OTTAWA — India’s envoy to Ottawa says Canadians who advocate for a separate Sikh homeland in India’s Punjab region are a “national security threat” and a “red line” in bilateral relations as diplomatic tensions between Canada and the government of Narendra Modi continue.
Speaking in Montreal on Monday, High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma said India does not recognize dual nationality, and that Indians who adopt Canadian citizenship are “foreigners” who have no right to weigh in on matters of Indian politics.
“So the foreigners having, if I can call it, (an) evil eye on the territorial integrity of India, that is a big red line for us. Indians will decide what will happen to India. Indians will decide the fate of India, not the foreigners,” he said.
Canadian government ministers pushed back against India’s claim — repeated on the weekend by its foreign minister — that Ottawa is soft on extremists, saying Canadians of all origins have a right to peacefully express political opinions.
Friday’s arrest of three Indian nationals charged with last June’s shooting death of Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in B.C. did little to ease an international dispute that broke into the open in September. That’s when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first publicly accused Modi’s government of being tied to Nijjar’s shooting death outside a Surrey gurdwara. At the G20 summit in India a week earlier, Trudeau had privately levied the same accusation with Modi personally, and called on Modi’s government to co-operate with the police investigation.
But there’s little evidence of such co-operation. The RCMP said last week that working with Indian counterparts is an ongoing challenge. On Tuesday, as the three men facing charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder appeared in a B.C. court via video conference, demonstrators carried signs bearing the faces of the three suspects and the slogan, “Indian agents arrested.”
Nijjar was actively organizing referendum support for the creation of a Sikh homeland called Khalistan, part of a wider effort in Indian communities abroad that the Indian government condemns.
The Modi government had blacklisted Nijjar as a separatist extremist and demanded evidence from Canada to support Trudeau’s contention that he was killed by agents acting at India’s behest.
Friday’s formal criminal charges did nothing to change India’s tone.
On the weekend, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said Canada’s tolerance of extremists is the “biggest problem.”
Jaishankar said the governing Liberals and other, unspecified political parties “pander” to Sikh separatists for votes, and “have given these kinds of extremism, separatism, advocates of violence a certain legitimacy in the name of free speech.”
“Somebody may have been arrested, the police may have done some investigation, but the fact is (a) number of gangland people, (a) number of people with organized crime links from Punjab have been made welcome in Canada,” he said.
“These are wanted criminals from India, you have given them visas … and yet you allow them to live there.”
On Monday, Verma said he was concerned about “national security threats emanating from the land of Canada. These threats are largely emanating from the Canadian citizens.”
He said if “Indians living abroad want to decide the fate of India, better to go back and participate in the election process.”
Verma went on to say officials are working through “diplomatic channels” to resolve the “concerns of both sides,” and that trade in goods and services between the two countries is nevertheless increasing.
Asked to respond to the Indian government’s long-standing and repeated claim that Canada is lax on Sikh extremists, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland emphasized “every single person in Canada” enjoys a “fundamental right in our democracy, which is the right to freely express yourself,” along with the right to feel “safe and secure.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told reporters that “our job is to protect Canadians, and we stand by the allegations that a Canadian was killed on Canadian soil by Indian agents.”
Joly declined further comment on the ongoing RCMP investigation into Nijjar’s death.
The lengths India will go to interfere or influence Canadian political discussion were laid out in an interim report on foreign interference released Friday by inquiry commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue, although it dealt only with elections meddling.
“Indian officials, including Canada-based proxies, engage in a range of activities that seek to influence Canadian communities and politicians,” Hogue wrote.
“India views part of these communities as fostering an anti-India sentiment, and represents a threat to Indian stability and national security. India does not differentiate between lawful, pro-Khalistani political advocacy and the relatively small Canada-based Khalistani violent extremism. It views anyone aligned with Khalistani separatism as a seditious threat to India. Targets of Indian foreign interference are often members of the Indo-Canadian communities, but prominent non-Indo-Canadians are also subject to India’s foreign influence activities. These activities may not be directed at influencing Canada’s democratic institutions, but are still significant.”
Using proxies in Canada obscures “any explicit link between India and the foreign interference activities,” she concluded.
Hogue concluded that India “directed foreign interference activities related to the 2019 and 2021 general elections” through Indian proxy agents, including through “the clandestine provision of illicit financial support to various Canadian politicians as a means of attempting to secure the election of pro-India candidates or gaining influence over candidates who take office. In some instances, the candidates may never know their campaigns received illicit funds.”
On Tuesday, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an attorney and spokesman for Sikhs for Justice who worked with Nijjar to build support for an independent Sikh state in India’s Punjab region, said in an open letter that the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations should not have invited Verma to speak. It said India’s top diplomat in Canada should be arrested and prosecuted as responsible for the interference Hogue documented, and for the death of Nijjar.
With files from Mark Ramzy and The Canadian Press
