Canada-India relations are at a new low. Why China could be the winner.

Canada’s expulsion of six Indian diplomats this week, amid accusations involving homicide, extortion, intimidation, coercion, and harassment of Indian diaspora on Canadian soil, is more than a spectacular breakdown in bilateral relations between two countries.

It comes at a time when Canada’s Western allies see India, the world’s most populous nation, as a critical counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific. And while the West has been shoring up economic and strategic ties with India, critics say it has looked away from evidence of increasing authoritarianism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“In many respects, the Canada-India issue right now is almost standing as a warning beacon to the entire Western alliance,” says Vincent Rigby, a McGill University professor and a former national security and intelligence adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “How do you manage this kind of relationship with an emerging global power that we want to cooperate with and that we want to be on good terms with but who’s doing these kinds of things to their friends?”

Ottawa’s allegations that Indian government agents are linked to widespread violence against a Sikh minority in Canada, which India vehemently denies, are unprecedented. It’s not that transnational repression, in which governments reach beyond their borders to try to silence dissidents and which watchdog groups say is on the rise, hasn’t occurred in democracies. A former Russian spy and his daughter were found poisoned in Salisbury, England, in 2018 in a botched assassination attempt. But it’s much more likely to be executed in authoritarian or repressive states, and it’s even rarer to occur between two countries generally seen as friends.

Sikh activist killed

The Canadian dispute began with the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an Indian-born Canadian citizen who was shot dead in the parking lot of a Sikh temple he ran in Surrey, British Columbia, in June 2023. At the time of his killing, he was an active campaigner in a movement for an independent Sikh nation, known as Khalistan, which its supporters say will be carved out of India’s Punjab state. Mr. Trudeau publicly claimed that “agents of the government of India” had been linked to the killing, drawing denial and outrage from the Indian government.

On Monday, with India failing to cooperate with Canada’s investigation, the government announced it was expelling India’s high commissioner to Canada and five other diplomats – with Canadian police alleging a much wider criminal campaign that they deemed so serious they went public.

“These are probably the gravest allegations against India made by another country ever,” says Praveen Donthi, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group in New Delhi.

India called the allegations “preposterous.” The government expelled six senior Canadian diplomats in return, sinking the bilateral relationship this week to historic lows.

But the charges are not isolated. On Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department filed murder-for-hire charges against a former Indian intelligence agent in connection with a foiled assassination attempt of a Sikh activist in New York City.

The case prompted a global Washington Post investigation that detailed “an escalating campaign of aggression by RAW [India’s spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing] against the Indian diaspora in Asia, Europe, and North America.”

The public revelations could now force the West into a tricky balancing act with India, and come amid a worrying growth in transnational repression more globally, say watchdog groups.

A fundamental disconnect – and double standards?

Freedom House research director Yana Gorokhovskaia says that increasingly, governments are engaging in transnational repression to silence dissent for two main reasons. Global migration has led to much larger diasporas, and governments who commit it have faced very little accountability.

She cites the case of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi columnist for The Washington Post, who was assassinated in Turkey in 2018. The United States promised to turn Saudi Arabia into “a pariah state,” she says. “But relations are more or less normal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and between Turkey and Saudi Arabia.”

Sophie Duroy, a law lecturer at the University of Essex who specializes in intelligence and international law, says a precedent has been set by the U.S. and Israel, two states that have “normalized assassination” as a tool of statecraft. But she sees a double standard, depending on “who practices it, who is the victim, and on whose territory this happens on,” she says.

In this case, for example, Mr. Nijjar was deemed a terrorist by India in 2020. The Khalistan movement is banned in India, and its active advocates are mostly the Punjabi diaspora overseas. Canada hosts the largest Sikh population outside India, with Sikhs making up about 2% of the population.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, says the relationship between Canada and India has been strained in recent years. Ultimately, there stands a fundamental disconnect between the two countries when it comes to the notion of Khalistan. “What India regards as a really serious potential threat, Canada regards as essentially activism protected by free speech,” he says.

Allies react to Canada’s investigation

Western allies – particularly the Five Eyes intelligence group that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. – have publicly supported Canada’s investigation.

But Canada could find itself lonelier than it did when it raised the ire of China after it arrested Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou, given that India is seen as a strategic partner that countries such as the U.S. and Japan need to counter China’s influence in the Pacific.

India also stands to lose, as it remains dependent on Western allies to continue its rise on the global stage, says Mr. Donthi, the analyst. Delhi has cooperated with the U.S. investigation, but its denials in the Canada investigation generated global headlines this week in what Mr. Trudeau called a “horrific mistake” to interfere with Canada’s “sovereignty.”

“This mishap will cast doubts on the nature of the Indian state and affect relations” with the West, Mr. Donthi says. “The favorable external climate India enjoyed so far might not be the same after this.”

That is something opposition parties in India are watching, too.

Sagarika Goshe, an Indian parliamentarian from the Trinamool Congress party, says the opposition rarely pushes against Mr. Modi on issues of foreign policy, and the same is true now, with opposition leaders criticizing Canada’s allegations as hypocritical. But she adds that the prime minister should call a confidential, all-party meeting – as is typical in times of crisis – to “inform the leader of the opposition as to what is the truth.”

Senior opposition leader Jairam Ramesh agrees, writing on the social platform X that “Safeguarding India’s global standing is a shared responsibility.”

The bilateral dispute has not derailed India’s partnerships, but, depending on how it is resolved, it could force some inward thinking by those allies. “If the allegations are true, and a country you are supposed to be trusting and that’s your partner is carrying out acts of transnational repression on their soil, that is a very sobering thing to process,” says Mr. Kugelman.