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Canadians manage to give Modi a headache for a change
For years, Justin Trudeau’s government failed to manage foreign interference in Canadian politics, with officials struggling to explain how they failed to see or act on intelligence reports. It got so bad that frustrated Canadian spies started leaking damaging tidbits, forcing the prime minister to call a public inquiry.
Canada has one of the world’s highest proportions of foreign-born citizens, which leads to lively grassroots diaspora politics, but it has failed to set up adequate protections against outside influence. It is only now setting up a foreign agent registry, for example, and the gaps appear to have been taken advantage of by foreign powers, particularly China and India.
Trudeau has been accused of turning a blind eye to Chinese interference and being too close to separatist Canadian Sikhs, while his Conservative opponents are accused of being too close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Trudeau and his officials have been on the defensive for years, struggling to explain their inadequate measures while trying to rectify them. But on Monday, his team showed a sign of progress as it took a series of carefully orchestrated steps designed to push back at Modi.
First, Canada announced it had expelled six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma. In New Delhi, after being summoned by India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Canadian Deputy High Commissioner Stewart Wheelertold Indian journalists that Canada had provided “credible, irrefutable evidence of ties between agents of the government of India and the murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.”
Next, senior Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers said they had “evidence pertaining to agents of the government of India’s involvement in serious criminal activity in Canada,” including “well over a dozen credible and imminent threats to life.”
Then, a steely-eyed Trudeau held a news conference outlining the allegations and complaining that India had failed to cooperate with Canadian police and public safety officials. “We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil,” Trudeau said.
Finally, officials worked the phones, giving off-the-record details to national security reporters in Ottawa and Washington, adding lurid details to the broad picture already laid out by the police and politicians.
Speaking off the record, Canadian officials told journalists that Indian diplomats have been forcing Indian Canadians to spy on one another, using money, visas, and threats for leverage, then sending the information back to India, where a senior official “authorized the intelligence-gathering missions and attacks” on people Modi wanted to be targeted. An unnamed Canadian official told the Washington Post that the senior official in India was Amit Shah, Modi’s right-hand man.
India denounced the “preposterous imputations” and blamed “vote bank politics,” Indian shorthand for Trudeau’s reliance on Sikh Canadian voters. India has often accused Canada of being soft on Sikh separatists, alleging that it harbors terrorists, blaming the Canadians for ignoring Indian warnings that might have prevented the 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 people.
On their face, the Canadian allegations seem too outlandish to be true. Officials allege that the attacks in Canada were carried out by thugs controlled by famous gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, who is directing assassins on behalf of his masters in the Modi government even while he sits in a Punjab prison cell. The targets include supporters of an independent Khalistan and other people who have gotten on the wrong side of Modi.
India has been demanding evidence of criminality since September 2023, when Trudeau accused Modi of being behind the murder of Canadian Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down by a hit squad outside a temple in British Columbia that June. Back then, India scoffed and falsely accused Trudeau of being coked up, acting as though Canada was making up lies.
Going to see Uncle Sam
But last November, an indictment was unsealed in New York that revealed Indian national Nikhil Gupta, acting on behalf of Modi’s government, had allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill Nijjar’s lawyer, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. India’s bumbling 007s made two big mistakes. Pannum is an American citizen, so the Americans could hardly let that slide. And the hitman Gupta tried to hire was actually an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency officer.
Gupta is now in a US prison, and officials in Canada and the police must now have a thick dossier linking India to other assassination attempts, including that of Nijjar.
Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a lecturer at Yale University, says Modi can’t afford to be seen to have angered Uncle Sam.
“There will hardly be any damaging political consequences for Mr. Modi unless the United States decides to pursue its case very very strongly and embarrass India,” says Singh.
“Then it would make a material difference to how Mr. Modi is perceived.”
Trudeau showed his cards just as Indian officials were arriving in Washington this week to help the Americans with their inquiries in the Gupta case, maximizing the impact and embarrassing Modi on the world stage.
One of the most surprising things about the whole affair is that India seemingly did not dial down its activities after Trudeau called them out last year: Canadians allege that a recent attack against a popular singer was linked to Indian intelligence.
What does this mean for Modi?
So far, it’s a murky, inconclusive mess. The Canadians, of course, have proved nothing, and Trudeau’s back is to the wall as he’s facing growing pressure at home to step down as Liberal Party leader. In testimony at the inquiry on Wednesday, he went after his Conservative opponents, linking them to foreign interference, which lends credence to Indian allegations that he is just trying to save his own skin.
But allies have not expressed skepticism about the evidence the Canadians have shared. The US State Department seems unimpressed by India’s failure to cooperate with Canadian authorities, as do the UK and Australia.
Experts think this is a headache for Modi, but it is unlikely to blow up the significant strategic and trade relations between India and its Western friends.
“The US is likely to deliver a clear message to India about interfering in the internal affairs of allied democracies, especially Washington’s trusted Five Eyes partners,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group.
“But it’s also going to seek to contain the fallout from Delhi’s dispute with Ottawa with an eye to the bigger strategic prize: alignment with India as an essential partner to counter China.”
Behind the scenes, Canada’s allies can be expected to twist arms to try to get the Indians to call off their hit squads. If they don’t, they can expect police and intelligence agencies to keep a close eye on their diplomats, even while military and economic ties grow stronger.
Biden wants to take away Modi’s license to kill
Before Narendra Modi became prime minister, he said India should be quicker to kill terrorists outside its borders – carrying out extrajudicial assassinations on foreign soil, giving his spies the license to kill, James Bond-style.
An indictment unsealed in New York on Wednesday suggests that Modi did do that, and then angrily denied responsibility for an assassination in Canada.
Modi is popular enough in India that this should not dent his popularity or threaten his reelection bid next spring, but the news raises challenges for him internationally, not least with Canada, whose leader has been vindicated.
The US indictment alleges that on June 9 an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, arranged for a payment of $15,000 to an American hitman to carry out a $100,000 murder contract on Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader who lives in the United States. The problem for Gupta, and Modi, is that the “hitman” was an undercover officer with the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
Eight days later, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh separatist leader, called Pannun, who was his lawyer, to tell him that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had just warned him his life was in danger. The next day, Nijjar was gunned down by a team of killers outside his gurdwara in Surrey, B.C. That night, the indictment says, Gupta sent a video of Nijjar’s bullet-riddled corpse to the fake hitman he had hired.
The next day, he messaged again — “we have so many targets” — and urged him to take out Pannun.
Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic later in June on murder-for-hire charges.
The indictment alleges an Indian government official — presumably a senior spy — “directed the assassination plot from India” and that three more assassinations were planned in Canada.
This indictment makes everything that India has said since look ridiculous. When Justin Trudeau announced in September that Canada suspected Indian involvement in Nijjar’s death, Modi’s government responded with furious denials and expelled 41 Canadian diplomats. India’s media attacked Trudeau, even accusing him of being coked out in New Delhi for the G20 meeting, an entirely made-up allegation that nonetheless went viral around the world.
Joe Biden’s government was put in an awkward position by Trudeau’s accusation. Washington confirmed that it had intel that seemed to back Trudeau’s claim but also sought to calm tensions between its closest ally and India, whose cooperation it needs in containing China.
Behind the scenes, the Americans were exasperated, says Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Eurasia Group’s practice head for South Asia, who lives in New Delhi. “I’ve heard that the Americans have yelled at both sides and said the world has some serious problems going on right now. This is just bullshit. Let’s get this off the table very quickly.”
But India kept applying pressure to Canada, motivated by long-standing resentment of Canadian inaction on Sikh separatism.
Both Nijjar and Pannun had been helping organize a diaspora referendum calling for the creation of “Khalistan,” a majority Sikh state in northern India, which enrages the Indian government. There is little support for that idea in India, but it lives on in the hearts of Sikhs around the world, and India believes Canadian Sikhs finance terrorist attacks in India.
A Canadian inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombing, which killed 329 people, blamed poor intelligence and policing for failing to prevent it, and nobody was ever convicted. India regularly complains that Canada does not do enough to crack down on separatists, alleging, for instance, that Nijjar was running a terrorist training camp. They accuse the Liberals of failing to crack down because they need Sikh votes.
India has legitimate complaints, but it now seems clear that Trudeau was entirely right and Modi entirely wrong about who was responsible for killing Nijjar.
It is easy to understand Trudeau’s moves now. He came under heavy criticism for taking the impolitic position he did, instead of trying to resolve the matter quietly, but he knew all along he would be vindicated. It’s much harder to understand Modi’s moves, especially after Gupta was arrested, and after both Trudeau and Biden raised this issue with him at the G20 meeting in September. How did he think this would end?
Biden has invested a lot of time and energy in wooing Modi, cultivating him as a crucial Asian ally in the soft-power struggle with a rising China. Wednesday’s news will inevitably raise questions about how useful an ally he can really be.
But India has now promised to investigate the matter. “The Biden administration is pushing the Indian government to make a commitment not to carry out such targeted killing on ‘friendly soil’ and against citizens of friendly countries,” says Chaudhuri.
“I suspect they have already told the Indians in no uncertain terms that this cannot happen again,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's global macro-geopolitics practice. “But Washington needs New Delhi on a range of high-priority issues, and New Delhi knows that.”
Despite this ugly business, the Americans have continued to engage on all fronts and will keep doing so. The same day the indictment came down, NASA announced it would train an Indian astronaut.
Biden is signaling that India and the United States need one another so much that the relationship will continue to deepen, whether or not Modi reins in his bumbling assassins.