October 16, 2024
NEW DELHI – On Oct 12, top security officials from India and Canada gathered for a secret meeting in Singapore.
For over five hours, they sought to come to an understanding over New Delhi’s alleged involvement in the killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist on Canadian soil, but in the end, the powwow came to naught.
Two days later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly escalated the row. The country on Oct 14 expelled six Indian diplomats, including India’s High Commissioner to Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma, for purportedly gathering information and intimidating members of the Indian diaspora.
India contradicted this by claiming it had recalled its diplomats, and countered by giving six Canadian diplomats notice to leave by Oct 19. It summoned and expelled Acting High Commissioner in India Stewart Wheeler, currently Canada’s top diplomat in the South Asian country.
Mr Trudeau in 2023 claimed in Parliament that he had evidence linking Indian agents to the murder in Canadian territory of Mr Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh who supported the notion of a separate Sikh state called Khalistan carved out of India’s Punjab state. India designated him a terrorist.
The latest developments have blown open a dispute between India and Canada that has been brewing since Mr Nijjar was fatally shot as he got into his truck in June 2023 after he left the Sikh temple he led in the city of Surrey.
On Oct 14, Mr Trudeau, during a press conference in Ottawa on the diplomatic expulsions, said: “We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil, a deeply unacceptable violation of Canada’s sovereignty and of international law.”
India’s Narendra Modi government, which has sought to project muscular diplomacy and is sensitive to any kind of criticism on the global stage, denied Canadian assertions of Indian involvement and called the many allegations “preposterous”.
Indian sources maintained that Canada had not yet shared “credible evidence” with India. They also underlined that the Canadian government through the past year had engaged with India’s High Commissioner and had now “targeted him.”
Professor C. Raja Mohan, a visiting research professor at the NUS Institute of South Asian Studies, said: “Diplomacy has broken down. It looks like things have blown out. Things will get a lot worse than better.”
But the biggest question facing India is not what will happen to ties with Canada – with which it has limited economic and political linkages – but whether this will in any way impact India’s critical ties with the US.
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly repeatedly asserted at the Oct 14 press conference that she had shared everything with her counterparts of the Five Eyes, an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
“We have excellent ties with other Five Eyes members. We will closely watch what they have to say and how they react,” noted a recently retired Indian diplomat who did not want to be named.
Parallel investigations are also ongoing in the US over a foiled attack on pro-Khalistan separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual American-Canadian citizen designated a terrorist by India.
Prosecutors have alleged that an Indian government official, identified by the US Justice Department as CC1, asked Indian citizen Nikhil Gupta, who was extradited to the US from the Czech Republic in November 2023, to assassinate Mr Pannun on US soil in 2023 at around the same time as Mr Nijjar’s murder.
The Indian government set up an inquiry into the US allegations in November 2023, and an Indian team is in the US to cooperate in the probe. While Canada has accused India of being uncooperative, the US says India has cooperated.
The Hindustan Times newspaper reported that India had told the US that the government official had been arrested and that he was no longer working for the government.
Ties with the US are a top priority for India, while for the US, India is a key part of its Indo-Pacific strategy.
Both countries are united over the larger threat of China – India has a border row with China, while the US is involved in a jostle for influence with China.
India and the US form the Quad security forum, along with Japan and Australia.
“The larger Indo-Pacific strategy will prevail. But the Nikhil Gupta trial could be an issue. There could be more revelations,” said Dr Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at New Delhi–based think-tank Observer Research Foundation.
It remains to be seen whether any further revelations would hit India-US ties, he said, but noted: “I don’t think the basic US policy towards India will change.”
The Indian reaction
Still, speculation has mounted in India over the kind of evidence the Canadians have linking Indian diplomats to Mr Nijjar’s murder.
The opposition Congress Party has urged the Modi government to take all political parties into confidence on the developing situation with Canada.
The Indian authorities have also not confirmed the meeting in Singapore took pace, but Hindustan Times did mention a meeting without naming Singapore.
The meeting in Singapore was reportedly led by India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, a powerful figure in the Indian government, and his Canadian counterpart Nathalie Drouin. The session reportedly saw the Indian side deny all the allegations.
The meeting was sought by the Canadian side, according to a Washington Post report quoting Canadian officials, to “warn that details exposing Indian involvement in attacks were likely to become public as prosecutors move forward next month with a planned trial of four Indian nationals in Nijjar’s killing”.
Within 48 hours of the meeting in Singapore, the Canadians had publicly accused the Indian government of using a web of Indian diplomats, officials of the Research and Analysis Wing – which is India’s foreign intelligence agency – and a criminal network led by jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, who has a presence in Canada, to gather information and target members of the Indian Sikh diaspora.
Mr Trudeau, who accused New Delhi of refusing to cooperate, said he had chosen to go public to “disrupt the pattern of Indian diplomats collecting, through questionable and illegal means, information on Canadian citizens that were then fed to criminal organisations that would then take violent actions from extortion to murder against Canadians”.
Canada is home to the largest Sikh community outside India.
The Khalistan movement, which was largely stamped out in India in the 1980s, remains embedded in certain sections of the Indian Sikh diaspora in countries like Canada, the UK and Australia. Former prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards for the tough action against the Khalistan movement.
Against this backdrop, New Delhi has watched the activities of foreign-based Khalistan separatists with great concern and has long accused Canada, which said it would uphold freedom of speech, of harbouring those it deems to be terrorists.
Noting that the Oct 14 developments were the third round of mutual expulsion of diplomats, a former Indian envoy said Mr Trudeau’s persistence in taking the matter into the public domain has avoided “the benefits of quiet diplomacy… therefore, India has had to retaliate in whatever way it could”.
“Every time there’s a press conference by Trudeau, things get worse,” the former Indian diplomat, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Straits Times.
“It is a kind of unfortunate diplomatic exchange, not traditionally seen between friendly countries. But it has been going on for a year since Trudeau went public (with the allegations).”