The Killing in Canada Shows What India Has Become - The Atlantic
The government in New Delhi may well be the sort that will do anything to silence dissent.
By Daniel Block
On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood before his country’s Parliament and leveled a dramatic charge: Ottawa had “credible evidence” that the Indian government had assassinated a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. The citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, had been gunned down outside the Sikh temple where he served as president. Trudeau declared the killing “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty” and “contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open, and democratic societies conduct themselves.”
The prime minister’s claim made headlines around the planet, but it shouldn’t have been altogether surprising. Nijjar was a prominent activist who called for Sikhs—a religious group mostly concentrated in northern India—to break away from New Delhi and form an independent nation. As a result, New Delhi had labeled him a terrorist. The Indian government has denied involvement in the killing, but under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it has become illiberal at home and bellicose abroad, such that assassinations on foreign soil are no longer an unimaginable part of its agenda.
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Rift With Canada Puts Spotlight on India’s Security Services
Trudeau’s accusations suggest New Delhi’s intelligence operatives could lead it down a dark path.
By
Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in India.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/2...nijjar-sikh-separatism-security-intelligence/
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week accused the Indian government of involvement in the fatal shooting of a Canadian Sikh activist, it was perhaps the first time a liberal, Western democracy had made such a claim about New Delhi. Trudeau was backed by the Canadian opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, who called the alleged actions an “outrageous affront” to Canadian sovereignty. India has rejected the accusations, but on Tuesday, Trudeau doubled down: “We are not looking to provoke or escalate. We are simply laying out the facts as we understand them,” he
said.
Earlier this month, senior Canadian intelligence officials visited India before the G-20 summit in New Delhi to share the evidence they had gathered about the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June. Trudeau raised the issue with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a meeting on the sidelines of the summit. Afterward, New Delhi issued a brusque
statement noting its concerns about “continuing anti-India activities of extremist elements in Canada.” That likely gave Trudeau a sense about how India intended to treat the allegations once they were made public.
This week, Canada expelled a senior Indian diplomat, Pavan Kumar Rai, who represented India’s foreign intelligence agency in Ottawa. In response, India threw out the head of intelligence at Canada’s embassy in New Delhi. On Thursday, India suspended visa services for Canadian citizens until further notice, marking a serious escalation in the clash.
India and Canada’s shared values and people-to-people ties should make them natural partners, but that has not been the case under Modi and Trudeau. Bilateral relations have been frayed for some time, in part because India believes that Canada has been sympathetic toward the Sikh separatist movement, while Canada has said India was
interfering in its domestic politics. Trudeau’s allegations this week caused the two countries to reach a breaking point. Anticipating the geopolitical effects, Trudeau
briefed Canada’s closest allies about the case before his announcement, including the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom. The two countries issued a statement of concern about the incident.
In New Delhi, concerns about the return of Sikh separatism have long fed insecurities about India’s sovereignty, and those anxieties have grown under Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Hindu nationalist regime. Modi’s top security czar is a former intelligence chief, Ajit Doval, who led a successful campaign against violent Sikh separatists in the 1980s. Canadian Sikh support for the 2020 farmers’ protests against Modi’s government no doubt stoked Doval’s own fears. Many of the demonstrators were Sikhs. India’s security establishment has allegedly
violated international law in a
few high-profile cases abroad. None have taken place in a country like Canada, a treaty ally of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Trudeau’s allegations could help Modi domestically by feeding into a nationalist narrative that takes pride in him as a strong leader, but wasting diplomatic energy containing the fallout of this fracas will only distract India from other major challenges—namely the one posed by its rival China. If India continues to look at the world through the lens of its intelligence operatives rather than holding them accountable for their failures, it runs the risk of going down a very dark path.
Simmering tensions between India and Canada had already come to the fore before Trudeau’s public accusations. At a press conference in New Delhi in June, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said, “If anybody has a complaint, we have a complaint about Canada … the space they are giving to Khalistanis and violent extremists.” A few days later, he
added that New Delhi had made it clear that if activities in Canada threatened Indian national security “we will respond.” This veiled threat came 10 days after Nijjar was shot dead as he left the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia.
At the time, Nijjar’s name was relatively unknown in India or Canada. He moved to Canada from India’s Sikh-majority state of Punjab in 1997 and became president of the religious body that runs the Sikh gurdwara in Surrey in 2020. That November, India
declared Nijjar a terrorist. Its federal counterterrorism agency
accused him of trying to radicalize the Sikh diaspora in the service of creating an independent Sikh state known as Khalistan. In India, Sikh separatism peaked in the 1980s, losing steam after Indian security forces crushed a violent insurgency, which was
supported by Pakistan. In Punjab, the movement no longer has a support base, although New Delhi occasionally hypes it as a threat.
A vocal backer of Khalistan, Nijjar upset India’s government last fall when he organized a campaign in Brampton, Ontario, to
hold a symbolic referendum on the Khalistan issue. Canadian laws do not prohibit nonviolent support for Sikh separatism, while India has wide-ranging laws on sedition and against terror that make it very difficult. In India, the ideology of the BJP’s parent organization also considers Sikhs to be Hindus—an assertion rejected by Sikh leaders, whose community has politically opposed and democratically defeated Modi’s party in Punjab. To explain why Sikhs oppose the ruling party, India’s regime has turned the pro-Khalistan movement as a bogeyman.
India’s security establishment, meanwhile, is still grappling with the memory of the long-dead pro-Khalistan insurgency. Doval, whose career highlight was leading security operations against Sikh separatists in the 1980s, still harbors apprehensions about their revival. The external response to the monthslong farmers’ protests in 2020 has shaped India’s attitude toward Canada and the United Kingdom: that they are soft toward Sikh separatists. BJP leaders tried to discredit the protesting farmers as pro-Khalistan activists. When the Canadian government issued a statement against some of the harsh policing against the farmers, New Delhi accused Ottawa of meddling in its internal affairs.
Aside from Nijjar,
three other prominent Sikh separatist activists have died under mysterious circumstances abroad this year: Avtar Singh Khanda in the United Kingdom and Paramjit Singh Panjwar and Harmeet Singh in Pakistan. Sikh separatist groups allege that Indian intelligence operatives were
responsible for their deaths. Under Doval, the security establishment has recently been in the spotlight over two high-profile cases. The first was the
capture and rendition of Sheikha Latifa, the daughter of the ruler of Dubai, by Indian special forces off the coast of Goa in March 2018, returning her to her family against her will. The second the attempted abduction of fugitive businessman
Mehul Choksi in Antigua in May 2021.
Modi’s party has decried previous governments for making India a “
soft state” and for not
emulating the example of Israel—or its imagination of the country—of taking the war to the adversary through spectacular covert action abroad. It is not clear if the
mythology of the Mossad, Israel’s successful and infamously ruthless national intelligence agency, is driving Indian action today, but many Hindu nationalists have
framed these alleged actions as evidence of a
strong state under Modi. Perhaps they forget that Israel undertakes such operations in countries such as Iran, which have little international credibility and few allies. By contrast, Canada is a member of the G-7, a NATO founder, and part of the exclusive Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States each issued dutiful statements of concern over Trudeau’s recent allegations. However, India’s importance as a partner in countering China in the Indo-Pacific means that these other Western countries will remain soft on Modi. Despite mounting criticism, the Biden administration has overlooked credible evidence of democratic backsliding and poor treatment of religious minorities under BJP rule under Modi. The United States has decided that its convergent interests with India against China take precedence over its professed values. When it comes to Trudeau’s allegations, those interests are bound to trump the United States’ shared values with Canada.
India and Canada share historical ties dating to India’s colonial era. Canada is home to one of the largest diasporas of Indian heritage in the world, at
nearly 1.4 million, and is India’s second-biggest
overseas study destination. Sikhs now form a
larger share of Canada’s national population (2.1 percent) than India’s (1.7 percent). If the two countries have reached a new low in their relationship, it is because India has changed its direction under Modi, whose vision of a Hindu majoritarian state has emboldened nationalists abroad.
In Australia, Queensland state police
released documents this week that suggest that Hindus defaced a Hindu temple wall to divert attention toward pro-Khalistan activists. Last year, riots against Muslims in Leicester, England, were
blamed on right-wing Hindu nationalist groups. An Indian government
statement condemned the “violence perpetrated against the Indian community in Leicester and vandalization of premises and symbols of Hindu religion” without acknowledging violence against Muslims. According to a U.S. lawsuit, a Hindu sect closely associated with Modi
trafficked workers from India and forced them into labor at Hindu temples in five U.S. states.
In hushed tones and classified documents, Canadian officials have also complained of Hindu nationalist overreach. A
2018 report prepared for Canadian deputy ministers attending a national security retreat warned that Indian Canadians were among those at risk of “being influenced, overtly or covertly, by foreign governments with their own agendas.” Canada’s Sikh community forms part of the senior leadership of every political party. Sikhs in Canada have historically supported Trudeau’s Liberal Party, and the prime minister’s minority government now survives on the support of the New Democratic Party, headed by Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh. In 2013, India
denied a visa to Singh in 2013 for pursuing an “insidious agenda of disturbing the social fabric of India.” New Delhi also sees Trudeau himself as soft on Sikh separatists because of his continuing focus on catering to their grievances.
Domestic politics in India play an equally important role in shaping New Delhi’s stance toward Ottawa, as Modi’s government heads into a national election next year. The Indian leader has always campaigned on a tough national security agenda, and Trudeau’s allegations could favor his strongman image. If so, the diplomatic effort spent containing the fallout of the accusations—while it would be better used to deal with China—would be a small price to pay for Modi.
However, intelligence agencies and operatives have an important role in ensuring a country’s national security. India’s have made tragic blunders in recent years, failing to warn about China’s sudden ingress into Indian territory in 2020 and failing to prevent a suicide bomber from killing 40 security personnel in 2019. It is high time they are held accountable for these failures. India can no longer approach the world through the eyes of its intelligence agents. Not changing course could be more costly and consequential than the kerfuffle with Canada.
In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin remains the only leader known to order an assassination in a Western democracy, when Russian operatives
fatally poisoned a Russian defector in London in 2018. Pakistan’s intelligence agencies were allegedly
behind the mysterious killings of Baloch separatist leaders in Sweden and Canada in 2020. Canada has not made its evidence public, but it has brought unwanted attention to India’s audacious approach toward its foes. Whatever the predilections of India’s security establishment, Modi cannot afford to be seen in the same league as Putin and Pakistan’s rogue generals—certainly not as he proclaims India to be a
Vishwaguru, or a teacher-master to the world.
