Nitish Pahwa
Justin Trudeau speaks in the House of Commons in Ontario on Tuesday.
On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stunned the world by all but accusing India of conducting an assassination on his country’s soil. Speaking in Parliament, Trudeau provided an update on his government’s investigation into the June murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh-separatist “Khalistan” activist and Canadian citizen who was shot and killed in his truck by two masked gunmen in the British Columbia town where he served as president of a local gurdwara. “Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India” and the circumstances of Nijjar’s killing, Trudeau informed the public. “Last week, at G20, I brought them personally, and directly, to Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi in no uncertain terms.”
The statement sent shockwaves across the globe even before Canada’s foreign affairs minister announced that the country was booting “a senior Indian diplomat” named Pavan Kumar Rai in connection with the investigation. India’s government then put out multiple statements on Monday referring to the allegations as “absurd” and accusing Canada of “threaten[ing] India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” subsequently returning the diplomatic favor by giving an unnamed senior Canadian official five days to leave the subcontinent. Trudeau said on Tuesday that he’s “not looking to provoke or escalate” the already thick tensions between his country and India, but undeniably, his disclosure has inflamed suspicions and rage across a complex geopolitical web—among Nijjar’s family and friends, among the vibrant Sikh diaspora in Canada, among the nations allied with both sides, and among Modi-loyal Indians taken aback by the Canadian PM’s audacity. The White House has already said it’s “deeply concerned about the allegations,” and further stated that “it is critical that Canada’s investigation proceed and the perpetrators be brought to justice.”
Who was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and how did his death become the center of a global conflict? How much does Canada know? And why is India even involving itself with so many people across the world who are not its citizens? Some answers.
Why was Hardeep Singh Nijjar killed, and why was it so significant?
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was a Punjab-born Sikh who’d emigrated to Canada, where he became a citizen, owned a plumbing business, and presided over a local temple in Surrey, British Columbia, that’s named for the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak. While Nijjar was a beloved member of Canada’s Sikh population—which is the second largest of any country in the world, after India’s—he was legally perceived in his former country as a “terrorist,” thanks in large part to his advocacy for clawing back parts of the North Indian state of Punjab and establishing a sovereign state for the region’s Sikhs, to be known as Khalistan.
What’s Khalistan?
The roots of the Khalistan concept lie in the waning years of British-ruled India, as the prospect of independence came into view. By the 1940s, it was clear that any postcolonial arrangement would have to include demarcations for separate Hindu- and Muslim-specific nations, as tensions between the two religious groups had long been inflamed by colonial duress. Many of India’s Sikhs, who hold roots in Punjab dating back to their religion’s 15th-century founding, similarly desired a country of their own, with borders encompassing the entirety of Punjab and other parts of North India. This obviously did not come to pass, and when Punjab’s territory was split between India and Pakistan in 1947, the overwhelming majority of Sikhs made the treacherous Partition journey to settle within India. Several residents still pined for a separate state, leading India’s Parliament to establish Sikh- and Hindu-dominated states in the north, respectively recognized as Punjab and Haryana, by 1966. This did not stem the clamor, especially since then–Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to grant Punjab the kind of special autonomy that was given to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. Going into the 1970s, idealistic Indian Sikhs took advantage of relaxed immigration laws to settle in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, spreading the Khalistan idea across the globe.
By the 1980s, the movement had taken on a militant bent, with the most fervent separatists engaging in bombings and shootings that injured and killed hundreds of Hindu and anti-Khalistan Punjabis. The issue hit crisis mode in 1984, when Gandhi sent army and police forces to Punjab’s Golden Temple—the holiest place of worship for Sikhs—because the most murderous Khalistan-movement factions were hiding out there. A shootout ensued, leading to brutal casualties not only among the fighters but also of several Punjabi civilians, only further stoking regional anger against the government. A few months later, Gandhi’s own Sikh bodyguard murdered her in retaliation, spawning retaliatory pogroms across North India that killed thousands of Sikhs and appeared to have been encouraged by the then-ruling Congress Party. The violence reached Canada the year after, when revenge-seeking Khalistan militants based there assembled and planted a bomb on Air India Flight 182, which exploded over the Atlantic Ocean while traveling from Montreal to London and killed all of the aircraft’s occupants, including both Canadian and Indian citizens.* (This horrific attack, the worst of its kind in Canadian history, remains the primary example of Khalistani terrorism abroad; that same day, another Air India–targeted bomb exploded in Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, killing two staffers.) Punjab continued to erupt in both pro-Khalistan and anti-Sikh violence throughout the decade, which both heightened government crackdowns and reduced popular support for the movement within Punjab; however, many Sikh individuals and groups located both within and outside of India have professed their continued desire for a Khalistan state.
So was Nijjar involved in … any of that?
Not in that fraught history, no—he was only a teen by the time Khalistan-linked chaos quieted in the early 1990s. But Nijjar had been targeted time and again by the Modi administration, which kept tabs on the Sikh diaspora and their Khalistan cause sympathizers. Nijjar was an organizer with the Canadian arm of Sikhs for Justice, a U.S.-based pro-Khalistan organization that’s attempted to hold Congress Party members accountable in international courts for the anti-Sikh violence of the 1980s. After it was banned from India in 2019, SFJ called for its myriad outposts to hold a referendum in favor of Punjab’s secession from India, garnering ample support in Canada. This collective activism among Canadian Sikhs has long provoked India’s ire, spurring decadeslong tensions between Indian and Canadian leaders; Canadian PMs of all ideological persuasions have long rebuffed India’s requests to censor or surveil pro-Khalistan Sikhs, since they never evolved into anything resembling the ’80s-era Indian militias.
Nevertheless, under Modi’s reign, India has continued to monitor and target Khalistan supporters abroad. In 2016, its government told Canada that Nijjar specifically was running a militant training cell near Vancouver, and that he was wanted in India in connection with a fatal 2007 movie theater bombing. (In 2014, all suspects accused in that case were cleared of their charges.) When a Vancouver Sun reporter tracked him down, Nijjar denied all the allegations, mentioning that he’d been living in Canada for decades and was “too busy” with his family and career to get involved in such things. Yet India kept up its pursuit of Singh. In 2018, Punjab’s chief minister at the time, Amarinder Singh, welcomed Trudeau to his state and presented him with a list of “wanted” criminals that named Nijjar—who was later taken into custody by Canadian police only to be released after 24 hours with no charges. Nijjar did not deny his support for pro-Khalistan groups, but he maintained his innocence against India’s terrorism charges, claiming he was “being targeted and framed in false criminal cases.” In 2020, India officially deemed Nijjar a terrorist, linking his pro-Khalistan activism to the widespread farmers’ protests that the national government was (unsuccessfully) attempting to crush. Last year, India’s counterterrorism agency accused Nijjar of being involved in an attack on a Hindu priest and promised a monetary award to anyone who could help authorities arrest him. After Nijjar’s murder on June 18, the World Sikh Organisation of Canada claimed that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had warned him long in advance that he could be the target of an assassination plot.
Was there any proof for all the accusations against Nijjar?
No firm proof as far as we can ascertain. There were multiple Indian government and police reports written so as to charge Nijjar in these acts, but no supplementary evidence was released to the public.
Why did India target him so voraciously, then?
The Modi administration often makes the Khalistan movement a scapegoat and a justification for crackdowns whenever protests have roared up against the prime minister’s authoritarian, bigoted rule. Organizers of protests as varied as 2019’s nationwide uprisings against Islamophobic legislation, 2020’s rallies of farmers against government rollbacks of agricultural safety nets, and even this year’s mobilization of women wrestlers against institutional sexual harassment—they’ve all been accused by Modi allies, sans evidence, of being primarily linked to or driven by pro-Khalistan soldiers. This spring, when Punjabi police embarked on a manhunt to apprehend the militant pro-Khalistan ringleader Amritpal Singh Sandhu, and were countered by disapproving local Sikhs, they mass-arrested hundreds of those dissenters and shut down digital communication networks across the state for days. This suppression spread beyond Punjab’s and India’s borders: The Modi administration, never reluctant to block a tweet it didn’t like, ordered Twitter to obscure hundreds of accounts from Indian view, including those belonging to the Pakistani government, which India accused of funding current-day Khalistan movement terrorists, and to Canadian member of Parliament Jagmeet Singh, himself a Sikh who’d attended pro-Khalistan rallies before entering politics.
So on one end, there is India’s persistent chasing of anyone and everyone it considers a pro-Khalistan gunman. Then there is India’s particular beef with Canada, its Sikhs, and their pro-Khalistan rallies, which recently have been as peaceful as Punjab’s ’80s insurgencies were bloody. It’s also worth noting that Indian officials have felt empowered under Modi to flex their power on the international stage, coddled as the country is by powerful allies of all stripes, like the U.S. and Russia. Indian diplomats have spurned American politicians who call out the Modi era’s human rights abuses, persuaded British royals not to trot out their Indian-origin crown jewels during this year’s coronation, and refused to cut ties with Russia after it invaded Ukraine, to the exhaustion of Western allies who’ve begged the country to take a firm pro-Ukraine stance. And yes, the government has stripped citizenship from and detained U.S.-based Indian-origin journalists. This is the first time India’s been accused of an out-and-out foreign assassination, however—perhaps an indication that Modi and his goons stand to benefit from the impunity afforded to despots like Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia who approved the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
To sum it up: India’s single-minded pursuit of anyone associated with the wide-spanning arms of the Khalistan movement, plus its willingness to confront and target Indians in foreign countries, made for a formula that could encourage India to chase whomever it liked, no matter how unsupported the individual charges. And if Indian diplomats were indeed behind Nijjar’s murder, they probably felt better about carrying out such an act in Canada, a country of which they aren’t too fond.
They’re that mad at Canada because of Khalistan-sympathizing Sikhs?
Indeed. To be clear, there are plenty of Sikhs worldwide who don’t necessarily want a Khalistan state, but they are opposed to how India goes after those alleged to be Khalistan supporters, which they see as pure persecution of Sikhs by Modi’s Hindu-nationalist regime. Throughout the Modi years, India-Canada relations have chilled as India-U.S. relations have warmed. When Trudeau expressed concern in late 2020 over India’s suppression of the farmers’ protests, the subcontinent characterized his remarks as straight-up “interference” in Indian affairs. (However, the farmers themselves appeared to welcome Canadian solidarity.) Finally, of course, there was the Group of 20 Summit in New Delhi, where Modi confronted Trudeau over anti-Modi Sikh rallies while Trudeau, as we now know, confronted Modi over Nijjar’s killing.
It seems Canada isn’t yet releasing any hard evidence on India’s role in the killing. So why did Trudeau make such a loud announcement?
Reportedly, correspondents for the Globe and Mail newspaper heard about Canada’s suspicions of Indian involvement from “national-security sources” and contacted Ottawa officials for confirmation. When it became clear the paper was going to publish the story no matter what, Trudeau decided to make the public announcement on Monday, after which the piece finally published. On Tuesday, Trudeau elaborated that “Canadians have a right to know and need to know when things are going on like this. And that’s why we made the decision to [reveal] this.”
What … happens now?
It’s hard to say. As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, Canada had asked friends like the U.S. earlier this summer to condemn Nijjar’s murder, only for them to decline; nations like the U.K. and Australia are now issuing delicate statements over the matter without implying that India’s to blame for anything.
Meanwhile, the already fraught Canada-India relationship appears destined to crumble even further. On Monday, Canadian Sikhs posting about Nijjar’s death on Facebook had their posts taken down and accounts suspended; some were restored after the account holders appealed to Meta. Meanwhile, Canada updated its travel advisory for the subcontinent, asking citizens to avoid traveling to Jammu and Kashmir; in turn, India issued an advisory Wednesday asking Indians traveling to or residing in Canada to “exercise caution.” Sikhs in British Columbia alternately expressed relief that Canada finally appeared to acknowledge India’s aggressive silencing of pro-Khalistan voices, while lamenting that it took a stone-cold murder to bring that interference to light. Nijjar’s son told Canadian media Tuesday that he and his family had always suspected the Indian government was behind his father’s death, and said he hoped Canada could uncover the “specific individuals” involved.
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