The Mounties take on Modi. Who will win?
Canadian Thanksgiving is usually a sleepy holiday, unnoticed by the rest of the world. Not this year. In a press conference held on October 14th Mike Duheme, the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, accused India’s top diplomat in Canada, Sanjay Kumar Verma, of involvement with a criminal network that has coerced and killed Canadian citizens who support Sikh separatism.
The Washington Post reports Canadian officials saying that Indian diplomats had been collecting information on members of the diaspora, then passing it to India’s Research and Analysis Wing, a spy service, to identify targets. One official reportedly said the operation had been authorised by Amit Shah, India’s home secretary. Indian officials have denied involvement.
The Canadian government immediately ordered Mr Verma and five other Indian diplomats to leave the country. “We cannot abide by what we are seeing right now,” Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, said in a press conference. Indian officials angrily denied the accusations and reciprocated by ejecting six New Delhi-based Canadian diplomats from India. One Indian official says Mr Trudeau’s statement was the “same old Trudeau saying the same old things for the same old reasons”.
Mr Trudeau stunned Canadians in September 2023 when he first alleged publicly that Indian agents had been involved in the shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside a Sikh temple in a Vancouver suburb. India had designated Nijjar as a terrorist and offered a reward for information leading to his arrest. The Indian government said the accusation that they had killed him was ludicrous, and demanded that Canada provide proof.
The Canadians had been attempting to do just that. Mr Trudeau discussed the case with Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, on the margins of the ASEAN summit in Laos on October 10th. Canada then dispatched security officials to Singapore to show evidence to their Indian counterparts. That was an exceedingly rare step in spycraft, according to Ward Elcock, former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, as sharing evidence reveals the capabilities of an intelligence service. The Indians were evidently unmoved.
They were more receptive to similar accusations from the United States, whose government alleged last year that Indian agents had tried to hire a hit-man to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York. Mr Pannun had worked closely with Nijjar on the campaign for an independent Sikh state. Mr Modi has co-operated with the American investigation (the unnamed Indian official mentioned in the United States indictment has now been arrested and charged with running a “murder-for-hire” scheme), but rebuffed Canada’s claims.
“That says that the Indians see Canada as weaklings, while they know they have no choice but to toe the line with the Americans,” says Mr Elcock.
The Canadian authorities believe India was behind other assassinations besides that of Nijjar. Any further revelations bearing that out will mean the United States, Britain and other allies will have to choose between their values and their strategic interests in Asia. ■
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