Nijjar murder row: India stood up to Canada, but its balancing act now at risk in US

Canada’s decision to confront Delhi with the findings of its investigations, pointing to alleged Indian government involvement in the June 2023 Nijjar killing, comes almost exactly one year after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claims. This is a calculated escalation at a time the shadow of a linked case looms over India’s ties with the United States.

In fact, Canada and the US have acted together on this issue from the start, and are doing so now, as a senior Canadian minister confirmed on Monday. This poses a new challenge in US-India ties at a time of an outgoing administration and political change in Washington DC. 

Prime Minister Trudeau told a press conference late Monday that Canadian officials had shared evidence with India that the RCMP has clear and compelling evidence that Indian agents have engaged in, and continue to engage in, activities that pose a significant threat to public safety. “This includes clandestine information gathering techniques, coercive behaviour targeting South Asian Canadians, and involvement in over a dozen threatening and violent acts, including murder. This is unacceptable.”

The evidence had been shared with India, Trudeau said, but India had rebuffed all Canadian requests for cooperation. “That is why, this weekend, Canadian officials took an extraordinary step. They met with Indian officials to share RCMP evidence, which concluded six agents of the Government of India are persons of interest in criminal activities,” he said. Trudeau also said he had flagged the importance of this meeting to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he met him in Laos at the East Asia summit.

Canada, he said, had been left with only one choice, and that was to deport the six. Earlier in the day, Canada declared the Indian High Commissioner to Ottawa Sanjeev Kumar Verma and five other officials at the mission persona non grata and ordered their deportation. Delhi said on Monday it had “withdrawn” the diplomats. Acting reciprocally, India expelled the Canadian High Commission and five other diplomats and consular staff at the Canadian mission in Delhi.

Hours before Trudeau spoke to the media, Commissioner of the Canadian law enforcement agency Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Mike Duheme told a press conference that Canada's National Security Adviser Natalie Drouin, deputy foreign minister David Morrison and the deputy commissioner of the RCMP, met National Security Adviser Ajit Kumar Doval over the weekend and confronted him with evidence of the involvement of several Indian government officials, including India's High Commissioner Sanjeev Verma, in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023.

The Washington Post reported that the meeting took place in Singapore on October 12, and that the Canadian team told Doval that the Indian officials were using the services of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang for their alleged “criminal” acts. The newspaper also named Union Home Minister Amit Shah as one of the Indian officials mentioned in conversations and texts exchanged by Indian diplomats as having authorised intelligence-gathering missions and attacks on Sikh separatists.

The RCMP Commissioner alleged that the activities of the Indian government agents posed a significant threat to public safety in Canada. He said investigations had yielded “significant amount of information about the breadth and depth of activity orchestrated by agents of the Government of India and consequential threats to the safety and security of individuals living in Canada”.

The downgrading of ties between Ottawa and Delhi is an unprecedented row in the history of India’s ties with any country barring its neighbours. Despite the resentment over Canada’s embrace of Khalistani activists, India’s ties were friendly if not warm over the decades. India’s first nuclear test in 1974 was carried out with plutonium from a Canadian-made reactor given in 1954. A massive Indian diaspora, not confined only to the Sikh community, lives in Canada, forming over 5 percent of the country’s population. 

India has denounced the “preposterous imputations” as a part of Trudeau’s “vote bank politics”, and said it had “withdrawn” its diplomats in Ottawa, after receiving “diplomatic communication” from Canada that they were “persons of interest” in a matter related to an investigation in that country. It did not mention the Nijjar case or the meeting in Singapore. 

The Indian statement lauded Verma as India’s most senior diplomat with a four-decade career in the Indian Foreign Service. This is the first time that the reputation of a senior Indian diplomat has been tarnished in this way. Even Pakistan has not hurled such accusations at top Indian envoys posted in Islamabad.

US-Canada lockstep

The India-Canada showdown comes days after the conspicuous absence of National Security Adviser Ajit Kumar Doval from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s entourage to Washington DC for the Quad summit, and for bilateral meetings with outgoing President Joe Biden.

Days ahead of the visit, a court in New York issued summons to Doval and former head of R&AW Samant Goel for their alleged involvement in a bid to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Khalistan activist and a US citizen. Delhi tried to put on a brave face. The official explanation for Doval's absence was that he was required in India to oversee the J&K elections.

Modi's visit to the US was jolted by another development. Two days ahead of his arrival in the US, Biden held a meeting with representatives of the Sikh community at the White House to discuss threats facing them in the US, including the foiled assassination of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

If the Indian side protested, there is no public record of it. While Delhi shows no hesitation in tough talking Canada, brushing off the evidence as “unsubstantiated”, it has not been able to stand up to the US with similar anger.

On Monday, as the India-Canada row was unfolding, the US State department said an Indian team would be visiting the US on October 15 in connection with the Pannun case. The team was set up by Delhi after the foiled bid to assassinate Pannun came to light after the Department of Justice framed charges in November 2003 against the two accused, an Indian national named Nikhil Gupta, and an unnamed government official.

“The Enquiry Committee will be travelling to Washington, DC on October 15, as part of their ongoing investigations to discuss the case, including information they have obtained, and to receive an update from US authorities regarding the US case that is proceeding,” the office of the spokesperson at the US State Department said.

“Additionally, India has informed the United States they are continuing their efforts to investigate other linkages of the former government employee and will determine follow up steps, as necessary,” the spokesperson’s office said.

Speaking at yesterday’s press conference in Ottawa alongside Trudeau, Canadian foreign minister Joly sought to emphasise that the incident in Canada was far more serious than the Pannun case. In Canada, she alleged, Nijjar was killed, sitting diplomats were involved in the crime, and the violence against the South Asian community increased after that incident. She said in both cases, it had been difficult to get Indian cooperation in the investigation. She stressed that India must engage with Five Eyes, the security alliance between US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia. 

Another minister present at Trudeau’s press conference, Domin LeBlanc, who heads the Ministry of Public Safety, Democratic Institutions and Intergovernmental Affairs, said he had spoken to the US attorney general and briefed him on the RCMP investigation.

In an apparent effort to separate the Nijjar and Pannun case and insulate its relationship with the US in the developing row with Canada, Delhi has reportedly communicated to Washington that it has arrested an Indian government official identified in the Pannun case indictment as CC1. The Washington Post had previously identified CC1 as Vikram Yadav, serving in R&AW on deputation from a paramilitary organisation.

Trudeau’s political stakes

For the politically embattled Trudeau, who heads a minority government after it lost the support of an important ally, the National Democratic Party headed by Jagmeet Singh, and faces a tough election by October 2025, the Nijjar case has been a godsend opportunity that plays to the sentiments of Canada's Sikh diaspora, a mainstream political constituency.

Last week, after he and Modi met at the East Asia summit in Vientiane, the Laos capital, Trudeau told the Canadian media that he “emphasised that there is work that we need to do…the safety of Canadians and upholding the rule of law is one of the fundamental responsibilities of any Canadian government, and that’s what I'll stay focused on”. By one account, Trudeau had “ambushed” Modi. Quoting unnamed sources, Indian media reported that there was no “substantive” discussion between the two leaders.

At the Singapore meeting, held the day after the October 11 “brief exchange” between the two leaders in Laos, the Canadian team presented Doval with evidence of the “criminal activities” of Indian diplomatic and consular staff, the RCMP chief said. According to him, these activities had reached such a level that “despite law enforcement's actions, the harms had continued posing a serious threat to our Public safety” and “a point was reached when we felt it was imperative to confront the Government of India and inform the public” about the findings of the investigation.

Trudeau is scheduled to appear before a Foreign Interference Commission later this week. Interference by foreign powers in Canadian politics and elections by influencing prominent members of the country’s many diaspora groups and elected representatives has roiled  the country over the last two years. Last week, Canadian foreign minister Melanie Joly told the Commission that while interference by Russia and China were a worry, she also worries about India’s activities in Canada.

Joly later told reporters that after Nijjar’s killing, she remained concerned about more deaths as there was “no cooperation” from India on the issue.

Challenges ahead

India has framed the showdown as a problem with the Trudeau government. Trudeau’s “hostility to India has long been in evidence,” the Indian statement on Monday said. “His Cabinet has included individuals who have openly associated with an extremist and separatist agenda regarding India. His naked interference in Indian internal politics in December 2020 showed how far he was willing to go in this regard,” It also pointed attention to the Khalistani links of Jagmeet Singh, who was in Trudeau's cabinet until the NDP left the coalition recently.

Delhi’s political signalling may be picked up by the Canadian opposition at this point. But it may be tricky to assume that a different government may not pursue the Nijjar investigation with the same vigour as Trudeau. Governments and politicians may forget, but states have a long memory.

The immediate challenge is with regard to the nearly 2 million Indian diaspora in Canada. Many are Canadian citizens, or Permanent Residents. Plus there are tens of thousands of Indian students. At the people to people level, Canada remains the destination of choice for many Indians who believe they would be able to make a better life outside their own country.

Since the Nijjar case cast a shadow on ties with Canada, leading to both sides reducing consular staff last year, visa services were the first to be hit on both sides, leaving students, parents, Canadian citizens without OCI cards, and Indians needing Canadian visas high and dry.

The fallout on relations with the US would also be a concern for Delhi. So far, India has managed to present the Pannun case as a small distraction to the greater purpose of building a solid partnership with Washington. The billowing controversy may singe trust on security issues between the two. 

Embarrassment in Pakistan

The row has come at a time when External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is visiting Pakistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation heads of government meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday.

While the Indian Prime Minister attends the organisation’s heads of government summits, the decision to send a cabinet minister of international standing to Islamabad was both a signal to Washington DC and to the two prime movers of the SCO, Moscow and Beijing, that Delhi takes its balancing act seriously.

But the allegations by a Western country against India's security apparatus are bound to be a source of embarrassment as Jaishankar engages with China and Russia at the security-focussed forum in territory that is both unfamiliar to him and unfriendly to India. While Canada’s allegations dent Delhi’s self-image as a vishwamitra or vishwaguru, they conversely put India in the same category of countries that assassinate and in other ways target political dissidents abroad – Russia, China, Saudi, and Pakistan. In that sense, Jaishankar will be in good company in Islamabad.

The issue may dominate media coverage of Jaishankar’s presence in Pakistan, the first by an Indian foreign minister in nine years. After the Pannun and Nijjar cases became public, Pakistan made its own allegations about how Indian security agencies were carrying out assassinations on its soil. Those may get a fresh airing now.

Update on Oct 17: This piece has been updated to include a correct list of countries part of the Five Eyes grouping.

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