A gruelling week for Indian diplomacy began with an explosive Canadian press conference on Monday. Senior Canadian police officials accused Indian diplomats of being involved in “criminal” activities on Canadian soil, ranging from homicide and targeted assassinations to extortion, intimidation and coercion against members of the Canadian Sikh community.
They alleged that Indian diplomats – including the high commissioner himself – were implicated not only in the high profile killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist who was gunned down outside a gurdwara in a suburb of Vancouver last June, but also linked to other murders on Canadian soil. The diplomats had even worked with a gang run by India’s most notorious mob boss to get their dirty work done, they alleged.
Two days later, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau doubled down on the claims. Testifying before a public inquiry, he said Canada had clear intelligence linking Indian diplomats to “drive-by shootings, home invasions, violent extortion and even murder in and across Canada”. India, added Trudeau, had made a “horrific mistake” in violating Canadian sovereignty.
It was a considerable escalation of a diplomatic row that has torpedoed India-Canada relations, beginning last year when Trudeau stood up in parliament and said there were “credible allegations” linking the Indian government to the killing of Nijjar – an accusation India rejected as “absurd”.
Since then, allegations of an India campaign of transnational violence and harassment have emerged not only in Canada but in the US, UK and Pakistan, where prominent Sikh activists say they have received threats to their lives.
Western officials and the Sikh community claim that what has been laid bare is a far-reaching – if often clumsily implemented – policy of transnational repression targeting the Sikh diaspora by the government of prime minister Narendra Modi. Canadian officials reportedly say they have evidence that orders of alleged threats and harassment came from the very top levels of Indian government, right up to the powerful home minister Amit Shah, who is considered Modi’s right hand man.
India has repeatedly rejected all the allegations, emphasising that such killing are not government policy , and Canada’s latest allegations were met with a flurry of outraged denials. New Delhi described the claims as “preposterous imputations” and “ludicrous” statements, and accused Trudeau of a political vendetta. They have also accused Canada of providing a safe haven to Sikh terrorists.
But by Friday morning, India had woken to fresh allegations, this time from the US. An “Indian government employee”, named as Vikash Yadav, was being charged over a plot to murder a prominent Sikh activist and US citizen, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York last year. At the time the murder was planned, Yadav was working as an intelligence official under the office of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and had been a longtime employee of the Indian government.
The new indictment added further details to the alleged assassination plot against Pannun, initially revealed by US department of justice prosecutors late last year.
In what read like the script of a B movie, US investigators alleged that an Indian agent in New Delhi – previously referred to just as CC1 but now revealed as Yadav – had hired an Indian middleman in New York to help orchestrate a plot to murder Pannun. Panuun, a lawyer and US citizen, is a known fireband Sikh separatist and has been designated as a terrorist by the India government.
However, it is alleged the plot was foiled after the assassin Yadav and his middleman recruited to kill Pannun awkwardly turned out to be an undercover US officer. The suspected middleman, named as Nikhil Gupta, fled to the Czech Republic, where he was arrested and later deported back to the US, where he has entered a not guilty plea. On Friday, the FBI released a wanted notice for Yadav and it believed the US will seek his extradition from India, where he is still believed to be “at large”.
India has sought to portray the Indian and Canadian incidents as unconnected but, according to US investigators, they are inextricably linked. As the Pannun murder plot was being planned out, Gupta had mentioned a “big target” in Canada, just days before Nijjar was gunned down, it is claimed. Then, hours after Nijjar’s death, Yadav allegedly sent his middleman a video clip of Nijjar’s dead body.
The justice department made it clear they believed Pannun’s killing was “a grave example” of an increasing trend of transnational repression – a term defined as foreign governments taking violent and illegal actions beyond their own territory. Without directly mentioning the geopolitical implications evidently at play, they also emphasised that they would hold those responsible to account “regardless of their position or proximity to power”.
India is now scrambling to reject allegations that it has become a rogue international actor that has illegally violated the sovereign territory of not one but two of its western allies. Not long ago, such killings were never considered part of India’s intelligence playbook. But since he came to power a decade ago, Modi’s muscular nationalist agenda has come to define his agenda both at home and abroad, as he seeks to push India to superpower status.
In a previous Guardian investigation, which linked India to up to 20 killings over the border in Pakistan since 2020, intelligence officials described how the Modi government had become emboldened to carry out attacks on dissidents on foreign soil. They said Israel’s notorious spy agency the Mossad and the assassination of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in 2018 had been directly cited as examples to follow.
“What the Saudis did was very effective,” an intelligence officer told the Guardian earlier this year. “You not only get rid of your enemy but send a chilling message, a warning to the people working against you. Every intelligence agency has been doing this. Our country cannot be strong without exerting power over our enemies.” Officially, the Indian government has repeatedly denied this is their policy.
In both Canada and the US, the allegations have yet to be proved in a court of law, and Canada has yet to press charges against any Indian government officials, simply naming them as “persons of interest” in the case.
But any authentication of the allegation would confirm there has been a radical reimagining of the role of Indian foreign intelligence agencies under the Modi government. It indicates that Modi’s longstanding domestic suppression of dissent – targeting everyone from opposition politicians to activists and even NGOs – has now transcended international borders, particularly to target Sikhs associated with the separatist Khalistan movement, which is far more prevalent among the diaspora.
There has been a markedly sharp contrast in how India has responded to both cases, which observers say is symptomatic of differing geopolitical agendas. In the case of Canada, where India has bullishly maintained there is no evidence, analysts say relations have sunk so low that India has little to lose by refusing to co-operate with the investigation.
However, India can ill-afford to make a similar enemy of Washington. In the wake of the Pannun indictment, they set up a high level inquiry in to the US allegations, which travelled to Washington this week. India’s foreign ministry also confirmed that Yadav is no longer a government employee.
So far, the White House has sought to tread a similarly careful diplomatic line, in an apparent bid not to alienate India who is an important strategic and economic ally. But in its indictment, the justice department made it clear that it would not let geopolitics interfere in the pursuit of the case.
“To the governments around the world who may be considering such criminal activity and to the communities they would target,” said attorney general Matthew G. Olsen, “let there be no doubt that the Department of Justice is committed to disrupting and exposing these plots.”