Vivek Y. Kelkar

On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the bombshell announcement that: ‘Over the past number of weeks Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.’ Trudeau has since strengthened his language, and argued that he has ‘credible reasons to believe that agents of the government of India were involved in the killing of a Canadian on Canadian soil.

The holy festival of Eid-ul-Fitr has dawned in Pakistan, marking the end of Ramadan. Celebrations were unusually muted. The month of Ramadan has been harrowing for a large swathe of Pakistan’s populace. All through the month, through the day-long fasts, crowds thronged outside the free food distribution centres across the country, waiting for bags of flour. Sometimes they waited days. Fights were commonplace. Often, the very young or the elderly were injured or even killed in the stampedes. There are far too many of these cases to recount. Food inflation is at a record high of 47 per cent; overall inflation hovered around the 35 per cent mark through March and April. Earlier this month the country’s central bank raised interest rates to 21 per cent.

The rain and the cold in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Balochistan, did not deter them. Neither did the floods that ravaged their homes. The families of Balochistan’s missing had been protesting for days outside the provincial government’s headquarters. On August 25, one of the protestors, Seema Baloch, the sister of Shabbir Baloch, a student leader who had been missing for weeks, fell unconscious and had to be taken to a nearby hospital. The others simply kept protesting. Government officials gently asked them to leave, but when the protesters asked about the missing—all allegedly abducted by Pakistani security forces—the officials professed ignorance or, worse, helplessness.