The very public spat between Canada and India is now in its second week. It began, publicly, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in parliament on September 18 that his government was investigating “credible allegations” that “potentially” linked India to the killing of a militant Canadian Sikh in its province of British Columbia, in June.
That was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, whom nobody denies had dubious links with the underworld in his former home, the Indian state of Punjab, and was radicalized to the idea of Khalistan -- a Sikh free state born of secession from India. The movement is rooted in great political upheaval and violence in Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s.
There has, over the past two years, been a resurgence of such rhetoric in North America and elsewhere, including a controversial “referendum” of expatriate Sikhs. Like Nijjar, his colleagues enjoyed Canada’s liberal freedom of speech and expression guarantees, much to India’s long-time chagrin. India sees Canada as essentially protecting its enemies, including generous legal treatment for those linked to the bombing of an Air India 747 in 1985 en route from Montreal to London that killed all 329 crew and passengers on board -- including several Canadian citizens.
It was an outcome of the engineered and cascading political chaos in Punjab from the 1980s, the creation of Frankenstein’s monsters that cut the puppeteer’s umbilical, the entry into the Golden Temple complex by Indian Army to root out Sikh militants in June 1984 -- universally seen by Sikhs as a desecration of their holiest shrine -- the subsequent assassination Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that October by two Sikh bodyguards, and the ensuing anti-Sikh pogrom in India that killed thousands.
Those dark times have persisted in the memory of many Sikhs, several of whom sought shelter in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Successive governments of Punjab and India have since attempted to brutally stamp out pro-Khalistan sentiments and practitioners at home -- they have been less than successful abroad -- and attempted to engage Sikhs in the conversation of a shared peace and prosperity in a new India, as it were. Pro-Khalistan sentiments have persisted in some hard-line Sikh pockets in Canada, the US and the UK, and it sets the collective teeth of India’s foreign policy and security establishments on edge.
Denial waits
India has strenuously denied Trudeau’s allegations, including his subsequent statement that the intelligence for this alleged India-sanctioned hit was shared with Canada by a member of the so-called Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance that comprises Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.
The unsaid name that has floated about as being capable of the hit the Directorate General of Security. It’s the covert-operations arm of India’s Cabinet Secretariat, which houses the wordy “Research and Analysis Wing,” or R&AW; it handles overseas intelligence. Its de-facto boss is the national security advisor.
In the week since Trudeau’s announcement, Canada, and then India, expelled the other’s station chiefs of intelligence arms. Canada has already held back on expanding trade talks that looked to enhance the bilateral trade that clocked a post-Covid $9 billion in 2022 (about $6-7bn less than India’s bilateral trade with Bangladesh). The agency that handles Indian visa applications in Canada has stopped receiving fresh applications. Canada has officially been asked to scale down its diplomatic personnel in India.
It’s an in-your-face response that has persisted despite Canadian allies like the UK and the US -- also India’s security allies -- suggesting India cooperate with Canada’s investigations.
There seems little likelihood of a near-term climbdown. Besides domestic compulsions, India is emboldened by its place in the “Quad” security dialogue that, besides the US and Australia, has India and Japan on board. It’s among several other trade and security arrangements from Europe to the Indian Ocean region and the Asia-Pacific of which India is a part in the grand design of an anti-China bulwark.
There have been some suggestions, including in the Wall Street Journal, of a moving on predicated on India back-channelling assurances to Canada, the US, and others of the Five Eyes that, it would lay off conducting such black ops on Five-Eyes soil, of which Canada, the UK, and the US -- the UK with a rocky government and the US in election mode -- have strong Sikh-nationalism oriented history and groups. Such assurances are also, evidently, designed as payback for not in any way humiliating Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, even though four of the Five Eyes were present -- including a cold-shouldered Trudeau.
They will need to contend with India’s increasingly absolutist domestic politics and muscular foreign policy -- with the exception of a China led by President Xi Jinping. India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar has even spoken of the wisdom of taking on that vast and powerful country to India’s north with which there are extremely thorny border issues.
But Canada isn’t China and Justin Trudeau isn’t Xi Jinping.
Is it all politics?
Trudeau runs a minority government, and Sikhs, several of them Khalistan-advocates, are political supporters. Canadian federal elections are due in 2025. With that in mind, this past July, Trudeau effected an axe-and-shuffle of three-fourths of his cabinet to shore up voter fatigue, and be seen to combat, among other negatives, a housing crisis, and interest rate and cost-of-living crisis that has spawned the term “Justin-flation.”
Reuters quoted Robert Asselin, senior vice president of policy at the Business Council of Canada as saying that Trudeau’s shuffle was “a bit of theatre.” Besides, with some crucial support to his minority government also being non-binding in nature, such as the one with the New Democrats, strategy calls for Trudeau being in a go-mode for elections and a fourth term. Besides rooting the Nijjar killing in Canada’s Constitutional freedom of speech and practice shrine, the episode will undoubtedly be squeezed for political mileage.
And, as it happens, theatre is India’s go-to tool for the BJP in general and Modi in particular. Stagey politics has ensured Modi’s face on everything from Covid vaccination certificates to nearly every billboard and visual for India’s year-long G20 presidency that began in December 2022 and peaked with the summit earlier this month.
It is unlikely that the Modi government will temper its stand with parliamentary general elections due by April-May 2024. The party machinery is already in election mode to ensure for Modi and a BJP-led coalition a third consecutive term.
While an eventual and quiet scapegoat sacrifice isn’t out of the question to assuage the mood of the Five Eyes, it will be done only with the counter-assurance of keeping a lid on things.
That is foreign policy. At home, the spat with Canada had already begun to be spun as: India will take on the world whenever it needs to. Establishment media has been on overdrive this past week not so much to dissect Trudeau’s accusation. Instead, they have provided unattributed micro-details of Nijjar’s considerable CV of pro-Khalistan statements and connections, his criminal activities in Punjab, and even his “dossier” that “points” to his “links” with the Pakistan’s ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence, for long that country’s sword arm in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere in South Asia.
A former Congress chief minister of Punjab, Amarinder Singh, has railed about how he presented Trudeau, when he visited Punjab in 2018, with what he thought was overwhelming and irrefutable evidence of pro-Khalistan activities that linked Canadian-Sikh citizens and residents. Nothing came off it, Singh insisted to a major Indian newspaper.
Manpreet Badal, a former minister in his government who switched to the BJP early this year, has written of how Trudeau is living in a “world of make believe” and how India is no longer the India of the 1970s and 1980s that is going to roll over in the face of superpower pressure. “Hearing Justin Trudeau level accusations against India in the Canadian Parliament,” wrote Badal, “it felt as though I was listening to a discourse in Pakistan.”
With multiple elections in play, it’s all about having to choose between several devils and the deep sea.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Centre for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He has authored several books on history, ethnography, conflict resolution, and Eastern South Asia. His most recent book is ‘The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India’s Far East’ (Simon and Schuster).
