View: India-Canada ties could worsen before they get better

Justin Trudeau’s unsubstantiated allegation against India over Nijjar’s killing has created a mess of bilateral relations. The ball is now in Canada’s court.

Published on: Oct 4, 2023, 10:40:06 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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With the US virtually asking India and Canada to bilaterally sort out the diplomatic row while seriously investigating the allegations over terrorist Nijjar’s killing, the ball is now squarely in Ottawa’s court. Either Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has to legally substantiate the “credible allegations” made against India a fortnight ago in Parliament or take back his accusation that India ordered a hit on Sikh terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on June 18 in British Columbia. Nijjar was the operational chief of Khalistan Tiger Force with terror training in Pakistan in 2012.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at G-20 summit.

While the Narendra Modi government is maintaining radio silence on diplomatic channels with Canadian propaganda media stating that the allegation was based on surveillance (interception) of phones of Indian diplomats, New Delhi is waiting to act on the legal proof of Indian involvement in the Surrey killing if and when provided by Ottawa.

Fact is even before the so-called allegation was made to stand legal scrutiny, Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly had already publicly indicted India and asked Pawan Kumar Rai, a RA&W officer under official cover, to pack his bags and head home. Canada also deliberately dragged its closest ally US into the diplomatic row by stating that the intelligence on Nijjar’s killing was given by one of the countries in the Five Eyes Anglo-Saxon alliance.

While External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar discussed the Canadian affair with his US counterparts this week in Washington, the Indian response to Canada was the expulsion of Olivier Sylvestre, an official representative of Canadian Intelligence in India, suspension of visa services for Canadian nationals and seeking diplomatic parity in respective embassies as per Vienna Convention.

Clearly, the Indian strong action took Canada by surprise with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stating that he did not want escalation with India and his Foreign Minister now saying that Ottawa wants a stronger diplomatic footprint in India. Fact is that foreign embassies in India maintain large embassies and staff and use the democratic polity to monitor the entire sub-continent and China.

Given the umbilical relationship between the US and Canada, the Modi government will have to put its best diplomatic foot forward to navigate through the mess that has been caused by allegations made by Trudeau with a radical Sikh vote bank in mind. All thanks to miniscule radical Sikh extremists and gangsters taking shelter in Canada, the other Indian diaspora including the large student community will be made to suffer with suspension of visa services and withdrawal of diplomatic staff. Trudeau’s move has also tried to cast a shadow on India-US relations and the QUAD grouping at large even though EAM Jaishankar has discussed the matter in detail with his counterpart Anthony Blinken and NSA Jake Sullivan. Clearly, matters will get worse between India and Canada before they recover from the blow struck by Trudeau on bilateral ties.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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