. The Globe and Mail reported that the press secretary to Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree declined to say if, in light of the indictment, Canadian investigators would still continue to pursue the initial “working theory” alleging Indian official involvement in the murder, but said Canadian law enforcement was continuing to pursue the investigation in the case with “great care and diligence and guided by evidence and the rule of law” and that “the investigation remains active and ongoing”.

The Canadian daily also noted that Moreland’s remarks, which were interpreted by the Indian media as giving Delhi a clean chit, were specific to the investigation carried out by Operation Hardball. The absence of any reference to the Canadian line of investigation in the indictment has still not yielded a categorical statement from the Canadian side that this shuts the door on their allegations about Indian involvement.

Nijjar and the indictment

In the indictment itself, two things stand out regarding the Nijjar case.

One is the out-of-character silence on the part of the Bishnoi gang, described throughout the document as Bishnoi OCG (organised criminal group), about its alleged involvement in the Nijjar assassination.

The indictment says Bishnoi and his associates Goldy Brar and Rohit Godara, together with other members and associates “frequently claimed public responsibility for their violent acts, including through videos and written messages publicly posted online... [and] used this high-profile violence and the public promotion of that violence to cultivate a widespread climate of fear, and to fuel the notion, promoted by members and associates of the Bishnoi OCG, that the Bishnoi OCG was invulnerable to or otherwise beyond the reach of law enforcement.” 

After a shooting at Rupinder Singh “Gippy” Grewal's home (“R.G” in the indictment)  in Vancouver, Bishnoi is alleged to have posted a warning on Facebook on behalf of the “Lawrence Bishnoi Group” to the singer-actor: “No one can save you from us”. Goldy Brar is alleged to have called Gippy’s number several times, claimed responsibility for the shooting at his home and demanded money. In another case of extortion in Canada, Bishnoi and his associates are alleged to have called a businessman identified only by his initials “A.G” and demanded payment of half a million Canadian dollars.

But on the Nijjar killing, Bishnoi goes quiet. Only in December 2024 – months after the RCMP’s May 2024 arrest of four suspects in the Nijjar case, and after their link to the Bishnoi gang was made public by Canadian authorities during the high-voltage diplomatic spat with Delhi – did a Bishnoi gang member use Nijjar’s fate as a warning while making an extortion call to a man identified only as “S.S”. Though the indictment says several times that the Bishnoi gang used its high-visibility victims as a calling card for its extortion racket, yet on its most high-profile hit the gang seems to have laid low for a year and a half.

The second is the indictment’s silence on the motive for the Nijjar killing. Why Bishnoi would choose to target such a high-profile figure is left unsaid. Paragraph 11 of the indictment does provide another reason for the Bishnoi gang’s violent activities, without linking it to any particular “overt act” by the group: “Members and associates of the Bishnoi OCG also engaged in acts of violence as a source of revenue. Members and associates of the Bishnoi OCG accepted murder-for-hire and extortion-for-hire contracts around the world, and murdered and extorted victims in India, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere for profit.”

The indictment identifies four unnamed accomplices in the killing of Nijjar (who is identified in the document as HSN) as “co-conspirators” numbered 1 to 4, who “agreed to assist in the assassination”. Bishnoi provided co-conspirator 1 with a photograph of the target: “Co-conspirators 1 and 2 shot and killed H.S.N. as H.S.N. was leaving the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurudwara temple in Surrey, British Columbia.”

It is not clear from the indictment whether these four “co-conspirators” are the same four suspects arrested by the RCMP in May 2024, the ones whose trial is reportedly scheduled for next year.

NSA visit to Canada

Earlier this year, in the first week of February, the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval made a quiet visit to Ottawa in the first week of February, another step in a nearly year-long effort by both sides to rebuild ties after Prime Minister Mark Carney assumed office in March 2025, paving the way for his visit to India in March this year.

Relations had all but broken down in October 2024, when then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a press conference that Canadian officials had shared “clear and compelling evidence” with India of “Indian agents” posing a “significant threat” to public safety in Canada. The Trudeau government declared seven Indian officials, including the then Indian High Commissioner to Ottawa, Sanjeev Kumar Verma, persona non grata and deported them. Delhi said it had “withdrawn” the diplomats. But in a reciprocal move, India expelled the Canadian High Commissioner and five other diplomats and consular staff from the Canadian mission in Delhi.

Backing up Trudeau, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme told a press conference that Canada’s National Security Adviser Natalie Drouin, deputy foreign minister David Morrison and the deputy commissioner of the RCMP had met the Indian NSA – according to media reports, in Singapore. There, they reportedly confronted him with evidence of the involvement of several Indian government officials, including India’s High Commissioner Sanjeev Verma, in the killing of Nijjar in June 2023. Reports also said the Canadian team told Doval that the Indian officials were using the services of the Bishnoi gang for their alleged “criminal” acts. 

India publicly dismissed the allegations as “outrageous” and said they were linked to the then-upcoming elections in Canada, accusing Trudeau of pandering to a Khalistani Sikh constituency. Trudeau lost, and Carney was elected. As the host of the June 2025 G7 meeting, he invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an outreach participant. At their first in-person meeting, the two leaders got an opportunity to hold frank discussions and chart a way ahead from the debris of the bilateral relationship.

Soon after, the two countries restored full diplomatic relations. In September 2025, Canada’s NSA Drouin would travel to Delhi with the country's deputy foreign minister. Both Canada and India had been jolted by US President Donald Trump's tariff war and had begun serious work on rebuilding bridges with each other. At stake were trade, high-tech collaboration, and the wider Indian diaspora, beyond the Sikh community, who were the first to be affected by the downturn in ties through long wait periods for visas or visa rejections.

Drouin said after the visit that at her meeting with Doval, the two discussed “our respective security concerns and committed to non-interference including refraining from transnational repression”, a charge Canada made against India in October 2024.

The Indian statement on her visit said the two had “productive discussions on advancing the bilateral relationship including in areas such as counter terrorism, combating transnational organised crime and intelligence exchanges. They agreed to strengthen security cooperation and further reinforce existing mechanisms of engagement.”

During Doval’s trip to Canada in February this year, he met Drouin as well as Public Safety Minister Anandasangaree. Unlike in September 2025, both sides issued identical statements about the visit, acknowledging “the progress” in supporting the “safety and security” of their countries and citizens, and agreeing to a “shared workplan” for cooperation on national security and law enforcement issues. They agreed to establish a security and law-enforcement liaison to “streamline bilateral communications and enable timely information sharing on issues of mutual concern to Canada and India, such as the illegal flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl precursors, and transnational organised criminal networks.”

Ahead of Carney’s visit weeks after Doval’s visit, Canadian officials briefing the media said they believed India was “no longer” involved in crimes on Canadian soil and that they were “confident that the activity is no longer continuing”. Carney’s visit to India went off smoothly, with both sides agreeing to finalise a Free Trade Agreement by the end of 2026.

But it was not without pushback from sections of the Canadian establishment and media. While he was still in India, the Globe and Mail published a report quoting unnamed sources alleging links between Indian officials posted at specific locations and Nijjar’s killers. At the time, Canadian foreign minister Anita Anand, sidestepping questions about the report, said Canada and India would “continue to collaborate on national security and law enforcement”.

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