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India to demarche Canada on Khalistanis targeting Indian diplomats

The poster for the protest rally in Toronto names Indian high commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Consul General of India Apoorva Srivastava in Toronto.

Updated on: Jul 3, 2023, 21:11:06 IST
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India has asked Canada to urgently act against so-called Khalistan extremists who are planning to take out a protest march to Indian embassies in Toronto and Vancouver after deliberately trying to blame Indian diplomats and security agencies for the killing of designated terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The 45-year-old Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) chief was killed in an inter-gang warfare on June 19 in Sikh dominated Surrey town in Vancouver. Nijjar had links with the proscribed organization SFJ, which is led by a US-based designated terrorist.

Khalistan extremists are taking out protest rallies on July 8 in Toronto and Vancouver
Khalistan extremists are taking out protest rallies on July 8 in Toronto and Vancouver

Due to the long weekend holiday in Canada, the Indian High Commission is expected to demarche the Justin Trudeau government on Monday and ask the Federal Government to take action against Khalistan extremists for naming and threatening Indian diplomats. While the poster for protest rally in Toronto on July 8 names Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Consul General of India Apoorva Srivastava in Toronto with photos, posters of a simultaneous rally in Vancouver names the High Commissioner and Consul General Vancouver Manish.

A poster for protest rally on July 8

Such is the gall of the Khalistan extremists that phone numbers of the organizers of protest rally are printed on the posters along with photos of their targets that is Indian diplomats. “Since the identities of those threatening Indian diplomats is known, the Canadian government this time has no excuses for not taking action or dismissing this threat as a legitimate democratic right of the protestors", said an official.

Despite New Delhi raising the threat of these Khalistan extremists to the Indian diaspora with the Justin Trudeau government, the latter chooses to take no action against these violent elements as the separatists Sikh constitute a vote bank for the present government. The Khalistan extremists have virtually been given a free pass by the Trudeau regime with the former defacing Indian temples and targeting the Indian non-Sikh community. While the Vancouver protest rally will start from Guru Nanak Sikh Gurudwara, which had been taken over by Nijjar and his cronies, it will culminate at the Indian Consulate in Vancouver. The Toronto protest rally will start from Malton and proceed towards the Indian High Commission in Toronto.

Adding to the pressure on Indian diplomats, the SFJ has taken to social media to announce “kill India” rallies in eight countries on the same day.

 
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.

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