According to the Canadian government—in testimony its deputy foreign minister presented to Parliament in Ottawa—India’s home minister, Amit Shah, orchestrated the murder of a Canadian Sikh activist. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot to death in British Columbia in June 2023. Nijjar led a Sikh temple in B.C. and had long advocated for creating an independent Sikh homeland, Khalistan, out of the Indian state of Punjab.
Canada says Indian diplomats arranged Nijjar’s assassination through a criminal network run by the Indian mob boss Lawrence Bishnoi. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadian intelligence services had evidence tying Indian officials to a broad campaign of violence and harassment against Sikhs in Canada—a campaign that’s included extortions, home invasions, drive-by shootings, and now the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Ottawa expelled six Indian diplomats following the allegations; Delhi then kicked Canadian diplomats out of India, calling the charges baseless. But apparently, they’re not—nor has India’s apparent campaign against Sikh activists been confined to Canada. The U.S. Justice Department recently charged an Indian intelligence officer with planning a failed plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist on U.S. soil. And U.K. officials have meanwhile implicated India in the harassment of Sikh activists in Britain.
Still, Western countries—including Canada—have yet to impose any penalties on India. And despite a seeming attempt to murder a U.S. citizen on U.S. territory, Washington has barely mentioned any of this publicly. Why?
Omair Ahmad is an Indian journalist, a contributing editor with The Signal, and the author of six books, including the novel Jimmy the Terrorist. Ahmad says the evidence isn’t public yet, so we don’t entirely know whether or how the Indian government is involved in these crimes. Delhi has long said, though, that it sees Sikh separatists as a security threat—even though there’s almost no support in India for establishing a Sikh state. Delhi has also said it’s frustrated by the lack of help from Ottawa or Washington in dealing with the activists’ attempts to build support for the creation of Khalistan.
All this is happening, Ahmad says, as India potentially realigns itself in the world. The prevailing belief in Delhi is that India has gotten little economic support in exchange for allying itself with the U.S. and the West. And recently, the Indian government announced a deal with China to resolve the countries’ longstanding border dispute—a major issue that’s been keeping them from building closer ties …
Oliver Mills: What do these Sikh activists want?
Omair Ahmad: They’re separatists, who want to turn Punjab into an ethno-religious sovereign state—Khalistan. Some want even more territory than that. Sikhs make up only 1.7 percent of India’s population, and they tend to be concentrated in Punjab, where they’re a majority.
Calls for a Sikh homeland go back to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947—but the militant movement for Khalistan emerged in the 1980s. In ’84, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, in retaliation for a military operation against Sikh nationalists. That killing set off a wave of violent riots against the Sikh population in Delhi. Thousands were killed.
In the late ‘90s, though, Sikh support for the militant movement started to fall off. Inside India, calls for Khalistan have largely disappeared since.
Many Sikhs have emigrated; many of those who have experienced violence in India, either from the state or from vigilantes; and Canada now has the largest Punjabi Sikh population outside India. And like a lot of diaspora communities, that population has a strong attachment to ideas about the past in their country of origin—even if those ideas don’t entirely reflect reality in the present.
Back in India, a few activists still call for the creation of Khalistan, but the idea has lost any real popular traction. Mostly, there’s no Sikh separatist movement left in India.
It remains an open question why the Indian government allegedly decided to pursue assassinations, especially in such a ham-handed manner.
Mills: Why such a fierce response, then?
Ahmad: The Indian government is upset that Canada and other countries have allowed Sikh immigrants to continue promoting the idea of Khalistan. Sikh temples in Canada have told visiting Indian officials—including those from Punjab—that they’re unwelcome.
It reflects poorly on India when its politicians are told to bugger off. This is at the center of India’s dissatisfaction with Canada, and it’s raised tensions over the last five years.
Mills: What do we know about how Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party understand the Sikhs and their goals?
Ahmad: Since the colonial era, Sikhs have been overrepresented in the military and police. This makes the Sikhs an important minority to the Indian state, which remains almost paranoid about ideas of separation and tends to be overly sensitive to any hint of disgruntlement from any minority group. And now, on account of the events in Canada, the Indian state has changed its perception of the Punjabi Sikh community for the worse.
There is another political facet here. Punjabi Sikh farmers were a driving force behind recent farmers’ protests, which forced the government to scrap three agricultural bills from 2020. In response, many BJP and mainstream media branded the Sikh farmers as Khalistan extremists, even if they weren’t. They were just exercising their right to protest. But the Modi government experienced the demonstrations as a political humiliation.
Still, even though India’s ruling party are Hindu nationalists, they consider Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists as part of a broader Hindu family—despite these groups not seeing themselves this way. The BJP still wants to co-opt Sikhs into the larger Hindu-nationalist movement—because the party has always performed poorly in Punjab and lacks a base there.
Sikhs are well represented in Modi’s cabinet, too. Hardeep Singh Puri is a senior cabinet minister, and the government expended a lot of effort to evacuate Afghan Sikhs from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.
Mills: So why would the Indian government want to assassinate Sikh citizens of friendly countries?
Ahmad: It’s important to be clear, the public hasn’t seen any alleged evidence linking the government to the murder in Canada—or the planned murder in the U.S.
We do know India was frustrated that Canada wouldn’t sanction or deport Sikh activists—and that the U.S. wasn’t helping India push Canada on the matter.
But it remains an open question why the Indian government allegedly decided to pursue assassinations, especially in such a ham-handed manner. The details of these alleged plans in U.S. court filings sound bizarre—and borderline incompetent: The charges say India recruited people for the operations on WhatsApp, and there are connections to organized crime. It blows my mind.
Retired Indian officials have said they never operated like this. It would certainly be unusual for the Indian home minister to lead an initiative overseas. Typically, the home minister just doesn’t give instructions to India’s foreign intelligence service, which was apparently involved in these operations.
Either the Indian government has mutated into something unprecedented in the country’s history, or else this evidence can’t be true.
On the other hand, Canada would obviously want to be extremely careful about publicly saying only things it feels very clear on. Canada is part of the Five Eyes intelligence network, which also includes the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. Ottawa’s reputation is on the line here.
Either the Indian government has mutated into something unprecedented in the country’s history, or else this evidence can’t be true. Right now, we don’t know what’s true and what’s not. But it’s all very bizarre. Nothing like this has ever happened before with India.
Mills: What effects would you say all this is having inside India?
Ahmad: The country’s mainstream media has mostly stayed away from the issue—though it has frequently amplified the government’s line that these allegations are preposterous. Only one mainstream newspaper has mentioned the home minister and the allegations against him. His position remains stable today.
Most Punjabis don’t like this news—but so far, there’s been no public unrest in the Punjabi Sikh community. There is no great sympathy in Punjab for Khalistan activism abroad. It’s a fringe-of-a-fringe idea. Punjab suffered heavily during the repression of the 1980s, and no one wants to go back to that.
It’s hard to say what impact these allegations will have, if and when any court cases start to happen.
Mills: How do you see the consequences this might be having for India around the world?
Ahmad: So far, the consequences have been limited to some India-Canada ties—visa-processing times have been delayed, for instance. There hasn’t been any real impact on trade, but there doesn’t tend to be any real impact on trade at this stage of uncertainty.
And there hasn’t been any reputational impact for India at all among its other Western allies. The German chancellor and Spanish prime minister recently visited India, and it was all smiles.
The U.S. has just said it’s troubled by the allegations—and, you know, India should be taking this seriously. But that’s it.
One important geopolitical effect is a sudden breakthrough between India and China in negotiations over their shared border, which is called the Line of Actual Control. The details aren’t public yet, but India and China have apparently agreed to resolve their border dispute, which had driven fighting and even caused a few deaths in the past couple of years.
The border deal between India and China—that has some inclined to say the Indians are cooling their relations with the West on account of not getting what they wanted.
Mills: How so?
Ahmad: One of the strongest arguments for a closer relationship with America is that it’s an alliance that’ll accelerate economic growth. This is what happened decades ago with the so-called Asian Tigers: Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan—they all benefited from allying themselves with the U.S.
India needs economic growth—its GDP per capita is only about $2,500. India believed that being closer to the U.S. and the West would enable it to make a similar economic leap. But today, the Indian government reckons it hasn’t gotten strong economic support. Of course, it might be a delusion to think being close to Washington means rapid economic growth; that’s not what happened for every U.S. ally—and India could see that with Pakistan.
The border deal between India and China—that has some inclined to say the Indians are cooling their relations with the West on account of not getting what they wanted.
But now Delhi also feels disrespected by Western countries’ handling of these Sikh activists. India is saying, We see Khalistan as a significant security issue. We suffered a decade of violence, bombings—and even had a prime minister assassinated. We’re telling you to take this seriously—to take action—but you’re not.
Mills: What would you say we know about how the U.S. is looking at all this?
Ahmad: Ashley J. Tellis—a retired longtime U.S. official who negotiated Washington’s nuclear agreement with India—said recently that the Biden administration has taken a two-track approach: It discusses positive developments, like Delhi cooperating with Washington against Beijing, in public; but it discusses difficult issues, like human rights, in private.
The flaws of this approach are becoming pretty stark—and not just with India. The choice to address democratic norms and human rights in private has made autocratic allies feel like they have more freedom to do what they want. The red lines aren’t clear—and they aren’t public.
India watched this happen in neighboring Bangladesh. In private, the U.S. kept pushing the longtime ruling party, the Awami League, to uphold democratic norms. But the party ignored the pressure and became ever more autocratic—without any consequences from Washington—until a student movement ousted the government this year.
Mills: You say that, aside from Canada, no Western countries have publicly criticized India—or yet taken any serious actions against it. How do you see the implications of that?
Ahmad: It’s a problem. And it comes at a time when Russia has conducted assassinations overseas, too, and China has harassed Uyghur and Tibetan dissidents abroad—and is killing and imprisoning Uyghurs at home.
This is all part of a larger problem about what it means to participate in the world order. What does it mean to uphold international laws and norms? Some analysts talk about a multipolar world today—meaning a world with multiple, competing centers of power, as U.S. dominance declines. If multipolar is shorthand for countries doing whatever they want, then that’s an issue.
The U.S. is complicit in this erosion of norms, too. President Joe Biden has talked a lot about defending democracy, but then his administration doesn’t enforce international norms or apply them the same way to all countries. If Washington wants to look at the world in terms of democracies vs. autocracies, and it considers democracies to be the countries that follow the rule of law, then it’s fair to ask: What does the rule of law mean? What is acceptable, legal behavior, and what isn’t?
India’s campaign against Sikhs overseas has pulled this question to the forefront. Are we looking at a world order with stable norms or a situation where governments think they can get away with violating the rule of law without consequences?