Written by 
A little more than a year after Canada set off a diplomatic row with India over the alleged assassination of a Sikh leader and Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, Ottawa has given its accusations new teeth. And now, Canada needs some backup.
Earlier this week, Canadian police accused India’s diplomatic staff in Canada—and the Modi government itself—of coordinating a sustained campaign of violence and harassment against Sikh activists in Canada. After the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the results of their investigation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promptly expelled six Indian diplomats believed to be behind the plots.
India, of course, has denied all these charges.
But Trudeau has had little choice but to confront Prime Minister Narendra Modi over running clandestine operations on Canadian soil. Yet Canada’s allies in the Five Eyes intelligence group—Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have been so concerned about losing India as a bulwark against China, they’ve not exactly leapt to condemn New Delhi. That leaves Canada in an awkward spot.
Ironically, it was pursuing Chinese interference that helped put Ottawa on India’s trail. Following a series of revelations about Canadian politicians’ cozy relationships with Beijing, the Trudeau government embarked on an intense—albeit, at times, quixotic—effort to investigate how foreign states interfere in Canadian politics. It culminated in a large-scale public inquiry that has seen a slew of senior security and intelligence officials testify, ending with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own appearance before the foreign interference inquiry on Oct. 16.
The inquiry has revealed how Canadian intelligence services uncovered a network of Indian officials and their local proxies, which Ottawa alleges have run a clandestine campaign to defeat pro-Sikh politicians in recent elections and illegally funnel money into the coffers of candidates deemed friendly to India. (One likely target had once been a friend of Modi, but defected to the Sikh cause.)
While the inquiry has studied how India meddles in Canadian politics, Canada’s security services have been conducting a parallel investigation.
Last fall, Trudeau announced that Canada had obtained evidence linking the Indian government to the 2023 murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, which occurred outside of a gurdwara (a Sikh temple) in Surrey, British Columbia.
India had long accused Nijjar of being at the head of a Khalistani terrorist network and sought his arrest, which Canada declined to do. Nijjar has always maintained that his movement, which is holding a worldwide referendum on the question of whether Khalistan should gain independence from India, is a peaceful and democratic one. The RCMP now say that their investigation proves that India, not satisfied with the official channels, had its intelligence services hire hitmen to kill Nijjar.
Once he was briefed on India’s alleged involvement in the murder, Trudeau told the foreign interference inquiry that he scheduled a meeting with Prime Minister Modi at the September 2023 summit of the G-20 in Delhi. “I sat down and shared that we knew that they were involved, and expressed a real concern around it,” Trudeau said. “He responded with the usual response from him, which is that we have people who are outspoken against the Indian government living in Canada that he would like to see arrested.”
In Trudeau’s telling, he informed Modi that Canada’s respect for freedom of speech would not allow them to make such an arrest. After a frosty and chaotic exit from the country, Trudeau returned to Ottawa to make the allegations public.
On Oct. 14, a little more than a year after the row began, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme announced that the national police force had obtained evidence that the Indian repression campaign had gone even wider. The RCMP said it had evidence “tying agents of the government of India to homicides and violent acts” as well as evidence of members of the Indian diaspora in Canada being “coerced and threatened into working with the government of India,” and of an intelligence-gathering campaign run against the Canadian government.
As part of its investigation, the RCMP identified “over a dozen credible and imminent threats to life,” Duheme said. The police have arrested eight people in connection with alleged murder plots targeting these Sikh activists, while another 22 people were arrested on related extortion charges.
I asked Duheme whether Canada believes that this kind of transnational repression campaign might be unfolding elsewhere. “I doubt it very much if they [the Indian government] have a different way of operating in different countries,” he said.
Indeed, last year, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had thwarted a plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a New York-based lawyer and one of the main leaders of the global Khalistan independence movement. According to U.S. prosecutors, the same network that ordered Nijjar’s killing also tried to have Pannun murdered. The plot was ultimately foiled, and its alleged hitman was arrested in the Czech Republic. Earlier this month, the FBI arrested a second alleged conspirator, an employee of India’s foreign intelligence service.
Sikh activists have publicly said this kind of pressure campaign is intensifying around the world, not just in North America. And yet, Canada’s allies have been unusually circumspect about the whole affair.
When Ottawa first accused India of having a hand in Nijjar’s murder, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden said it believed that the Modi government should be “seriously” investigating the matter. A year on, after Modi thumbed his nose at the Canadian findings, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller would only say that the United States “wanted to see the government of India cooperate with Canada in its investigation” but that “they have chosen an alternate path.”
The United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have all made public statements in agreement that the allegations are serious, but they have reserved any further judgment until the outcome of Canada’s legal proceedings have concluded.
Most of the alleged conspirators, however, are unlikely to ever stand trial. Canada had requested that diplomatic immunity be waived for six staff members at the Indian high commission, but that request was rebuffed—so Ottawa expelled them.
The international response pales in comparison to the reaction after Russian dissident and former spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned in the United Kingdom in 2018; the U.K. government concluded that the Kremlin was responsible. In both tone and action, the Western world moved quickly and more decisively to punish Moscow’s homicide.
Why is the world tiptoeing around India?
One answer is that political assassinations have become a fact of geopolitics again. Israel’s killing spree against Hamas and Hezbollah operatives in Iran, Lebanon, and elsewhere have been met largely with silence from Western leaders. Both North Korea and Russia have continued assassinating critics abroad, and the world has given up trying to hold them accountable.
The more specific answer is that India is a linchpin of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy and a key part of its plans to contain China’s ambitions in the region. Even as Modi’s government has dismantled critical parts of India democracy, weakened civil liberties at home, and grown closer to the Moscow-led bloc of illiberal countries, Washington has continued forging political and economic ties with New Delhi. Just last month, Biden and Modi inked a deal to beef up semiconductor supply chains between their countries.
It seems increasingly clear that the United States and its allies are holding themselves back from criticizing India—and are far from considering imposing consequences—because they see the strategic benefits outweighing the practical realities of this suspected global campaign of violence and repression.
But this moral compromise is only going to grow more absurd. Unless the international community can impose real penalties for this bad behavior, India and others have no incentive to stop. What’s more, it has targeted the very democratic actors that the West publicly claims to support.
Canada could do more to help itself, of course. Unlike the United States, Canada is cautious about revealing evidence of criminal wrongdoing before a case gets to trial.
When I asked how, when, or even if the totality of this evidence would be made public, Duheme said it was beyond his power. “Our judicial process is not set up that way,” the commissioner said.
The man with the power to release that information—through declassification, if necessary—is Trudeau himself. Given that relatively few eyes have seen the proof that Canada claims to have, the Modi government—which has been shown the evidence—has already gotten traction by insisting that the so-called proof is flimsy and uncompelling.
Media in India has already geared up to attack the allegations. The Indian government initially responded by denying any evidence implicating its diplomatic staff, accusing Trudeau of “hostility” toward India, and alleging that Canada is harboring extremists who put India’s security at risk. The Indian press went further, seizing on the government’s miserable poll numbers, whipping up anti-Sikh fervor against his former governing partner Jagmeet Singh, and trumpeting a minor right-wing Canadian commentator’s outlandish criticism of Trudeau.
Even Canadian columnists have criticized Ottawa’s response, with some of them even parroting India’s line that “Canada has allowed Sikh extremism to flourish” inside its borders.
The world can’t keep equivocating and making excuses for the Indian government. It needs to send a clear message that transnational repression and foreign assassinations are unacceptable—both under international law and as a norm of diplomacy.
At a bare minimum, the Western world needs to start making these criticisms plainly known to Modi. If it wants to go further, it could sanction the senior intelligence officials whom Canada has identified as responsible for running these clandestine operations. Better yet, though, the United Nations could send a message by finally adopting a formal prohibition on the use of political assassinations under international law, raising the possibility of legal proceedings against those who order these murders.
Trudeau argued in his testimony before Canada’s foreign interference inquiry that India’s “violation of sovereignty, of the international rule of law, with extrajudicial killings in a foreign country, in a fellow democracy—was a massive mistake.” In a moral sense, that’s true. But practically, it will only have been a mistake if the West can enact consequences.