Understanding Canada’s Fight With India Over a Murdered Sikh Activist

The diplomatic rift has suddenly grown more stark as Canada amplifies its accusations that India is directing lethal operations abroad.

Canada expelled six Indian diplomats on Monday, including India’s High Commissioner to Canada, accusing them of being part of a broad criminal network to intimidate and harass Canadian Sikhs. India responded by kicking out six Canadian diplomats.

The expulsions escalated a dispute between the two countries that began with the assassination of a Canadian citizen in British Columbia last year. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India of orchestrating the brazen killing, setting off a chain of denunciations and diplomatic clashes between the two countries.

Here’s what we know — and don’t know — about the complicated chain of events that has ruptured once-friendly relations between India and Canada.

Here’s what you need to know:

• How did this begin?
• Who was Hardeep Singh Nijjar?
• Who are the Sikh separatists?
• Why is Canada involved?
• What happened in the United States?
• Why did Canada say Indian diplomats were part of a criminal network?
• What happens next?

How did this begin?

Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the president of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, was ambushed and shot dead by three masked men on June 18, 2023. He was a Sikh activist who called for an independent nation carved out of northern India.

In September 2023, the Canadian prime minister told lawmakers that “agents of the government of India” had been linked to Mr. Nijjar’s killing, drawing outrage from the Indian government.

On May 3, three Indian men were arrested in Canada and charged with the killing.

The Indian government has vehemently denied the accusations that it was involved in Mr. Nijjar’s killing, claiming that Mr. Trudeau is pandering to Canada’s large Sikh community for political gain.

Who was Hardeep Singh Nijjar?

Mr. Nijjar was born in the northern Indian state of Punjab. He moved to Canada in the mid-1990s after a period of Indian crackdowns on the Sikh separatist movement.

In Canada, Mr. Nijjar worked as a plumber, married and had two sons. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 2015. In 2020, Mr. Nijjar became the president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, the Sikh temple in Surrey.

Mr. Nijjar was a self-proclaimed “Sikh nationalist who believes in and supports Sikhs’ right to self-determination and independence of Indian-occupied Punjab through a future referendum,” according to an open letter he wrote to the Canadian government in 2016. He was a key figure in British Columbia in rallying votes for a referendum in Canada supporting the establishment of a nation called Khalistan that would include parts of Punjab state.

The Indian government declared Mr. Nijjar a terrorist in 2020, decades after he left India. It accused him of plotting a violent attack in India and of leading a terrorist group called the Khalistan Tiger Force. In Punjab, however, politicians and journalists asserted that despite the charges, many locals had never heard of him or his movement.

Who are the Sikh separatists?

Sikhism is the fifth-largest organized religion in the world, with about 26 million adherents around the world, of whom about 23 million live in Punjab. Sikhs make up less than 2 percent of India’s population of 1.4 billion.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the movement for an independent state gained traction among Sikhs in Punjab and the worldwide Sikh diaspora. The movement eventually inspired an armed insurgency that lasted for more than a decade. India responded with force, including using torture, illegal detentions and extrajudicial killings to suppress the movement.

In 1984, India’s prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, ordered troops to storm the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of Sikhism, in Amritsar, to arrest insurgents hiding there. Hundreds were killed in that raid.

Later that year, Ms. Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards. That prompted widespread anti-Sikh violence in northern India. Thousands of Sikhs were massacred in organized pogroms.

Today, the Indian government asserts that Canada’s lax attitude toward extremism among its politically influential Sikhs poses a national security threat to India. But analysts, political leaders and residents say there is little support in Punjab for a secessionist cause that peaked in deadly violence decades ago and was snuffed out.

It remains a rallying cry among some of the roughly three million members of the Sikh diaspora, particularly in Canada, Australia and Britain.

Why is Canada involved?

Many Sikhs have emigrated to Canada. According to Canada’s 2021 census, Sikhs accounted for 2.1 percent of the population, making the country home to the largest Sikh population outside India.

India said it had warned Canada that Canadian Sikh extremists like Mr. Nijjar were plotting violence in Punjab, in hopes of turning the state into a separate Sikh nation.

India has accused Mr. Trudeau of being sympathetic to Sikh separatists because Sikhs largely support his Liberal Party.

Officials have also accused their counterparts in Britain, the United States and Australia of inaction, claiming Sikh secessionists have vandalized Indian diplomatic missions and threatened Indian diplomats.

Those allegations received new scrutiny when another assassination plot against a Sikh activist was narrowly foiled — this time in the United States.

What happened in the United States?

In November, American prosecutors charged an Indian citizen, Nikhil Gupta, with murder for hire and conspiracy to commit murder for hire. The target, officials said, was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the general counsel for the group Sikhs for Justice, which supports the secession of Punjab from India.

Prosecutors linked the attempted assassination to the killing of Mr. Nijjar in June. And they said that an Indian government official, who was not named, orchestrated the attempted assassination.

The plot failed: The man planning the assassination hired a hit man who was, in fact, an undercover law enforcement agent.

Why did Canada say Indian diplomats were part of a criminal network?

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a news conference on Monday that it believed the six diplomats were part of a broad criminal network involved in homicides, intimidation, harassment and extortion aimed at Canadian Sikhs.

It said the operations were spread across the country wherever Sikh communities exist. Among other details, they said that the group of Indian agents would collect intelligence to threaten and intimidate Sikhs, either through paid informants or by extorting and threatening individuals within the communities.

After Canada arrested three men in Mr. Nijjar’s killing, the CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting corporation, reported that the suspects belonged to an Indian criminal gang.

The CBC reported that the gang the hit-men were connected to was led by Lawrence Bishnoi, who was accused of several cases of murder, extortion and narcotics trafficking. Officials say he has orchestrated much of it from an Indian jail, where he has been held since 2014.

Mr. Bishnoi has demonstrated enormous power from behind bars, even giving a television interview from jail last year to pitch himself as a nationalist warrior rather than a criminal mastermind.

“I am a nationalist,” Mr. Bishnoi said in that interview. “I am against Khalistan. I am against Pakistan.”

Analysts and former officials said India’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, has long been suspected of tapping into criminal networks to carry out operations while maintaining deniability.

What happens next?

The relationship between India and Canada is at an impasse. The dramatic developments mean that the two countries will need to take some time to restore diplomatic links.

In the meantime, Canada will come under pressure to reveal more details about its ongoing investigation into what it has described as Indian government-operated criminal networks in Canada, particularly the claim that Indian government agents have been involved in “homicides.”

On Monday, Canadian officials declined to say who else other than Mr. Nijjar had been killed as part of these operations.

How does this affect global affairs?

Apart from the immediate law enforcement implications, this rift is also significant geopolitically. Canada and India are two important countries on the world stage, each in its own way, and the breakdown in their relationship is disruptive to global affairs.

Canada is a member of NATO and the Group of 7 and Group of 20 wealthiest nations, as well as one of the Five Eyes group of Western countries that share intelligence, including the United States. While Canada tends to keep a lower profile than others in these groupings, it is present in all major geopolitical global decisions as a traditional middling power.

India is not a low-profile middling power: It’s booming. It is the world’s most populous country, an economic powerhouse and key trading partner, and a sought-after ally for the United States, the European Union and others.

But in courting Mr. Modi, other governments are choosing in varying degrees to look away from accusations that he is leading India down an authoritarian path and abusing the country’s minorities as he and his allies pursue a Hindu-nationalist agenda.

Even as U.S. authorities have assisted Canada in its efforts to crack down on what it has described as an Indian-run criminal network operating on its soil, the Biden administration has been discreet about its own concerns with Mr. Modi, who received a warm welcome in the White House last year.

Nonetheless, Western governments will be under more pressure after the latest in the dispute between Canada and India to take a stand against transnational repression — the intimidation and killing of people on other nations’ territory.

Adam Pasick and Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.