Mansoor’s Musings: No end in sight on Indo-Canada feud

By Mansoor Ladha on October 31, 2024.

An analysis of the diplomatic tensions between India and Canada started before Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s killing. The hostility towards Canada began in 2018 when Jaspal Singh Atwal, a Canadian Indian and a former member of a Sikh separatist group, attended a dinner hosted during Trudeau’s visit to India and was photographed with Sophie Trudeau, the Canadian PM’s then-wife.

In 2020, Trudeau enraged India when he expressed concern when hundreds of thousands of farmers marched to New Delhi to protest new agricultural laws. But the main reason that angered India was when Canada announced that it was actively pursuing allegations linking Indian government to Nijjar’s murder.

Trudeau said evidence showed that Indian government agents had engaged in activities that threaten public safety in Canada, “including “clandestine information-gathering techniques, coercive behaviour targeting South Asian Canadians, and involvement in over a dozen threatening and violent acts, including murder.” He added that the evidence brought forth by the RCMP “cannot be ignored.”

Things really got out of hand when Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including the high commissioner, accusing them of murder of a Sikh separatist leader and alleging them for targeting Indian dissidents in Canada

India has always been touchy on the activities of Sikh separatists who have been demanding a separate Sikh state, Khalistan – the name of the proposed state envisioned by some Sikhs in a movement that emerged in India in the 1970s and early 1980s. The original movement is believed to have died away, but it has seen some resurgence among diasporic Sikh communities in Europe and North America, especially Canada, where 771,790 Sikhs live according to the 2021 census. Canada has the largest Sikh population outside of India’s Punjab.

Narendra Modi became India’s Prime Minister in 2014 with a clear agenda of establishing India in accordance with hindutya (“Hindu-ness”), an ideology based on Hindu values with the help of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sang (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary organisation with at least four million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills.

As a staunch promoter of the Hindu ideology, Modi has been rewriting the story of India, from that of a secular democracy to that of a Hindu nation that dominates its minorities, especially the country’s two hundred million Muslims. Modi and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and stifled the press into endorsing what they call the “New India.”

The Modi regime has sparked communal violence towards Muslims at home and has stripped Kashmir, the Muslim-majority state, of its special status as an autonomous region. This was followed by amending its citizenship law to incorporate a religious criterion for the first time, giving priority to Hindus, and followers of other south Asian religions, over Muslims.

Modi and his party, BJP, have conveniently ignored the contribution of Muslims to Indian nationalist movement when several Muslims were in the forefront during India’s struggle for independence from British rule. According to a famous Indian writer, Mr. Kushwant Singh, “Indian freedom is written on Muslim’s blood, their participation on freedom struggle were much more than their percentage.” Of 95,300 freedom fighters whose names are written in India Gate, New Delhi, out of that 61945 are Muslims which means 65% freedom fighters were Muslims.

India also has spread its wings into the U.S. where an Indian has been charged plotting to kill a Sikh separatist leader in New York. Another Indian agent was extradited to the U.S. from the Czech Republic. The Biden administration has chosen to be silent on these violent activities on American soil mainly because it needs India to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. Judging from Modi’s record, India-Canada ties will remain sour for a long time. Meanwhile, trade between the two counties, movements of foreign students and Indo-Canadians will suffer.

Mansoor Ladha is a Calgary based journalist and author of Aga Khan: Bridge between East and West, Memoirs of a Muhindi: Fleeing East Africa for the West, Off the Cuff and Portrait in Pluralism: Aga Khan’s Shia Ismaili Muslims.

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