India is embroiled in a steadily escalating diplomatic spat with Canada. Over a year ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Indian officials of being involved in the assassination of a Sikh community leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in June 2023 and demanded that the Indian government cooperate with Canada in its investigations of the Nijjar murder and other similar attempts.
India rejected the allegations as absurd and accused Canada of harboring Khalistani separatists wanted for terrorism in India. The first iteration of the spat led to the expulsion of diplomats and a reduction in the size of their respective diplomatic presence.
Escalating Crisis
The crisis has continued with periodic flare-ups and has now metastasized into a diplomatic disaster with no easy pathways to early resolution and normalization. For over a year Canada has been demanding that the Indian government cooperate with it in its investigation. The Modi government has responded by insisting that Canada had provided no evidence to substantiate its claims and so there was nothing that the Indian government could do to help.
In the past few weeks the Canadian investigative agencies claimed that they have presented the Indian government with the evidence they have and still India rejected it outright. The Canadians first announced that Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Verma (the highest Indian diplomat in Canada) was a person of interest along with several other diplomats who have since returned to India. According to media reports, Canadian officials met with India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval in Singapore and shared with him the evidence they had gathered.
When they failed to elicit a cooperative response, Canadian law enforcement went ahead and made public their accusations that India and its officials have been involved in assassinations and extortion of Canadian citizens in Canada and also engaging in criminal activity and election interference. The latest escalation in the steady stream of accusations included the revelation by Canada’s Deputy Foreign Minister David Morrison that he had confirmed to the Washington Post that India’s actions, which were tantamount to transnational repression, were ordered by Amit Shah, India’s home minister and the confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Additionally, Canada now sees India as a “cyber threat adversary,” which is probably an attempt to ratchet up diplomatic pressure.
The diplomatic crisis has not yet impacted the economic relations between the two nations. But the battle of narratives continues to escalate. Canada continues to insist that it values good relations with India, but it cannot tolerate the violation of its sovereignty by India’s actions against its citizens.
India has adopted a very dismissive posture toward Trudeau and Canada, treating it as a failing economy and accusing it of neglecting India’s legitimate concerns about anti-India activism, terrorism, and separatism from some members of the Indian diaspora based in Canada. The Indian government has also unleashed a narrative that paints Trudeau as incompetent, a failing leader desperately clinging onto a fragile minority government with the help and support of a party led by a Khalistan supporter, Jagmeet Singh. Singh is the leader of the National Democratic Party, whose support from outside the government in the Canadian Parliament keeps Trudeau in power.
Meanwhile, in a Parallel Universe
Two months after Trudeau’s explosive allegations against India in the Canadian Parliament, U.S. officials filed charges against an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, alleging that he had tried to hire a killer to murder an American citizen on American soil. There was no grandstanding, no public comment from President Joe Biden, but the indictment unsealed in a U.S. Federal Court was pretty damning.
India’s response to these charges was to announce that the Indian government has instituted a high-level inquiry to investigate the information that the United States has shared with the Indian government. The Indian government was responding in a rather mature fashion, respecting the concerns of the U.S. without dismissing them as absurd and promising to take meaningful action.
The contrast in the Indian government’s response to similar charges by Canada was startling. On the U.S. side, the case has progressed without any diplomatic drama. It’s a stark difference from the Canadian case, where each escalating accusation was met with an even more stern dismissal and counter actions such as suspending visas for Canadians wishing to visit India.
Unlike the Canadian government, which has so far only made accusations without sharing any intelligence or evidence that it had gathered to the public, the U.S. authorities continued to move their case forward. With each new step, they dealt a severe blow against the Modi government’s narrative that it was not involved in any transnational repression activities. Most recently the U.S. authorities filed charges against a former Indian intelligence operative for his role in the hire-for-murder plot foiled by the FBI. At every opportunity, U.S. spokespersons insist that India must cooperate with the Canadian investigation and that the U.S. would like to see meaningful accountability.
Gurpatwant Singh Pannu, the target, has now filed a civil lawsuit against the Indian government and has named Doval as one of those behind the plot to kill him. The high-level team that the Modi government instituted to investigate recently visited the United States and shared its findings. This inquiry has not shared its findings with the Indian Parliament or the Indian public.
The U.S. response was to demand meaningful accountability. Vedanta Patel, the deputy spokesperson of the State Department said “certainly the United States won’t be satisfied until there is meaningful accountability resulting from that investigation.”
Power and Diplomacy
The two sets of accusations about the same issue, one from Canada and one from the U.S., and the two entirely different responses that they elicited from India must be for realists, who believe that power is the most important element in world politics, a vindication of their paradigm.
India is judging that it is more powerful and influential in the global order than Canada, which is a member of NATO, the Five Eyes, the G-7, and the G-20. India has thus adopted a combative posture. It is also betting that Canada cannot do much economic damage to India, even though the Canadians have huge investments in India that they could withdraw and have already stalled discussions about a possible free trade agreement. India also seems confident that other Western nations will not undermine their growing relationships with India for Canada.
But with the United States, which India sees as a much more powerful state and a much-needed partner, India’s response is much more subdued and cooperative. To be fair the U.S. has cornered India by extraditing and arresting Nikhil Gupta and initiating legal processes that are not as easy to dismiss as Canada’s efforts, which at the moment are tantamount to mere accusations with no evidence presented in the public domain. S. Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, more or less acknowledged this in a statement to the Rajya Sabha last December, when he stated that the reason for the difference in response was that one nation (the U.S.) provided important “input” while the other (Canada) did not.
The real difference perhaps is that the U.S. was also sharing its input publicly by filing charges in courts, while Canada was doing it in private. Additionally, it also matters that the U.S. is a superpower while Canada is not.
Questions for Indian Policymakers
India has legitimate concerns about the anti-India separatist Khalistan movement and their actions in Canada as well as in India. But trying to use criminals to assassinate Khalistan activists in powerful friendly democracies is not a smart policy, especially given the rather sloppy covert tradecraft displayed by its intelligence agency.
U.S. counterintelligence has not only caught them red-handed but also could garner sufficient evidence to embarrass India and push it into a diplomatic corner. Given that there is no significant Khalistani activism in India, such an aggressive policy of violating a friendly state’s sovereignty is ill-advised. It has brought the Khalistan cause more attention and has damaged India’s reputation as one of the good states in the international arena.
India is compounding the ramifications of its strategic mistake by trying to bully Canada. Its denials appear apocryphal when seen in parallel with the developments in the U.S. side of this issue. India’s combative posture toward Canada undermines its affinity among the Western policy elite and its cooperative posture toward the U.S. makes it look weak in the eyes of the Global South. India needs the West for new technology, advanced weapons, investments, markets for its exports, and allies to balance China and the high-paying jobs its citizens fill in Western countries, sending home billions of dollars in remittances. It cannot jeopardize these interests.
India has mishandled this crisis with Canada and if there is no course correction it might damage India’s international image, diminish its soft power, and create a rift between India on the one hand and Canada and its allies including the United States, which are both members of NATO as well as the intelligence consortium Five Eyes.
If this posture of denial and bravado toward Canada is just to demonstrate that India is a major power, then it is misguided. But if this policy is meant to protect Indian leadership from blame for organizing a campaign of transnational repression, then it undermines Indian national interests by prolonging the crisis.