The India-Canada Breakdown

Could an obscure separatist movement that aims to carve out a Sikh homeland in northern India derail New Delhi’s relations with the West? Probably not, but the recent meltdown in India-Canada relations underscores the perils of crude identity politics and clumsy statecraft in an era of large-scale immigration.

Last week Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including the high commissioner—accusing them of working with a criminal network in a campaign of violent intimidation against dissident Sikhs in Canada. 

The latest accusations come roughly a year after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly blamed the Indian government for alleged links to the June 2023 gangland-style murder in British Columbia of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh separatist designated a terrorist by India in 2020.

In response to this latest escalation, India has expelled an equal number of Canadian diplomats. In an unusually blunt statement, the Indian Foreign Ministry said it “strongly rejects these preposterous imputations and ascribes them to the political agenda of the Trudeau Government that is centered around vote bank politics,” a reference to the widely held view in India that Mr. Trudeau’s policies are driven by his need for political support from Canadian Sikhs.

The crisis stems from a movement to carve out a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan from the Sikh-majority state of Punjab and adjoining areas in India. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Khalistan movement, backed by Pakistan, claimed more than 20,000 lives, the majority of them Sikh. 

The lowlights of that period include the 1984 Indian army storming of Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the assassination that same year of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, the anti-Sikh pogrom that followed, which killed nearly 3,000, and the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight from Montreal to London by Khalistani extremists, which killed more than 300.

In India’s telling, Mr. Trudeau endangers Indian security by pandering to radicals among Canada’s nearly 800,000-strong Sikh population, the largest Sikh diaspora in the world. 

In a phone interview, Terry Milewski, a Canadian journalist who has written extensively about the Khalistan movement, says Mr. Trudeau has conflated a small minority of radicals with Canada’s overwhelmingly peaceful Sikh community. “At its core it’s a matter of naiveté and just plain dumbness on the part of politicians in Canada,” says Mr. Milewski. 

The well-organized Sikh vote, influenced by the leadership of local Sikh temples, can tip the balance in several parliamentary constituencies in British Columbia and Ontario. This gives Sikhs, who account for roughly 2% of Canada’s population, an outsize voice in Canadian politics.

Mr. Milewski doesn’t believe that Mr. Trudeau alone is to blame for courting support among Sikh radicals, but he says the prime minister’s Liberal Party “has gone further than any other party in pandering to Khalistanis.” 

On Mr. Trudeau’s watch, these radicals stepped up activities viewed with alarm by India. They put up “wanted” posters of Indian diplomats, demanded that Canadian Hindus leave the country, glorified the architect of the 1985 Air India bombing, and paraded a tableau celebrating Indira Gandhi’s assassination. They also organized a series of public referendums among Sikhs in other countries—including the U.S., Australia and the U.K.—to demand the creation of Khalistan.

America is dealing with the problem differently. In a separate case, a murder plot against a Sikh separatist in New York, the U.S. has filed charges against two Indian nationals, including a former employee of the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external-intelligence agency. But the U.S. has pressed India quietly and in a spirit of cooperation while seeking to insulate the broader relationship from the fallout. 

“The Americans have approached this seriously,” Ajay Bisaria, a former Indian high commissioner to Canada, said in a phone interview. “With Trudeau we got political theater.”

The current disturbance offers lessons to both India and the West. For the U.S., which has spent over two decades cultivating closer ties with India, Mr. Trudeau’s showboating approach to a sensitive issue is a textbook case of how not to handle an important partner. 

For the Indian government, the stakes could scarcely be higher. India is in the midst of a partial rapprochement with China, but anyone who thinks New Delhi can afford to alienate the West is delusional. If India is seen as seeking to undermine freedom of speech and rule of law in the West, it risks being clubbed together with such adversaries as China, Russia and Iran.

Nobody can blame ordinary Indians—including Sikhs, the vast majority of whom rejected the Khalistan movement decades ago—for finding overseas Khalistani antics revolting. But this doesn’t change the fact that free speech is a fundamental value in the West. “We are not going to stop being free speech countries,” Mr. Mileswki says. “India can’t go around sending hit squads to the West.”