Tensions in India-Canada relations are escalating rapidly, with the two governments hurling increasingly serious allegations and following that up with tit-for-tat diplomatic actions against each other.
On Monday, a year-long row between the two countries over India’s alleged role in the June 2023 killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, erupted in the open yet again when the Canadian government said that six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, were “persons of interest” for their alleged role in Nijjar’s killing.
Nijjar, who was chief of the Khalistan Tiger Force, designated a terrorist outfit in India, was wanted in India for his role in planning, funding and facilitating over a dozen terrorist attacks. He was shot dead by masked men outside a Sikh temple in a Vancouver suburb last year.
India reacted swiftly to the latest Canadian allegations. Describing them as “preposterous imputations,” it attributed them to “the political agenda of the Trudeau Government that is centred around vote bank politics.”
Amid the war of words, Canada expelled the six Indian diplomats and India retaliated by ordering six Canadian diplomats based in New Delhi out of the country by the end of this week.
Meanwhile, an explosive report in Washington Post has added fuel to the fire. Citing Canadian officials, the report named India’s Home Minister Amit Shah as “the senior official in India” who “authorized” intelligence gathering and attacks on Sikh separatists in Canada.
“Conversations and texts among [the six] Indian diplomats [ordered out Canada] include references to a senior official in India and a senior official in RAW,” India’s external intelligence agency, as having Post reported. It cited Canadian officials as identifying the “senior official in India” as India’s Home Minister Amit Shah.
The Post report went on to say that top Canadian security and foreign ministry officials had shared details of references to Shah and other evidence with India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval at a meeting in Singapore on October 12. While Doval “did admit that India did use its diplomats to follow people, take pictures, et cetera,” he “denied any links to threats or violence,” according to a Canadian official cited in the Post report.
Neither the Indian Ministry of External Affairs nor the Ministry of Home Affairs which Shah heads have responded to the Washington Post report so far.
An Indian intelligence official who spoke to The Diplomat dismissed “the Canadian claims as driven by [Prime Minister] Trudeau’s domestic politics” and the Washington Post report as “unsubstantiated” and “based on comments by unnamed Canadian officials.”
An official in the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi, who spoke to The Diplomat on condition of anonymity, said that the Canadian government “has repeatedly provided evidence, most recently at the Singapore meeting with Doval, relating to the involvement of Indian officials and criminal gangs in attacks and murders on Canadian soil.”
Since the Canadian government first raised the issue of Indian involvement in Nijjar’s murder, not only is it articulating the allegations with increasing confidence but also, the accusing finger is pointing increasingly higher in the Indian government hierarchy.
In a speech to the Canadian Parliament in September last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “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.”
Indian analysts had pointed out at the time that all that Trudeau had were “credible allegations, not credible evidence.”
That appears to have changed.
The Canadian government now seems even more sure of the allegations it leveled against India. In a statement on Monday, Trudeau said his government “has clear and compelling evidence that agents of the Government of India have engaged in, and continue to engage in, activities that pose a significant threat to public safety. This includes clandestine information gathering techniques, coercive behaviour targeting South Asian Canadians, and involvement in over a dozen threatening and violent acts, including murder.”
If in the past, the Canadian government pointed at “agents” of the Indian government, now they are naming top diplomats and officials. Home Minister Amit Shah is the de facto number two in the Narendra Modi government.
The latest tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions are just the most recent of a series of downturns in the fraying India-Canada relationship. Following Trudeau’s allegations of Indian involvement in the Nijjar case, New Delhi asked Canada to reduce its diplomatic presence in India. Canada then withdrew over 40 diplomats from India.
However, tensions between the two countries go back several decades.
Canada was among the most vociferous of critics of India’s first nuclear test at Pokhran in May 1974, as India extracted plutonium for the bomb came from a reactor the Canadians had gifted it for peaceful use.
But it was over Canada’s sanctuary to Sikh separatists, some of them Khalistani terrorists wanted in India for grave crimes, that bilateral relations have suffered the most. While such support from Canada declined somewhat following the bombing of an Air India Montreal-London flight by Canadian Sikh terrorists in 1985, support never ceased.
As Ajai Sahni, founding member and executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management and South Asia Terrorism Portal, told me in an interview last year, Canada “has the worst record” with regard to “acting against individuals accused of terrorism on Indian soil but also in connection with the violation of its own laws on Canadian soil as well. Senior Canadian politicians, including leaders from Canada’s ruling Liberal Party and its coalition partner, the Jagmeet Singh-led New Democratic Party, have been seen at prominent Khalistani demonstrations where terrorists are glorified, demands for violence against India are articulated, and the membership of terrorist organizations banned in Canada – the Babbar Khalsa International, for instance – is openly flaunted.”
If for decades the Canadian government’s tolerance, even support of anti-India Sikh separatist activity damaged India-Canada relations, India’s alleged taking out of anti-India Sikh separatists in Canada has put ties in a downward spiral.