Trudeau was an unwitting dupe of those seeking to use him to torpedo a growing partnership between the West and India, writes Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat
Throughout 1936 and until the German Nazi invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, the German Military Secret Service (Abwehr) kept feeding doctored disinformation to the NKVD (the Soviet Secret Service) through double agents. The reports that were manufactured and sent falsely implicated superbly competent Red Army Marshals as German agents. Dossier after fake dossier was carefully prepared on more than a hundred topnotch Soviet officers, including those who had been involved in numerous Soviet joint activities with the German army during the 1920s, when both countries were isolated.
As a final touch to the deception, several Red Army officers were reported falsely to be opponents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and in particular, its General Secretary, J.V. Stalin. The NKVD, which was expert in discovering imaginary foes within the most loyal segments of the CPSU, was completely taken in by the Nazi deception operation, and very soon, senior Red Army commanders were arrested and executed as “Hitlerite agents”.
Some of the finest military talent in the USSR, especially those with an inside knowledge of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the German Wehrmacht (armed forces), were executed in this manner by Stalin, who was almost as paranoidal as Adolf Hitler. As a consequence, when three German armies (South, North and Centre) poured across the Soviet borders on 22 June 1941, the commanders left alive after the purge were clueless as to how to deal with an invasion that Stalin had assured them would not take place earlier than January-March 1944.
The few who recommended an active defensive operation in place of passively standing by came under scrutiny as “British agents”. Stalin ensured that the Soviet armies on the frontier were kept in peacetime positions, “so as to avoid provoking Hitler”. The consequence was a terrible loss of Soviet life and territory at the hands of the Wehrmacht that continued into 1943. The USSR was kept going principally by equipment supplied from the US, where President Franklin Roosevelt set aside old prejudices and joined hands with Stalin (and Churchill) to defeat Hitler.
Stalin’s order to remain passive was unforgivable. A forest of reports had reached STAVKA, the planning directorate of the military, that a German invasion was imminent. The last such report actually predicted the date and time (3 a.m.) of the attack on the previous day, but all such information were dismissed as “provocations” by Stalin and those around him.
Their conclusions were that such reports (of an imminent invasion) were fabrications of British intelligence that were designed and disseminated so as to tempt the USSR into attacking Germany first, so that Britain and France could watch in glee as the two titans tore each other to shreds.
As for the double agents who transmitted false reports in the past about the imaginary complicity of key Soviet military officers with the Nazis, each of them was put to death by the German side once the invasion was weeks away, in order to maintain secrecy about the Abwehr operation that made Stalin denude the Soviet military of its finest commanders, including Marshal Tukhachevsky, a Soviet patriot and an expert on German military tactics and strategy, who was put to death together with seven other top commanders in June 1937, four years before the German invasion of the USSR took place. They were followed by hundreds of other Red Army officers, the cream of the higher leadership of the Soviet armed forces.
SINO-PAK ALLIANCE FEEDS FALSE INFORMATION
There is an eerie similarity in the way false information was planted to sabotage the USSR’s defences against Nazi Germany and the way in which doctored information is now being deployed to wreck the unity of the Quad members, specifically the growing strategic relationship between Delhi and Washington. Justin Trudeau, has by his actions during the past week sought to levy a false charge against India that even a high school student would know was structured in a way designed to implode the India-US partnership and the Quad.
According to well-placed sources following developments from vantage points in Canada and the US, during the eight years of Liberal Party rule with Justin Trudeau as the Prime Minister, the security services of Canada have thus far resisted attempts by politicians close to Trudeau to infiltrate them by elements influenced by anti-India hatred of the degree manifested by the PLA and its South Asian subordinate, GHQ Rawalpindi. However, the worry within its portals was that a fresh term for Trudeau in the 45th General Election in 2025 would sharply increase the risk of such elements securing sensitive berths within the security network of the NATO member state. As a consequence, there have been leaks since the beginning of 2023 that have revealed the cosy relationship between leadership elements in the ruling coalition and individuals known to be linked to the Sino-Pakistan alliance.
Since March, such leaks have intensified, but extensive networking by the Liberal Party amongst the top media outlets ensured that much of the leaked information remained unused, especially items relating to the business and social linkages of ruling party members in Canada with those people and groups identified by the security services as being loyal to the line handed out to them by the Sino-Pakistan alliance. That the Liberal government has been generous in giving state handouts in various forms to several media outlets in Canada, including CBC, has helped in ensuring coverage that is overall friendly to Prime Minister Trudeau. The worry in CBC and other media outlets is that the opposition Conservative Party may cut back or even stop such payouts to media outlets, should they win a majority in 2025. The resulting slant in coverage is therefore predictable.
DEMONISING INDIA
Among the top priorities of the Sino-Pakistan alliance is to ensure a reversal of the deepening ties between India and the West, specifically the US. At first, in Beijing the Office of General Secretary Xi Jinping had calculated that the Russian network in India would be sufficient to ensure that there remained considerable distance between the strategic partnership of the US and India.
There have been intensive efforts by those close to the Sino-Wahhabi alliance in the US to demonise India and its ruling party, while in India, the Sino-Russian lobby has teamed up with GHQ Rawalpindi elements in an effort to get public opinion to oppose any further strengthening of security ties between India and the US. While there has been a raft of hostile reportage in both the democracies about the reliability and the wholesomeness of the other, such propaganda could not prevent India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi from signing the four defence Foundation Agreements with the US or in joining the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.
Should the Heads of Government of the four Quad members get together in India on 26 January 2024 with President Biden as the Guest of Honour at the parade in the way President Obama was in the 66th Republic Day parade in 2015, that would signal to the entire world that a new defensive alliance has formed that has both the determination and the capability to prevent the hegemony of an expansionist power that has a dense network in Canada over the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, the warm welcome meted out to Prime Minister Modi in Washington and Paris and the success of the 2023 G20 Summit capped with unanimity on the Delhi Declaration was followed by several ASEAN members, some for the first time, openly lodging protests at the expansionist maps recently presented by Beijing as “official” documents.
BLOCKING FIVE EYES TO EIGHT
The efforts of Rawalpindi GHQ and Beijing through their lobbies in the US and India have failed to deter successive US Presidents from Barack Obama to Trump to Biden from enhancing rather than degrading security and other linkages with India under Prime Minister Modi. What is particularly irksome to CCP General Secretary Xi is the unprecedented buildup by India across the Tibet-India border of military facilities. Since his taking charge as Prime Minister of India in 2014, Modi has personally supervised the building of infrastructure and the stationing of personnel on the northern border, a factor that has ensured the failure of efforts by the PLA in 2021 and 2022 to grab additional territory at the expense of India.
At the same time, defence imports from the US have been rising while those from Russia have been falling. In Beijing, such a development is the opposite of what needs to happen. Worse, in February 2023, personnel based in Hong Kong of the Ministry of State Security of the PRC were told by a “credible source based in the US” that some influential voices in Washington were going so far as to advocate the expansion of the Five Eyes network to Eight Eyes, with the inclusion of India, Japan and South Korea. The Five Eyes has in some quarters been regarded as a White Man’s Club, despite the rise in non-white sections of the population within each of its members. Adding Delhi, Tokyo and Seoul would dispel such a misperception.
The report was a warning signal. Clearly, Moscow Centre had failed in its task of diminishing the security cooperation between India and the US. There was need for a new approach, and this time around, attention turned to Canada and to Prime Minister Trudeau. It needs to be added that, according to those familiar with his thinking, Trudeau himself cannot be typecast as a PRC “agent of influence”.
Rather, the Sino-Pakistan network has made use of a trait of his, which is that (as described by an acquaintance) of “looking always at the short-term benefit to himself of any of his actions rather than at the long-term consequences of such actions”. It was probably this narrow view of the overall situation that made Trudeau the perfect unwary instrument to attempt to torpedo the evolving India-US security alliance. This was by openly charging the Government of India with the murder of a known terrorist and gangster, who was himself under the covert protection of a senior minister in the Canadian government.
TRUDEAU TOUTS A ‘DODGY DOSSIER’
Trudeau relied on a “Dodgy Dossier”, which was prepared as per the specifications of a few Trudeau loyalists. This set of documents were filled with what a source described as “AI-generated twaddle added to items scooped up through Google search”. Such shoddy “evidence” could be exposed as such, were an in-depth forensic examination to take place involving Indian technical experts.
Among the primary sources relied upon for the disinformation on India was Gurpatwant Singh Pannu, who needs no introduction so far as his pathological hostility to India and to the Hindu community in particular is concerned. Or to his close connections with the ISI in Pakistan and through that country, covert PLA outfits. Other bits and bytes were secured from known Hinduphobes who were certified as “credible” by a member of the Trudeau Cabinet.
This worthy had, in the past, facilitated the success of financial and immigration related cases that were of direct interest to the GHQ Rawalpindi “Khalistan” project.
The effort of such elements, who are freely operating in Canada, is to drag Punjab back into the 1980s, with help from similar networks across both sides of the Atlantic that are in close contact with agents and dupes of the Sino-Pakistan alliance who are based in Canada. Apparently, it did not take much effort to convince Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of the “credibility” of the information fed to him almost entirely by those close to a particular party that is essential in keeping him in power. The calculation in neighbouring countries hostile to India was that Trudeau’s hysterics would motivate the other Five Eyes members to join him in condemning India, thereby tearing to shreds an alliance of India and the West that has been carefully built up over the past decade.
Such an outcome would have removed the primary obstacle to PRC domination of the Indo-Pacific, and would have converted India from friend to foe in the manner that Saudi Arabia almost was, until Prime Minister Modi, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and President Biden had that historic handshake at the G20 Summit in Delhi. The main beneficiary would have been the PRC. Again, it needs to be reiterated that such a wider geopolitical game was not the motivation for the hysterics of Trudeau regarding the “foreign hand” that he alleged had neutralised a known terrorist and gangster on Canadian soil.
Rather, it was the political necessity of having to show to the Canadian public that he was alert about foreign interference from a faraway country, having early in the year been accused of wilfully ignoring the efforts made by PRC dupes and agents to promote the prospects of Trudeau’s party and that of an ally in the last general election.
If a source claiming to be close to Trudeau’s thinking is to be believed, the broader implications of what he was doing “never once entered his mind, all that mattered was the political benefit of showing that he was seen as standing up to foreign interference” in Canada. Not standing up against the world’s biggest authoritarian state, as he ought to have, but against the world’s most populous democracy. It bears repetition that Trudeau was not an agent but an unwitting dupe of the groups seeking to use him to torpedo a partnership between the West and India.
TRUDEAU NOT SHARING INFORMATION
Given the dodgy nature of the sources and input relied on so as to make a gangland killing get transformed into a hit job by the Government of India, it is small wonder that none of the information being relied upon by Prime Minister Trudeau in his efforts at damaging the India-US alliance is being shared with India. What is needed is an investigation into the activities of at least eleven key members of the Trudeau government, including their past involvement in financial flows directed towards extremists who carried out terrorist acts in India that took several dozen innocent lives.
However, this will take place only if Trudeau is defeated in 2025, not otherwise. It had been expected that the “Trudeau bombshell” would cause an unbridgeable chasm between the US and other Quad members and India, but as details of the antecedents and linkages of H.S. Nijjar, any such eventuality is becoming more and more remote, to the chagrin of the State Security Ministry in Beijing. As for Justin Trudeau, it remains to be seen whether his effort to besmirch the name of India and support anti-India elements in Canada will assist him in getting a third term in office in 2025.
What is concerning is that a country that is so close to the US, which along with India, Japan and Australia are the key elements in maintaining a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific, is led by an individual who has thoughtlessly acted in a manner that in different circumstances could have sundered the growing security relationship between India and the US, not to mention consigning the Quad to the dustbin.
Those working for such an outcome will need to go back to the drawing board and find another dupe, another pretext, for fulfilling their mission of unleashing a torpedo at the US-India-EU-UK-Japan-Australia partnership. Unfortunately for the Sino-Pakistan alliance, the partnership between these countries is becoming rock solid ever since Narendra Modi took the oath of office as Prime Minister of India in 2014.