India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses party supporters during an election campaign rally in Himmatnagar, India, on May 1.Amit Dave/Reuters
As India’s election winds toward its June 1 conclusion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has adopted a violent new campaign message. In recent speeches, Mr. Modi has taken credible accusations from Western officials that his government has sent agents abroad to kill Canadians and other foreigners – the most overt form of foreign interference – and turned them into taunts.
“Today, even India’s enemies know: This is Modi, this is the New India,” he said at an April 5 rally, according to The Washington Post. “This New India comes into your home to kill you.”
That threat, aimed at Muslim and Sikh foreigners his party considers enemies, was repeated on Tuesday, as reported by India’s NDTV: With regard to foreigners “who look at our borders with malicious intent,” he bragged at an event, “India no longer sends [documents], it kills enemies in their homes.”
Two incidents this week made it clear that this language is intended at least in part to taunt Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who last year accused India’s government of carrying out the June 18, 2023, assassination of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist, in Surrey, B.C.
On Monday morning, Canada’s deputy high commissioner to India was summoned by Mr. Modi’s government for a widely publicized reprimand. The subject was an appearance made by Mr. Trudeau last weekend at a Toronto rally to mark Vaisakhi, the anniversary of the founding of the Sikh faith in 1699. It has been customary for leaders of both major parties to attend such events.
Some in the crowd shouted anti-Modi slogans. Others, as some often do at this event, chanted slogans supporting the implausible idea of turning the Punjab region into a separate Sikh nation of Khalistan. This time, India’s government decided to make it an international incident: The diplomat was warned that the Prime Minister’s attendance amounted to an endorsement of radical Khalistani “terrorism.”
That rebuke took place, coincidentally or otherwise, just as The Washington Post was going to press with an exposé that named the senior Indian spy, reportedly under the command of Mr. Modi’s national-security adviser, who is accused by the U.S. Justice Department of having ordered and paid for the killing of Mr. Nijjar, the attempted murder of an American Sikh lawyer in New York, and the targeting of prominent Sikhs in Britain and Australia.
The report described a campaign of “defensive offence” aimed at assassinating and persecuting foreign non-Hindus who are at odds with Mr. Modi’s policies. At least five other Canadians, it claimed, were assassination targets.
Some view this Modi-Trudeau standoff over Sikh separatism – which dates back at least to Mr. Trudeau’s shambolic India visit in 2018 – as harmful to the Canada-India economic and trade relationship, and suggest that Canadian leaders instead ought to tolerate or ignore New Delhi’s extrajudicial acts in order to maintain that relationship.
The problem is that there are no “Khalistani terrorists.”
Yes, Sikh nationalism was a fearsome terrorist movement in the 1980s, responsible for the Air India bombing, which remains Canada’s deadliest terrorist incident, and for the 1984 assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. But after the 80s, Sikh terrorism vanished as quickly and completely as Quebec-separatist terrorism did after 1970. Today’s Khalistani activists are a romantic tendency in Western Canada, and non-existent in India. It is not wise for Canadian prime ministers to be associating with ethnic separatists of any variety, but these ones are considered by experts to be no more harmful than Bloc Québécois MPs.
Sikhs march in a parade to mark Khalsa Day celebrations in Toronto, on April 28.GEOFF ROBINS/Getty Images
Mr. Modi knows this. He does not target them for condemnation, and perhaps for assassination, because they are actually terrorists, but because they are Sikh.
In this year’s election campaign, in which Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is slumping in the polls (but is still almost sure to win), he has amped up his attacks on Muslims – who make up one-seventh of India’s population – and on Sikhs, who comprise less than 2 per cent, but have not been voting BJP and have protested and even defeated some of his policies.
“Within India, there is no Sikh separatism to speak of,” writes New Delhi political analyst Hartosh Singh Bal. But Mr. Modi “has invoked the insurgency that once afflicted Punjab, arguing that Indian Sikhs are being duped by separatists active abroad into opposing the government’s policies. … The assassination attempts are the result of this process. They suggest that New Delhi has come to believe its own propaganda.”
Mr. Modi is not attacking a threat harboured within Canada, as he claims; he is attacking Canada’s fundamental values of freedom of speech, pluralism and physical security. The United States has realized this – which is why Canadians know about it – and is taking legal action. No Canadian leader, of any party, should tolerate or dismiss Mr. Modi’s violent threats.
Doug Saunders