(On the left, clockwise from left, Narendra Modi, Lawrence Bishnoi, Ajit Doval and Amit Shah. On the right, clockwise from the bottom, Justin Trudeu, Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.)
In a set of charges that are surely unprecedented in the history of diplomatic relations between friendly democratic countries, Canada has accused India of orchestrating a systematic campaign of murder, violence and intimidation against members of the Sikh community on Canadian soil, most of whom are Canadian citizens.
Worse, the Canadian government has said it has “irrefutable evidence” that the Narendra Modi government has used Indian diplomats stationed in Canada as well as the Lawrence Bishnoi criminal gang as part of this campaign. Canadian officials say they have also told India that based on intercepted conversations and messages from Indian diplomats in Canada, they believe the attacks which have taken place in Canada were authorised by Union home minister Amit Shah and a senior official of the Research and Analysis Wing.
In a nutshell, Canada accuses the Modi government of running Putin-style hit squads against its opponents in that country and – to stick to the Russian analogy for a moment – deploying a notorious criminal gang as its tacky equivalent of the Wagner Group, i.e. a private mercenary force tasked with carrying out tricky jobs without any official footprint.
The Canadians have so far placed little to no evidence in the public domain to back up these charges and since the Indian side has used unprecedentedly strong language to deny these accusations, it is hard for us to know what or whom to believe.
While most Indians and Canadians are likely to take the default position of giving their government the benefit of doubt, it is essential that we try to unpack the story into its basic elements and see where the balance of probability lies.
So let’s start at the very beginning.
The Khalistan movement has not posed a security threat to India for more than two decades now. Punjab is peaceful; most incidents of violence there are linked to the rise of criminal gangs and their nexus with the drug trade. Remnants of the old Khalistan movement still exist in Canada, the US and Australia but their hold, even on the Sikh diaspora, is marginal.
There are no doubt Khalistani activists in these countries who still harbour the goal of an independent Sikh state, and who celebrate the terrorism which the Khalistan movement once engaged in, but whom the Indian government is unable to credibly link to acts – or even threats – of violence that would allow it to seek their extradition from these countries. For example, officially, someone like Gurpatwant Singh Pannun is wanted for terrorism in India. But the Indian government in 2022 failed to even convince Interpol that he should be put on a terror watch list.
Over the past two years, Indian diplomats have complained of close proximity demonstrations by Khalistani protestors outside the Indian high commission in Ottawa, including one where some of those who gathered shook the fence outside the high commission, put up posters and released two smoke canisters. India says Canada has not done enough to ensure the safety of Indian diplomatic missions or take action against those advocating separatism and violence. The Canadian side says it is constrained by its own free speech laws. “We have an extremely diverse country and freedom of expression is something that we have,” Justin Trudeau said last year. “But, we will also make sure that we are pushing back against violence and extremism in all its forms.”
If New Delhi’s complaints had given rise to the expectation that the Khalistani activists would soon be striking out at Indian targets, I the form in which violence finally arose took everyone in Canada by surprise.
In June 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Khalistan activist in Surrey, British Columbia, was shot dead by gunmen outside a gurdwara.
The previous year, India’s external affairs minister had cited the mugging and robbery of a Sikh man in Queens, New York as an example of the kind of incident which raised human rights concerns for the Indian government. Yet, curiously, the murder of a Sikh in Canada by assailants who were officially unknown at the time passed by without any Indian disapprobation.
India’s silence over what could easily have been a racist killing assumes significance because three months later, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau stood up before his country’s parliament to say there was “credible intelligence” linking the government of India to Nijjar’s murder. Canada also announced the expulsion of an Indian diplomat from Ottawa.
India angrily dismissed Trudeau’s allegation, accused him of pandering to “vote bank politics” (i.e. Canadian Sikhs) and ordered a downsizing of the Canadian diplomatic presence in India. Relations between Ottawa and Delhi went into a holding pattern thereafter, until the Modi government received another jolt in November 2023, this time from the United States. Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, for conspiring to kill the New York based Pannun, a US citizen. Gupta was accused of working closely with a government security official from India, identified in the indictment as CC-1.
India’s response to the US indictment was muted. Instead of angry fulminations, the government said it had appointed an internal committee to investigate the American charges.
Meanwhile, the Canadians continued with their investigations largely under the radar. In May this year, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the arrest of three men linked to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang whom it identified as Nijjar’s killers. Finally, on October 12, Ottawa dropped a bombshell. At a meeting arranged in Singapore that day, senior Canadian security officials confronted India’s national security adviser, Ajit Kumar Doval, with what they said was evidence linking six Indian diplomats, a senior RAW official as well as Union home minister Amit Shah to violent attacks on Canadian Sikhs.
On October 13, the Canadian government formally asked India to lift diplomatic immunity for its high commissioner in Ottawa and five other diplomats so that investigators from the RCMP could question them about the Nijjar case and other incidents of violence. Canada’s foreign minister said the police had “ample, clear and concrete evidence which identified six individuals as persons of interest in the Nijjar case.” The Indian government rejected this request, leading to the expulsion of its diplomats, followed by the counter-expulsion of six Canadian diplomats from India.
Taking stock of Canada’s charges
The Modi government’s case is that Trudeau is making allegations against India in order to garner support from Sikh voters. Assuming that is so, it is not clear why Trudeau’s purpose would not have been adequately served last year – when he first levelled his accusation – and why he would need to escalate matters again, even suborning the RCMP’s investigations in the process. Besides, there are as many Canadians of Hindu Indian origin as there are of Canadians of Sikh Indian origin and it is not apparent why Trudeau would supposedly court one vote bank by targeting India even if this means angering another vote bank.
“Yes, it is suspicious that this bombshell landed … even as news outlets are reporting that Trudeau is facing a possible backbench revolt,” writes John Ibbitson, a columnist for the Globe and Mail. “It may also be true that Canadian governments have, for partisan political reasons, turned a blind eye to actions by Sikh extremists in Canada.” There is, to Canada’s eternal shame, its shocking failure to prevent the bombing of an Air India flight from Canada to India in 1985 that led to the death of over 300 passengers. But, says Ibbotson, the Indian counter-allegations – i.e. of Trudeau engaging in ‘vote bank politics’ – “could only be true if the Canadian police and government were both completely corrupt and Canadian democracy a sham. The Indian response is the ultimate in gaslighting.”
I’m not a fan of Canadian democracy or of Trudeau but there is no denying the fact that Ibbotson makes a valid point. The Canadian allegations may still not add up but they need to be dealt with on the basis of logic and facts – taking into account certain realities about the way the Canadian law enforcement and judicial system operates – and not by making personal attacks on anyone or suggesting that Canada is some support of banana republic.
In any case, it should be obvious to the Modi government that Canadian investigators have had access to electronic intelligence provided to them by the United States – a country with close strategic ties to India – and it is unlikely that Washington would allow Ottawa to run away with a fabricated narrative that could endanger its own ties with New Delhi.
Let’s not forget US federal investigators have uncovered direct links between the dramatis personae in the Pannun case and the Nijjar killing. The US indictment ties the attempted murder of Pannun to an Indian security official in Delhi, ‘CC1’ and notes that he shared a virtually real-time video of Nijjar’s lifeless body – soon after he was shot dead in Canada – with Nikhil Gupta. The fact that India has told the US it has dismissed and arrested that official gives the latest Canadian accusations a further ring of credibility.
Why is this so? Because if Narendra Modi has now thrown CC1 under the bus for his involvement in the Pannun plot, he can no longer disavow knowledge of the Nijjar killing either. CC1 knows who shot and sent that video. So there was at least one Indian government official with a nexus to the Nijjar murder. That is where the MEA’s statements on Canada fall flat. If there is enough substance in the American allegations in the Pannun case to warrant the sacking and incarceration of a RAW officer, it beggars belief that the Canadian allegations in the Nijjar case are a fantasy conjured up by Trudeau to win Sikh votes.
Given the way the Modi government works, there is no way CC1 was working on his own. He was clearly doing what he was ordered to do by his superiors. Surely, the Modi government can no longer say the US – and Canada – are saying what they are saying only because they want to discredit or tarnish India in some way.
Retired Indian intelligence officials and diplomats I’ve spoken to have all expressed surprise over the Canadian claim that home minister Amit Shah had authorised the attacks under investigation. Shah controls the Intelligence Bureau but foreign actions come under RAW, they say, which reports to NSA Doval and Prime Minister Modi. And then ministers are always careful not to get their own hands dirty in operational matters.
This may be true of the Indian system traditionally but what these assessments fail to take into account are the deep changes that the Modi era has brought about in the functioning of the state. No home minister has enjoyed as much power and clout as Amit Shah does – not LK Advani or even Sardar Patel. With greater power comes greater recklessness. As we know so well from the Sohrabuddin matter, Shah, as the all-powerful home minister in Gujarat at the time, did not flinch from closely interacting with ‘shoot to kill’ police operations.
The fact that Lawrence Bishnoi, who is being held in Ahmedabad jail under a Union home ministry order that doesn’t even allow police officers in other states to easily interrogate him despite his involvement in cases in their domain, suggests a certain degree of official indulgence towards the ‘nationalist’ gangster.
When the trial of the Bishnoi gang gunmen arrested for the Nijjar killing begins, a lot of the evidence the Canadians say they have will emerge. Even if it does not in full, the stage is set for further national embarrassment. A pointer to the storm that is brewing is the official call from each of Canada’s ‘five eyes’ allies that Indian needs to cooperate with the Canadian investigation.
The one imponderable which remains – assuming the Canadian and US allegations are correct – is the question of the Modi government’s motive in undertaking such reckless actions on the soil of friendly countries. Even if the government had convinced itself that the Khalistan movement in North America poses a real and imminent danger – which it patently does not – the risks clearly outweighed the benefits. The only conclusion one can draw is that national security management has become infected with partisan political considerations. And the price for this will be paid by India long after Modi and Shah have left the scene.
Note: This piece was edited on 17 October at 11 am to note that the video of Nijjar’s killing was shared by CC1 with Nikhil Gupta, and not as earlier written, with a hired gunman in New York.
This article was first published on The Wire on Oct 16, 2024.
