Trudeau says India violated Canada's sovereignty

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke at more length at a parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday about the diplomatic flare-up with India earlier in the week. 

Canada's police and government on Monday went public with more details in the dispute over an alleged murder of a Sikh independence activist on Canadian soil last year, in which Ottawa says agents of the Hindu nationalist government in New Delhi played a role. 

Ottawa said it asked six Indian diplomats to leave the country, although India later said it had recalled them out of fear for their safety, and India in turn gave Canadian diplomats days to leave.

What the Canadian PM said

Trudeau said Canada's national police force had publicized its allegations against Indian diplomats because it had uncovered a wider and ongoing pattern of violent acts in Canada that also include drive-by-shootings and extortion.

"We had clear and certainly now ever clearer indications that India had violated Canada's sovereignty," Trudeau told an inquiry into alleged foreign interference.

"We are not looking to provoke or create a fight with India," Trudeau said. "The Indian government made a horrific mistake in thinking that they could interfere as aggressively as they did in the safety and sovereignty of Canada. We need to respond in order to ensure Canadians' safety."

The Canadian premier made the comments two days after Ottawa expelled six Indian diplomats, linking them to the murder of Sikh separatist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said it had identified India's top diplomat in the country and five other diplomats as persons of interest, prompting the expulsions.

Trudeau told the inquiry that he had been briefed on intelligence "that made it fairly clear, incredibly clear that India was involved in this killing, agents of the government of India were involved in the killing of a Canadian on Canadian soil."

India slams Trudeau's 'cavalier behavior'

Following Trudeau's remarks at the parliamentary inquiry, India's foreign ministry on Thursday issued a statement, maintaining that Trudeau's deposition confirmed India's position that Canada had provided no proof to support its allegations against Indian diplomats.

"Canada has presented us no evidence whatsoever in support of the serious allegations that it has chosen to level against India and Indian diplomats," Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said in the statement published on social media. 

"The responsibility for the damage that this cavalier behavior has caused to India-Canada relations lies with Prime Minister Trudeau alone," the statement added.

Trudeau says public allegations made as a last resort 

Trudeau also said that his government had initially tried to keep the investigations private and had repeatedly reached out to India over a long period. 

His government could have gone public with the allegations as early as the 2023 G20 summit in India, Trudeau said, had Canada been seeking to embarrass or provoke India with this matter.

That had been an opportunity to make a " big moment for India" into a "very uncomfortable summit" for the hosts, he said.

"We chose to continue to work with India behind the scenes to try and get India to cooperate with us," he said, adding he raised the issue in direct talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Thereafter, Trudeau said, the mood soured and only after repeated refusals to cooperate with the investigations did Canada start making some information public.

India's government calls allegations 'preposterous'

India on Monday disputed Canada's assertion that it had expelled the six diplomats, saying instead that it was withdrawing them from Canada because it was not confident that their safety could be guaranteed.

It said the allegations connected to the killing were "preposterous" and a "strategy of smearing India for political gains."

India also said it had asked six Canadian diplomats to leave by Saturday.

Canada's Sikh community is the largest outside India and is concentrated in electorally important suburban areas.

Previous round of diplomatic reprisals

India responded angrily to Trudeau's initial public allegation last year that New Delhi was involved in the murder.

Nijjar was shot dead by two masked assailants as he left a Sikh temple near his home in Surrey, in the western province of British Columbia.

In response to the allegation, India temporarily suspended visa services for Canadians, and both countries expelled several of the other's senior diplomats.

Relations had slowly improved until the latest round of expulsions.

Nijjar, who moved to Canada in 1997 and became a citizen in 2015, had campaigned for a separate Sikh state, known as Khalistan, to be carved out of India.

He was wanted by Indian authorities for alleged terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder.

Four Indian nationals living in Canada have been charged with Nijjar's murder and are awaiting trial.

'A democratic country going rogue'

DW spoke to Canadian lawyer Jaskaran Sandhu, a board member of the World Sikh Organization, who claimed India has become "a rogue state engaged in state-sponsored terrorism" in various Western countries.

He alleged that criminal activities in the West can be traced back to India's Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies.

"India has unleashed organized criminals and gangs in Canada to undermine the Canadian community, [against] Canada and the Sikh-Canadian diaspora with the intent of killing Sikh activists."

"There's the West, which includes countries like the UK and the US; and then there's countries like Russia, China and Iran, which have historically acted in this nature, engaging in transnational repression and foreign interference."

"This is India, a supposed democratic country, engaging in extrajudicial and extraterritorial violence against Canada… this is a democratic country going rogue."

US says India dismissed operative facing similar allegations in failed plot

Meanwhile, the United States on Wednesday said New Delhi had informed it that an intelligence operative accused of directing an assassination plot on US soil has been dismissed from the Indian government's service.

US prosecutors charged an Indian citizen last November over a scuppered attempt in New York to kill another advocate for a Sikh homeland.

The indictment described an "Indian government employee," not publicly named, as having recruited the hired hitman and directing the assassination plot remotely.

rc/msh (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)