India is testing its friends’ trust over slain Sikh activist

By Mihir Sharma

India’s friends and partners are clearly feeling a growing sense of disquiet right now.

Relations between Canada and India hit a new low this week, when New Delhi’s ambassador to Ottawa was either recalled or expelled, depending on who you believe. That came after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police declared that they had evidence of “links tying agents of the Government of India to homicides and violent acts.” The RCMP wanted to interview the ambassador about the June 2023 killing of the Sikh extremist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar. When the Indians refused, the Canadian foreign ministry claimed it had no alternative but to expel him and five other diplomats.

This has set off a firestorm in New Delhi. There is a great deal of anger at what appears — from an Indian perspective — to be three irresponsible acts by Canadian authorities. First, separatist activists that India views as dangerous extremists are allowed to thrive in Canada, and even given space within the formal political spectrum. Second, accusations linking Indian officials to at least one murder on Canadian soil have been publicized without detailed evidence to back up those claims. And third, Ottawa has raised the stakes by demanding to interview the ambassador, the longest-serving Indian diplomat and a man with no history of involvement in intelligence or connections to the national security establishment.

There is a stark contrast with the way the US has dealt with some very similar allegations about Indian actions on American soil. Washington refrained from making anything public except through court submissions; ensuring there was evidence backing up each accusation. While senior US officials have largely been silent, insisting the judicial system had to be given time and space, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself has repeatedly raised the issue — saying on Wednesday that India made “a massive mistake.” The US, meanwhile, briefed the press this week that India had fired an intelligence operative who had been accused of an attempted assassination in America.

The problem for New Delhi is that its official denials have only imperfectly distanced the nation from Nijjar’s killing. The tone and content are too much at variance. Canada may have provided no evidence of official Indian involvement, but the public’s reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, which has led to some decidedly mixed messaging. “We didn’t kill him, but we had every right to” is not very effective rhetoric.

India must recognize that the intemperate nature of its rhetoric — both official and unofficial — might trouble our friends every bit as much as any as-yet-unproven accusations. Now is the time to try to stem growing disquiet about how India acts abroad, not give give it reasons to grow. It isn’t necessary to say Trudeau has a “deliberate strategy of smearing India for political gains”, for example, or that “India reserves the right to take further steps in response” to Canadian “support for extremism, violence and separatism against India.”

Officials will argue that, although countries from the US to Australia will pay lip service to Canadian judicial independence and the integrity of its processes, they will continue to increase co-operation with India. In their minds, India is indispensable, and everyone has to engage with us.

But that sort of misses the point. Over the past year, I have noticed that investors who previously had no real interest in Indian politics or its geopolitical stance have begun asking careful questions of their interlocutors there. Stories like that of the Nijjar killing, and New Delhi’s response to it, tend to cut through the noise and make their way to even to those who had been otherwise oblivious.

Everyone will continue to engage with India. But the quality of the engagement depends on how much it can be trusted; and that in turn depends on whether it has shown a willingness to trust others. Countries have carried out targeted assassinations before. But they have rarely done it on friendly soil; and if so, they have not tried to make political capital out of it. If India is doing things like that, the West will think, then this is a relationship without trust. It is merely transactional.

But it is in New Delhi’s interest for relationships in domains from intelligence sharing to high-tech investment to be less transactional. India simply doesn’t have enough to offer at the moment. It may in the future — but today, it is asking for things on trust.

As disquiet about India grows, trust in India dies. We need to be a little less sanguine about how we are seen around the world. It may be tempting to beat up on polite Canada and to throw our weight around. But it’s hardly in New Delhi’s long-term interest to be seen as a bully.