A mysterious assassination, allegations of foreign intelligence interference, the bad blood between the two government leaders, the expulsion of diplomats, an anti-separatism crusade and Western ideological prejudices have all come to a head in a recent public showdown between India and Canada. As the rift seems to be growing by the day, it is high time to figure out the backstory.
The Indian authorities decided to expel six Canadian diplomats, including acting High Commissioner Stewart Ross Wheeler and his deputy. The country’s Ministry of External Affairs also announced it was recalling its envoy Ottawa, High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, alongside a number of diplomats, citing security concerns. These moves followed Canada’s official statement naming the High Commissioner as a ‘person of interest’ in the murder plot investigation in the wake of the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an exiled Sikh guru. India dismissed the allegations as unsubstantiated and accused Canada of supporting terrorism.
Canada responded by expelling six Indian diplomats, citing their violations of law with regard to Canadian nationals. ‘We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil,’ prime minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement. Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, doubled down on that claim, adding that the country would keep protecting its own interest despite its unwillingness to feud with India.
The diplomatic fallout between Canada and India erupted last year. On 21 September 2023, New Delhi refused to grant new visas to Canadian nationals after Canada had expelled several Indian diplomats, accusing them of aiding and abetting terrorism. Ottawa believed the diplomats in question were undercover intelligence operatives implicated in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
India, in turn, accused Nijjar of orchestrating a series of terror attacks starting in the mid-1980s. He was also referred to as the ‘mastermind’ behind the Khalistan Tiger Force that advocated the independence of Khalistan, a Sikh state the movement believed should have existed in India’s Punjab.
India takes the problem of ‘Sikh separatism and terrorism’ seriously. Being an ethnically and religiously pluralistic county, India is home to various grassroots national liberation fringe movements, mostly with small numbers of poorly armed followers acting in isolated areas. Besides, the country’s intelligence agencies boast a solid track record extinguishing the threats coming from these groups.
However, the security threat stemming from the Sikh movement is somewhat more significant as they can enlist foreign help to jeopardise India’s territorial integrity. Back in the day, many of their leaders moved to Canada and were granted political asylum. This makes it a pressing matter for India. But the ongoing showdown over the Sikhs looks almost surreal as it combines an ideological undertone with deep-seated personal grudges, which translates into an unsavoury illustration of a typical Western-style democracy.
First of all, Canada has yet to provide any compelling evidence that would implicate the Indian diplomats in the assassination plot. Since the victim was a high-profile leader of an anti-Indian paramilitary group, the Canadian authorities jumped to the conclusion that it must have been masterminded by the Indian intelligence agencies. But Nijjar was shot at from the automatic rifles carried by masked gunmen as they drove by the Vancouver temple in a truck. Even the shooters’ ethnicity was never positively identified. What if the crime was perpetrated by local extremists sick and tired of the Sikh immigrants’ vociferous presence in Canada? That theory was never pursued.
Canada is rightfully outraged by the murder of someone who was granted asylum on Canadian soil. The brazen crime should have been vindicated by the democratic justice system, as the protection guaranteed by the government had clearly been compromised. But the emotional aspect of the matter exacerbated by the lack of conclusive evidence torpedoed any shot at a negotiation with New Delhi and a more elaborate solution. The Vancouver shooting could have paved the way for a new chapter in the fruitful cooperation between the Canadian intelligence community and their Indian counterparts in a joint effort to tackle global terrorism.
That interaction could have helped both sides avoid the diplomatic showdown that is now verging on the breach of diplomatic relations between the two states.
Beginning in the 1980s, the Indian government has repeatedly reached out to the Canadian authorities regarding the Sikh émigrés. The Indians must have suggested exchanging the information with Canadian intelligence officials. The terrorist suspect lists must have been submitted as well. However, the Canadians have been time and again invoking basic human rights to rally behind the immigrant community in what can be viewed as an unfortunate precedent of the West’s dominant ideology interfering with the best interests of intelligence operations and government politics.
The thing is, prime minister Trudeau took the incident personally and assumed an almost childish approach as he laid into Narendra Modi, the host nation’s prime minister, at the 9 September 2023 G20 summit in Delhi. Although Justin Trudeau has a reputation as a flamboyant political leader, that move clearly violated both the well-established diplomatic rules and the Indian cultural norms. To make matters even worse, prime minister Modi is not the kind of person to take it lightly. He must have felt personally offended, which spurred a series of diplomatic expulsions and démarches.
But the deadly incident resonated with Trudeau on a deeply personal level too. He could not have mounted a different response, and so, he rather opted to escalate things to a diplomatic rift. The thing is that, for decades, the persecuted Sikh community was being consistently championed by the legendary Canadian leader who happened to be the incumbent’s father, the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
In the early-to-mid-1980s, Trudeau welcomed the leaders of the outlawed Sikh groups, including the now-murdered Singh Nijjar, followed by thousands of refugees fleeing Punjab. In the subsequent years, he was advocating for their rights on the global stage, which drove a hitherto nonexistent wedge between Canada and India. Decades later, Justin Trudeau apparently took over his dad’s cause, which has effectively sent the Canada–India relations into a nosedive.
However, this policy seems to be largely at odds with Canada’s national interests against the backdrop of India’s burgeoning economy and its vital role on the international job market. In the early 1980s, Western political elites got hooked on protecting the rights of minorities. When it came to a left-wing, social-democratic or Christian-democratic politician, sticking up for a community persecuted elsewhere became par for the course.
As a result of that political trend, the world’s leading governments were quick to latch on to multiple minority-related causes. Norway befriended the Palestinians. London became the seat of the African national Congress leaders. Sweden sided with the Kurds under Olof Palme, which soured the country’s relations with Turkey. Germany and the Netherlands were helping the Albanians, while Pierre Elliott Trudeau elected to aid the struggling Sikhs. However, born into a family of affluent lawyers, the Quebec native had nothing to do with India, let alone the Sikhs.
The two generations of the Trudeau family have now been attending to the Sikhs’ needs, and that is how the foreign policy of the present-day Canada, a large and wealthy state, has found itself subjugated to the 40-year-old ideological tenets, which defies the country’s pragmatic interests.
It is near-impossible to fix this state of affairs as long as the Trudeaus are the heavy-hitters of Canada’s political elites. It so happens that both in Canada and across much of the Western world, the democratic system has been tailor-made to maintain the old-money elites’ grip on power, and their plight seems inescapable.
Therefore, the ongoing diplomatic rift between Canada and India will only be getting worse. The international feud may include economic sanctions, a trade war, and mutual accusations of failed democracy and violations of minority rights. Which means the relations between the two states may well have been ruined for decades to come, and this is mostly due to the daunting fact that most Western nations put their ideologies above the fundamental security principles observed and advocated elsewhere.