Canada and India expelled diplomats from each country on Monday, intensifying a dispute over the killing of a Sikh activist last year.
The Canadian government said it expelled six diplomats Monday, including India’s top official in the country, over allegations that the officials gathered intelligence about Sikh separatists who were then targeted for violence.
India responded the same day by expelling six Canadian officials from India, including the top diplomat, Stewart Wheeler.
On Monday afternoon, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said investigators have clear and compelling evidence that agents of the government of India were involved in activities, including murder, that targeted Canadian citizens.
“This is a deeply unacceptable violation of Canada’s sovereignty and international law,” said Trudeau. “We cannot abide by what we’re seeing right now.”
India called Canada’s latest allegations “preposterous,” and accused Trudeau of pushing the accusations as a political ploy meant to gain support from Canada’s Sikh community, which is among the largest in the world outside of India.
“Prime Minister Trudeau’s hostility to India has long been in evidence,” said a statement issued by India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
Canada’s foreign affairs ministry said Canadian police had asked India to waive consular and diplomatic immunity for its officials to help in the investigation into a campaign against Canadian Sikhs, but New Delhi refused, which prompted the expulsions.
Ottawa kicked out the Indian diplomats, including its high commissioner to Canada, Sanjay Kumar Verma, after seeing the evidence gathered by Canada’s federal police force, said the country’s minister of foreign affairs, Mélanie Joly.
Joly said she has spoken with Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and with her counterparts in the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing networking, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
In a statement, India said it withdrew the diplomats because it was concerned for their security.
The investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police linked agents of the government of India to “homicides and violent acts,” said Mike Duheme, a commissioner for the RCMP.
The Indian diplomats collected information about Canadians that was used to threaten and coerce them into working with the Indian government, said the RCMP.
Duheme said a dozen members of Canada’s South Asian community have been warned by police about threats to their safety.
Along with Verma, based in Ottawa, the expelled diplomats included officials based in Indian consular offices in Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia, according to a senior Indian official.
Monday’s expulsions are the latest flare-up in a diplomatic dispute that began when Trudeau said in Parliament last year that Canada was pursuing “credible allegations” that agents of the Indian government were involved in killing Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist in Surrey, British Columbia, in June 2023.
At the time, New Delhi called the allegations “absurd” and forced Ottawa to withdraw more than 40 diplomats from India.
Trudeau’s allegations were bolstered in November, when the U.S. Justice Department accused an Indian citizen, Nikhil Gupta, of working for Indian government agents to orchestrate a foiled plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh activist and a close associate of Nijjar who was living in New York City. According to the indictment, U.S. agents recorded Gupta saying that Nijjar was also a target for killings that were purportedly arranged by an agent of the Indian government.
Pannun heads a U.S.-based activist group called Sikhs for Justice that has organized mock referendums in Canada and elsewhere asking whether Punjab, home to some 16 million Sikhs, should be a separate country.
He said on Monday that the diplomats’ expulsion validates his group’s concerns about the Indian government’s attempts to suppress dissent from Sikh separatists.
Officials from the RCMP, the foreign-affairs department and the national-security department met with Indian officials on Saturday in Singapore to seek their cooperation on the investigation.
“That did not result in the outcomes that were expected,” Duheme said in a briefing Monday.
Trudeau said he met with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week in Laos on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit.
“I highlighted how incredibly important the meeting between our national security advisers in Singapore this weekend was going to be,” said Trudeau. “He told me that he was aware of that meeting. I impressed upon him that it needed to be taken very, very seriously.”
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