India fought hard to improve its global image. Now it is accused of murder

Justin Trudeau boarded the plane to India armed with some explosive allegations.

A week before the Canadian prime minister took to parliament on Tuesday to publicly reveal that he believed the Indian government was linked to an assassination on Canadian soil, he raised the assessment of Canadian intelligence with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Credit: Richard Giliberto

Modi rejected Trudeau’s bid for a longer, more formal meeting at the G20. Then he went on the offensive. “They are promoting secessionism and inciting violence against Indian diplomats,” the Indian government said in a statement last week.

By Tuesday, diplomats in Delhi and Ottawa had been made persona non grata, Trudeau had vowed to hold people to account over the June murder of Indian separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and India’s TV networks had declared “war over Nijjar’s death”.

The fallout has led to a public breakdown in diplomatic relations, obliterated India’s G20 message of global harmony and put its closest partners – including Australia and the United States – in a very awkward position.

“It is shocking for India, a G20 member, to be behaving the way a rogue state would behave,” Dan Stanton, a former Canadian intelligence officer who specialised in Indian Sikh separatist movements told Britain’s The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday.

The White House was direct in its feedback. “We urge the Indian government to co-operate in the Canadian investigation and ensure that those responsible are held to account,” US national security council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said on Tuesday.

Nijjar is the second Indian separatist activist to be killed recently. Paramjit Singh Panjwar was shot dead in Lahore in May.

India has strongly rejected Canada’s allegations and accused Trudeau of trying to win votes from Canada’s large Sikh population, which it believes has become a global hub for separatists, some of whom do have a history of violent extremism.

The Sikh militant organisation Babbar Khalsa was responsible for the bombing of Air India Flight 182 from Montreal to Delhi in 1985. Sikh bodyguards assassinated then-prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. But since then, the separatists have become part of a relatively obscure movement campaigning to establish a Sikh state of Khalistan in the northern Indian region of Punjab.

So far, Modi’s concerns about the campaign have met lukewarm responses from some of India’s most important partners based on their own intelligence assessments.

Canada’s intelligence agencies had relayed some of its findings to their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere before Trudeau’s brief encounter with Modi in Delhi.

Washington and Canberra have made clear that they view local separatists as part of a relatively peaceful movement rather than a violent threat and will allow them to continue protesting in their own countries.

“I think the Indian diaspora has a range of views, and you know, we have made clear in relation to democratic debate in Australia that the peaceful expression of different views is a key part of Australia’s democracy,” Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in New York on Wednesday.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong speaks in New York.Credit: AP

In India, the situation has festered in a domestic political climate that has transformed the separatists into an existential threat to boost Modi’s national security credentials.

With an Indian election due early next year, walking the tightrope between Modi’s G20 vision of India as a democratic global player (vital to managing the rise of China) and his own pursuit of a Hindu nationalist state is about to become more perilous for India’s partners.

CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour put this tension to Wong at the United Nations on Wednesday.

“Prime Minister Modi received kind of a hero’s welcome in Australia when you had him in May. He received a very warm welcome at the White House, he received a very warm welcome on Bastille Day in France,” Amanpour said.

“The G20 was just held in India. How troubling is this allegation and how does it cause you, either to calibrate or not, how closely to hold Modi, how tightly?”

Wong said the allegations were “deeply concerning for all of us” but evaded the broader point about whether Anthony Albanese will still be calling Modi “the boss”.

The investigations may not be finalised for months but whatever the outcome, Modi will take comfort from the welcome Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman received at the G20.

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, US President Joe Biden, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Credit: Reuters

Five years ago, the CIA concluded that he ordered the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

US President Joe Biden vowed he “would pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are”. Last week Biden, Modi and bin Salman clasped hands on stage in Delhi.

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