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(EXPLAINER) Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s allegation last year that gunmen — acting on behalf of the Indian government — were connected to the assassination of a Sikh separatist leader near Vancouver sent relations between the two nations spiraling.
A year later and the rift has grown worse. Both countries have expelled diplomats, while Canadian authorities have made arrests and alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been involved in a series of violent acts targeting Sikhs across Canada.
But India’s government has denied involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh involved with the Khalistan movement. The movement’s aim is for the creation of an independent Sikh state.
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At the same time, India has accused Canada of providing a safehaven for Sikh separatists and that Trudeau’s government has indulged them for political gain.
Here’s everything you need to know about the growing rift between the two nations:
Nijjar’s murder and fallout
Last June, Nijjar, 45, a supporter of an independent Sikh homeland known as Khalistan, was killed outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver located south of the Fraser River on the U.S.-Canada border.
Born in India, Nijjar immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. He had been labeled a “terrorist” by New Delhi for supporting the separatist Khalistan movement — which calls for the creation of an independent homeland for Sikhs carved from India’s territory.
Sikhs are a small religious group with about 25 million around the world, most of them in India. Canada has a Sikh population of more than 770,000 people, equal to about 2% of the country’s total population. In fact, Canadian Sikhs constitute one of the country’s largest non-Christian religious groups and form the country’s largest South Asian ethnic group.
The vast majority of Sikhs live in Asia, but government figures show that there were 455,000 Sikhs in Canada in 2011 — more than double the 1991 population estimate of 145,000. Almost half of the country’s Sikh’s make British Columbia their home.
The call for a separate Sikh state began in the wake of the fall of the British Empire. In 1940, the first explicit calls for the creation of Khalistan was made in a pamphlet titled “Khalistan.”
Three months later, Trudeau, speaking to the Canadian parliament, said, “Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.”
Last May, four men were arrested in connection with the assassination. The accused, who allegedly played roles as shooters, drivers and spotters on the day Nijjar was killed, remain in a Canadian jail.