On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came forward with a shocking allegation: that “agents of the government of India” had assassinated a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.
The man, named Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was killed in British Columbia back in June. He was a global leader in the Sikh separatist movement, which called for an independent state on land currently inside the Indian state of Punjab. New Delhi had previously alleged that Nijjar was not merely an activist, but a militant involved in terrorist plots. Now he’s dead — and the Canadian government believes India is responsible.
It is hard to know how accurate these allegations are: Canada has not shared the intelligence supporting its claim publicly, and India has vehemently denied responsibility. But the Canadians did share their findings with other Western intelligence agencies before publicly pointing a finger at India. And it would be a disaster for Trudeau, both at home and abroad, to make such an allegation and for it to be proven false.
India’s foreign intelligence agency — the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW — is widely believed to regularly spy on Sikhs abroad. One Sikh diaspora source I spoke to while reporting this article refused to speak on the record due to previous threats made by Indian agents against family members still residing in the country.
But the killing of a NATO country’s citizen inside their borders would represent a massive and worrying escalation. In the 21st century, fellow democracies almost never assassinate each other’s citizens on each other’s territory, even if they are suspected of serious crimes. “Transnational repression,” the political science term for going after dissidents and critics abroad, is typically practiced by the world’s most brutal regimes — places like China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
“Most of us still believe that we’re the good guys and our government doesn’t do this kind of thing,” the…
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