![Canada has said it is probing possible ties between Indian government agents and the June 2023 killing of Canadian-Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a charge rejected by New Delhi [Chris Helgren/Reuters]](/Uploads/Images/News/2023/9/Image-1956-20230926072801.jpeg)
Unpacking India-Canada tensions amid Trudeau’s bombshell allegations
When Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last week that his government was investigating possible ties between India and the June killing of a Canadian Sikh leader, Moninder Singh says one of his initial feelings was “validation”.
“For 40 years, our community has been working to bring foreign interference from India to light,” said Singh, spokesman for the British Columbia Gurdwaras Council, a coalition of Sikh temples, including the one where Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed.
His sense of validation was “not only at the fact that foreign interference by India was being recognised”, Singh told Al Jazeera, but also that Nijjar’s death “wasn’t some localised matter; that there was a foreign hand in it”.
“But on the other side of it, there was also – amongst myself and the whole community – a sense of frustration, as well, as it [took] an assassination of a Sikh leader in a gurdwara for this acknowledgement to happen.”
Nijjar was fatally shot outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, a city southeast of Vancouver, on June 18. His death immediately fuelled concerns and outrage within the local community, but it was Trudeau’s allegations, made in the House of Commons, that set off a diplomatic crisis between Canada and India.
“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” the prime minister said on September 18.
India has forcefully denied Canada’s claims – calling them “absurd” and politically motivated. It has also accused Canada of not doing enough to stem anti-India activism and what it dubs “Sikh extremism”.
The ongoing row has highlighted long-simmering tensions between the two countries over a Sikh campaign for a sovereign state in India’s Punjab region known as the Khalistan movement that has supporters in parts of Canada.
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