‘Very messy’: India-Canada row over Sikh killing causes diplomatic shock waves
The sun was setting on a June evening as Hardeep Singh Nijjar walked across the car park of the gurdwara. Nijjar’s day job was as a plumber but this gurdwara, located in the city of Surrey, in Canada’s British Columbia province, was where he dedicated most of his energy. That day he had made an impassioned speech about the fight for an independent, safe state for Sikhs.
But as he reached his pickup truck, two heavy-set, masked gunmen lay in wait. Shots rang out across the car park and Nijjar, killed instantly, crumpled to the ground as the suspects fled – first on foot and then in a getaway car.
The incident had attracted little international attention until Monday, when Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, stood up in parliament and made an explosive announcement: there were credible allegations that this was an assassination carried out with the involvement of the Indian government, who had targeted Nijjar for his involvement in the Sikh separatist cause. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” Trudeau said.
The ramifications were instant. Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat who was reportedly involved in intelligence. India swiftly hit back, calling the accusations “absurd” and politically motivated, and expelling a Canadian diplomat in return. Trade talks between the two countries were halted.
The diplomatic barbs did not stop there. On Wednesday, India updated its travel advisory to warn its citizens to “exercise extreme caution” in Canada due to “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate crimes”. By Thursday, India had suspended all visa applications for Canadians, citing security threats against its diplomatic staff and “inaction by the Canadian authorities” on hate crimes,
and accused Canada of being a safe haven for terrorists. Meanwhile, speaking at the UN later that day, Trudeau called on India to cooperate with Canadian authorities to “uncover the truth” behind the killing.
While any evidence Canada has on the killing is yet to be made public, “for Trudeau to have made the statement he did, given the obvious implications and backlash, would imply a really significant level of confidence in the evidence that they have”, said Walter Ladwig, a senior lecturer in international relations at King’s College London. According to sources who spoke to Canadian media, when confronted privately with the evidence, Indian officials did not deny government involvement.
The response among analysts was disbelief, with many saying that foreign killings have not historically been part of India’s intelligence playbook. “If these allegations are true, then there is a radical reimagination of Indian intelligence and Indian intelligence operations outside the country,” said Yogesh Joshi, a research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
Yet, as Joshi emphasised, under the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government, India’s position on the world stage has never been so prominent and influential, as a geopolitical counterweight to China and also as a growing economic powerhouse. As a result, India has been able to aggressively pursue a foreign policy that often runs counter to western interests, while still being courted by leaders from the US, UK, Australia and Europe.
“This is not the India of 1980 and the 1990s,” said Joshi. “It’s a rising India, spearheaded by a political dispensation which believes in the use of force to pursue national interests.”
India’s external intelligence agency, the research and analysis wing (RAW), has long been connected to activities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Afghanistan, and is said to have a longstanding relationship with Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, but it has never been accused of extrajudicial killing on western soil.
The accusations could have a direct implication for Modi. RAW reports directly to the prime minister’s office, and should Canada’s investigations into Nijjar’s killing lead to arrests or judicial action against senior figures in RAW, even in absentia, it could touch those in the prime minister’s inner circle.
Analysts say there have been some indicators that RAW has become more emboldened to take action on foreign soil. In the past year, about six individuals whom India had designated as terrorists – either connected to the militant insurgency in Kashmir or the
Khalistan Sikh separatist movement – have been targeted and killed in neighbouring Pakistan. It is not known who was responsible for their deaths.
“We don’t know whether these are Indian intelligence operations, but there’s definitely an uptick in terms of killings of individuals in Pakistan which we haven’t seen before,” said Joshi.
The allegations have brought the Khalistan issue to the fore for India and Canada. For India, the Khalistan movement, which fights for Punjab to become an independent Sikh state, has a bloody history. It began around the time of India’s partition in the 1940s but grew into a full insurgency in the 1980s. A crackdown by the Indian army, known as Operation Blue Star, led to the killing of 400 Sikhs in a temple, and in retaliation the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards. What followed was a terrible spate of anti-Sikh pogroms in which more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed.
Canada was drawn into the dispute with its own tragic consequences in 1985. Seeking revenge for Operation Blue Star, Khalistani militants targeted two Air India flights. A bomb on Air India flight 182 exploded off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people onboard, including 268 Canadian citizens, 27 British citizens and 24 Indian citizens in the worst act of aviation terrorism before the September 11 attacks. The second bomb exploded in Tokyo airport, killing two baggage handlers.
In the years since, support for the Khalistan movement has largely dissipated within Punjab; a Pew survey in 2021 found 95% of Sikhs considered themselves proud Indians. However, the BJP government – highly sensitive to any secessionist movement that runs counter to its fiercely nationalist agenda – has continued to portray it as a significant threat to India, and brought down the full force of the state whenever it has emerged domestically.
Among Canada’s Sikh diaspora, the largest outside of India, support for Khalistan remained strong and has been the fly in the ointment of India and Canada’s relations. For years, New Delhi has accused Canada of allowing anti-India Khalistanis and banned Khalistani groups to operate freely on its soil. The Indian government had designated Nijjar a Khalistani terrorist and put a reward of 1m rupees (£9,800) on his head after he was accused of involvement in a plan to murder a Hindu priest.
Yet while New Delhi had passed on information regarding Khalistani threats operating in Canada, the Canadian authorities have never taken any action, and questions have been raised in India about how Canadian authorities have dealt with the Khalistani issue.
“There has been a real frustration from the Indian side for a long time, not just under Trudeau, that the Canadians have been fundamentally unwilling to take their concerns over Khalistani hate speech and violent threats seriously or respond to any inquiries,” said Ladwig.
The diplomatic fallout is likely to spread far beyond simply a disintegration of India-Canada relations. Countries such as the UK, US and Australia find themselves caught in the middle between Canada, one of their oldest allies, and India, which has come to occupy a pivotal place in their foreign policy agendas and been the focus of multiple recent strategic partnerships.
The mood in India has remained defiant, uniting a usually polarised political spectrum, with many commentators accusing western countries – with their own histories of targeting alleged terrorists on non-sovereign territory – of hypocrisy in their reaction.
While the language towards India from its western allies has been cautious so far, analysts say Trudeau’s accusations could point to the perils and limitations of liberal democracies hitching their wagons to Modi’s India, where there has been a significant shift towards authoritarianism and persecution of minorities.
“We are looking at a very messy geopolitical and diplomatic scene in the coming weeks and months,” said Joshi.