This is The Guardian. Today, assassins, spies and a superpower on the rise, the rift between Canada and India.
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On June the 18th last year, Hadeep Singh Najah was at his local Gudwara, the Sikh temple he attended. It was Father's Day and his two sons had called him earlier to say that there was pizza and his favourite Indian pudding waiting for him at home when he arrived. That morning they'd given him a new pair of jeans as a present.
Hannah Ellis Peterson, the Guardian's South Asia correspondent, has been covering his story. Najah ran a plumbing business in Surrey, a suburban city near Vancouver in Canada. But he was born and brought up in India. And there he'd been involved in a movement to create an independent Sikh homeland, a movement that India bans.
So Nijar was very active in the Gudwara. He was the president there, and that day he'd made his weekly speech to the congregation, where he spoke of the threats faced by the Sikh community around the world. And he urged people to face them not with violence, but with activism. So, you know, he told them, we do not need to grab AK-47s, we need to come together and demand our freedom.
So that evening, Nijar left the Gudwara. He was chatting with a friend and as he was heading towards his pickup truck, shots ran out across the car park. The window of his truck was shattered and there were two bullets lodged in his car door. Nijar was left bleeding on the ground. He'd been hit in the chest, in the head and in the arms. So nearby, two masked gunmen were seen fleeing the scene in a getaway car.
Nijar died on the spot. Back then, nobody knew the identity of the masked men who had killed Nijar. But his friends and family thought they knew who was ultimately responsible. And why? This wasn't a personal dispute. It wasn't a fight over money. This, they claimed, was the work of a foreign power. One that considered Nijar to be a dangerous terrorist.
Over the past year, his killing would expose an alleged network of spies, of criminal gangs for hire, of US government informants being hired as assassins, and ultimately a bitter and ongoing dispute between Canada and the Government of India.
From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safing. Today in focus, what a murder on Canadian soil might tell us about a rising Indian.
Hannah Ellis Peterson, this is the story of hit men and spies, and ultimately the rise of India as a force in the world. You're the Guardian's South Asia correspondent based in Delhi, but this story begins a long way away in Canada with the murder of Hadeep Singh Najah. Who was he and what did police initially make of his killing?
Najar was born in India, but he moved to Canada about 25 years ago and was a citizen there. And he was a proponent of the Palestine movement, which believes in a separatist state for Sikhs in Punjab in North India and fights for them to have their own independent homeland. It's a movement that's banned in India, but there remains a vibrant kind of support for Palestine among Sikh diaspora, particularly in North America and the UK.
So at the time of his death, Canadian investigators had said they'd not established any motive for the murder. They didn't identify any suspects, but they did categorize the killing as a targeted incident and an investigation was opened by the Canadian royal police. Okay, so back then, there are no suspects, no motive. The police were investigating, but the Sikh community in Canada, they had a pretty clear idea of who might be responsible. What did they do?
So yes, at the time the killing didn't make global news but within the Sikh diaspora, both in Canada but also in the US and the UK, it prompted a wave of anger and outrage because they viewed Nijaz killing as part of a wider attack and threats on seats by the Indian government and they blamed the Indian government for being behind his killing.
They killed our brother in Vancouver, Surrey. That's what they are. They are killers. They killed in Canada. They killed in Vancouver. I'm sure we're going to see other people who speak out against the Modi government. There's well are going to die. And it prompted a wave of protests in July. Hundreds of people gathered outside the Indian High Consulate in Toronto protesting against Nijar's death.
Who murdered by a passing conduct? India! What do we want? What do we want? What do we want? They held up signs saying kill India. They labelled Indian diplomats as killers. And it prompted the Indian government to actually summon the Canadian envoy as a result of these protests. I'm trying to explain this to me. Why would the Indian government be accused of killing people? Most of them Indian origin in Canada.
So the Palestine movement has a very long history. It began before Indian independence when a group of Sikhs began to push for an independent homeland for Sikhs to protect Sikhs. It was ultimately rejected during the establishment of India as a state, but in the aftermath, there was a group who continued to push for it. But it really wasn't until 1984 with Operation Blue Star that there was kind of global attention brought to the Palestine movement.
So this was a military operation, which was ordered by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, where she ordered for the military to storm the Golden Temple in Amritsar in Punjab, where the Pakistani army had set up residence. And it was a full frontal assault that went on for 24 hours. You know, rifles, grenades were fired into this temple and the Pakistani army were killed, as well as Indian army officers in a bloody shootout that lasted about 24 hours.
In response to the killing, the Sikh bodyguard of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi then shot her dead as revenge.
Mrs Ghandi is assassinated. Her son takes over. Good evening. India Aghandi, ruler of the world's largest democracy, died today, shot down by two of her own bodyguards. They were Sikhs taking revenge for the invasion of their temple in June. So they assassinated in in-promise that and it triggered massive anti- Sikh pogroms and riots in Punjab and across India. Hundreds of Sikhs were killed.
And it was out of this that enormous number of Sikhs then moved abroad. Large number of Sikhs went to Canada and there is now the largest community of Indian Sikhs living outside India in Canada. There are almost 800,000 of them. And a lot of them took this kind of Pakistani ideology with them when they left. Within India, the Indian military cracked down on this kind of Pakistani insurgency
which continued well into the 1990s. And nowadays, if you go to Punjab, there's not very much support for an independent Sikh state. But outside within the diaspora, that's where it has really remained very vibrant. And that's where these calisthenia activists are, you know, being seen as the ones who are kind of
basically keeping this ideology alive and they're viewed by the Indian government as a real threat to India because they fear these activists who are living in Canada who are living in the US will once again provoke the kind of violence that was seen in Punjab in the 80s and the 90s.
It had it had a signature fit into this movement, which, as you said, was a violent militancy, which hijacked planes back in the 80s, and which India accuses of carrying out terrorist acts even to this day. So, Nijar was an active part of this Pakistani movement. He'd been on the radar of the Indian authorities since 2012 for this Pakistani activism. At the time of his death, Nijar had been organising a referendum amongst the Sikh diaspora to gauge support for Palestine.
Back in 2016, India had issued an interpol notice accusing him of being a conspirator in a bombing in Punjab, and they accused him of recruiting or fundraising of transporting ammunition and providing arms for terrorist groups related to Palestine.
So they had designated him as a terrorist and a threat to the Indian state. Najah had denied all of this and had worked very hard to try and clear his name. And those are pretty serious accusations. For example, one of the cases he was wanted for was a bombing at a cinema in Punjab that killed six people and injured 40, though Najah has never faced court for any of this. And we really don't know how credible these accusations are. He obviously continued to deny them.
What we do know is that he was a staunch advocate for Sikh separatism. Did he ever worry that all of that might make him a target of violence? Yes, absolutely. Those around him, his lawyers and friends say that in the years of months leading up to his death, and even in some cases days, he had been given warnings by Canadian officials that there were threats to his life.
Okay, so Najat is killed in June and for months there are protests in Canada and there's this murder investigation happening in the background. And then about three months later, this killing starts to be felt on the global stage. What happens?
So by September, there were some indications of a decline in India-Canada relations. Trudeau paused, traced talks with India, and then when Trudeau travelled to Delhi for the G20 leaders meeting, which had been hosted by Modi, there was a sense of a definite frostiness between India and Canada.
Trudeau made some vague comments regarding India having to respect the rule of law. He didn't attend a dinner, which was being hosted for the leaders. And there was a very strange incident at the end where Trudeau's plane was reportedly stuck in Delhi overnight for very unspecified reasons, sparking a lot of kind of speculation amongst the Indians media about why he would have stayed in India for an extra day.
Okay, so there is a bit of intrigue around this G20, lots of speculation about what's going on between Canada and India. And then Justin Trudeau flies home and he drops what is a kind of diplomatic bomb. What happens? So what we now know is that during the G20 leaders meeting, Trudeau did raise these allegations directly with Modi along with the US alleging Indian government involvement in the killing of Najat.
These accusations reportedly did not go down well with the Indians, and they, I think, refused to cooperate or indulge Trudeau's allegations. So when Trudeau goes home, in Canada, a couple of weeks later, he takes the extraordinary step of standing up in Parliament and stating that there were credible allegations potentially linking the Indian state to the murder of Hardee Singh Najar.
Canada has declared its deep concerns to the top intelligence and security officials of the Indian government. Last week at the G20, I brought them personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms.
Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty. And this is a very big deal for a leader of a G20 country to get up in his parliament and suggest that another G20 country, India, could be involved in a murder.
It's hugely significant and pretty unprecedented. You know, Canada is a very close ally to the US, to the UK, and you know, these countries are trying to establish closer tides with India. So, you know, geopolitically, India has never been more important. And so for Canada to make these accusations against India, it makes it very difficult for other Western democracies to ignore, even if they are kind of inconveniently timed.
This is the first time and kind of the world stage India has been cast as a rogue nation that is happy to disregard international law. It was done in very strong words by Trudeau. He refused to back down on it. And soon after Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat in response, India hit back as aggressively. They called the allegations absurd. They called them politically motivated by Trudeau.
And they said that, in fact, Canada was the one who had been harbouring Sikh terrorists, which were a threat to India. And they then expelled a Canadian diplomat in turn and then forced Canada to reduce their consular staff in India by over 40 people.
So Hannah, this is a pretty extraordinary story. Over the past year, it becomes even more extraordinary because we start to go from accusations by the Canadian government to arrests. Take me through that. So in May, Canada announced they'd made three arrests of Indian citizens. They believed had been part of the hit squad that had shot Najah. And as they made those arrests, they kind of reiterated they were looking at connections to the Indian government.
But the kind of most explosive point this story this year came last month during a press conference which was held by senior Canadian police. The team has learned a significant amount of information about the breadth and depth of criminal activity orchestrated by agents of the Government of India and consequential threats to the safety and security of Canadians and individuals living in Canada.
Despite law enforcement's action, the harm has continued, posing a serious threat to our public safety.
So it was here that they not only said they had evidence linking the Indian ambassador and six other diplomatic staff to the killing of Niger, but they also accused Indian diplomats of being involved in criminal, I quote, activities on Canadian soil, you know, including homicides, targeted assassinations, extortion, intimidation, and coercion, mainly against members of the Canadian Sikh community.
That's incredible. They're accusing the Indian embassy in Canada of essentially operating like a criminal gang. Yeah, and they even went further. So they actually linked Indian diplomats to the killing of other prominent Sikhs on Canadian soil as well as Nijar and accused the Indian diplomatic staff of working with a gang run by India's most notorious gangster, this guy Lawrence Bishnoy.
to carry out these criminal activities and assassinations in Canada. Trudeau himself stood up and said, you know, Canada had clear intelligence linking Indian diplomats to drive by shootings, home invasions, violent extortion and murder in and across Canada. Unbelievable. Yeah, it's kind of unprecedented. I don't know any other, you know, Western country that has stood up and accused one of its allies of this kind of level of activity on foreign soil.
I think it is obvious that the government of India made a fundamental error in thinking that they could engage in supporting criminal activity against Canadians here on Canadian soil. Whether it be murders or extortion or other violent acts, it is absolutely unacceptable.
for any country, any democracy that upholds the rule of law. They actually said that Canadian security officials had held this secret meeting in Singapore before the press conference to present India with their findings, but India refused to acknowledge this intelligence and has refused to cooperate with the investigation.
As the Canadians are making these huge allegations against the Indian government, against the Indian embassy in Canada, are they putting any evidence out into the public to justify them?
So this is an interesting point because they say that much of what they have drawn their investigation from began with intelligence rather than evidence. And so this is what India has really seized upon. They say they haven't seen evidence of these allegations. Interestingly, there is another case which has come out, which is, I would say, equally kind of eye-opening, explosive, where there is, it seems, very damning evidence of India's involvement in the attempted killing of a Sikh.
national in America this time. What happened there? So not long after Trudeau made his first allegations, the US came out with an indictment. So it lays out very clearly evidence of what they say is an Indian government agent attempting to orchestrate the murder of Gert Panwan Singh Panen, who was a prominent Sikh activist and lawyer in an attempted assassination in New York.
So a second alleged plot against another Sikh activist, this one in America.
So Panen is another kind of quite firebrand, Kalastani leader. He was also, interestingly, Nijar's lawyer. So the two are very connected. So this indictment, which kind of reads like a spy novel, reveals that last May, an Indian government agent who initially was just named as CC1, but whose identity was just recently revealed as Vikash Yadav.
had recruited an Indian middleman, Nickel Gupta, in New York, to help him organize the assassination of Pannon. And in return, this guy Gupta would have cases against him cleared in India. Right. So allegedly, this Indian government agent uses a middleman called Nikhil Gupta to recruit a hitman in New York to assassinate this other Sikh leader there. So what ended up happening with that, according to the US indictment?
So Gupta agrees to help arrange this murder for hire. He also makes it clear that there are other targets after Pannon and mentions a big target in Canada. Then on the 18th of June when Nijar is shot dead, Yadav, the Indian agent, sends a video clip of Nijar's body to his middleman Gupta in New York.
and Gupta later confirms that this guy, Nijar, was the big target in Canada. On the 20th of June Gupta tells the hitman to carry out this assassination. So what Gupta and Yadav don't realize is that the man they've recruited to carry out this assassination is in fact an undercover US federal officer who has been tracking the whole plan, the whole time, and has been privy to all of the conversations and all the information. So this undercover US agent then persuades Gupta to come to the Czech Republic to meet
where he's arrested and has been deported back to the US where he will now face trial. So the man they allegedly recruited, he's in fact an undercover cop. And what about the Indian agent Vikas Yadav? What's happened to him? So a second indictment was released in the US and it makes it very clear that Yadav was working for the Indian government intelligence agency at the time he was plotting this murder of Panand.
and that the US Justice Department and the FBI consider this to be a grave example of transnational repression. So whilst they don't mention the Indian government, transnational repression is a term for when foreign governments go beyond their soil to carry out extrajudicial killings and violence. So the US government is now pressing charges against Yadav, this Indian government agent, and the FBI has released a wanted notice for him.
So Hannah, this story is still going and we saw yet another escalation late last month from the Canadian side when they appear to point the finger at who they say is ultimately responsible for this entire campaign of alleged transnational repression on the Indian side. Who did they accuse? So in a briefing that the Canadian authorities did to the Washington Post that they then confirmed in a parliamentary hearing
They confirmed they believe that Amit Shah, who is the Indian Home Minister and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's closest political ally, was the one who was overseeing this campaign of threats and violence on Canadian soil. Shah is Modi's right-hand man. He's the second most powerful man in the government. And this clearly links these cases to Modi's inner circle.
It's the most damning allegation yet that these killings in this campaign of transnational repression went right up to the very top of Indian government, possibly even from China's death.
I just want to dwell on this. Hannah, I covered India myself a few years ago. Amit Shah is not just some minister. As you say, he is by many estimations, the second most powerful man in India. It is a huge accusation. It is a huge accusation and it does indeed make it very difficult for the Indian government to kind of step away from this.
and claim, for instance, as it appears that they are attempting to do that this is the work of rogue agents, that this was nothing to do with the Indian government. So I think this is very critical because I think if this went up to the highest level of Indian government, it makes the geopolitical ramifications of these allegations much bigger and much harder for India to claim ignorance on and for Western governments to kind of turn a blind eye to.
Had a murdering dissidence abroad, running what sounds like a kind of criminal gang on Canadian soil, all of this sounds incredibly brazen. Is India accused of doing similar things beyond Canada and beyond the US?
So yes, I mean, Sikhs across the diaspora say that they have been facing threats to their lives. So particularly in the UK, Sikhs have said that there have been, you know, dozens of incidences of, you know, those involved with the Palestine movement. And so I'm not even involved in the Palestine movement at all, those who have attended protests.
have, you know, been given warnings by police or by government officials that there are threats to their lives. You know, in the UK, it became such a problem that there was a kind of cross-party group of politicians that requested a meeting with the government after there were so many reports of threats to the lives of British Sikhs. And a lot of these are very high profile figures who are being targeted. So this is not being done in a kind of quiet clandestine way.
It isn't unusual for countries, including the US, to be accused of doing things overseas in the shadows, including potentially killings of people. We know that that happens. But in the case of India, how much of a departure is this kind of alleged behavior from the way that they've acted in the past?
It's a really significant departure. Their playbook had never been to carry out actual judicial killings or attacks abroad. They were known for meddling in other ways and using proxies. But actual assassinations orchestrated by Indian intelligence officials, particularly on Western soil, is a really radical shift in how Indian intelligence has operated up till now. And it signals a pretty profound shift, I think, in how India views itself in the world.
how it views itself as a powerful player who can act aggressively to protect its own interests. I think there is a sense in India that whilst this hasn't improved yet, if India has done this, it's just doing what other superpowers have done. And I think it also speaks to India understanding how kind of powerful and influential it is for countries like the US, how geopolitically important it has become, and how possibly they then
may be allowed to act in a way that previously they would never have been able to get away with. Interesting. So you're saying that a part of this is India appreciating that, I guess, as China rises as a power in Asia, lots of Western countries like Canada, like the US, are going to India and trying to build a relationship with them as a kind of counterweight to China. And India is saying, well, you need us now. So they have greater license to act potentially than they've had in the past.
Yes, I mean, I think you can even see that in the diplomatic response that's come to these allegations. I mean, whilst Canada has gone out pretty strong, the American government has sought to walk a pretty kind of
difficult diplomatic tightrope. On one hand, they have called on India to investigate, but they've also lauded India for cooperating with America in their investigation. They have continued to be kind of visits from high-ranking American officials to India.
and various co-operations and deals have continued to move forward. So there is a sense that both the US and India are quite desperate for this not to actually get in the way of a kind of very strategic relationship that has been accelerating quite fast. You can see how critically important, particularly for America, who has invested so much in this India relationship as a counterbalance to China,
is. And there is a sense that, you know, they don't really want this inconvenient incident of an attempted assassination of a citizen on their soil to kind of get in the way of what this here is a very critically important geopolitical relationship. Coming up, what this whole saga might tell us about how to manage Narendra Modi's India in the years ahead.
Hannah, you said earlier that the wider backdrop to these killings, to this whole diplomatic spat between Canada and India, is that all of a sudden countries like the US, even under Donald Trump, feel like they really need India in a way that they haven't in the past as part of this bigger competition between the West and China. But what does this whole story tell you about? I guess how easy it's going to be to make India an ally as it rises as a global power.
So it is a very interesting question because as countries have moved to established ties with India under Modi, they have turned a very notable blind eye to India's domestic politics, particularly the kind of very strong religious nationalism of Modi and his BJP government. And this has included a large amount of very repressive policies. They've acted very aggressively in kind of oppressing.
anyone who they see as a threat. And this has been to activists, political parties, environmental groups, and also to the Muslim population of India that has faced enormous amounts of subjugation and violence under the Modi government. And there has up to this point been a kind of disconnect between what's happening domestically in India and how India is perceived internationally. But I think what we can see here is that if these allegations prove to be true, you cannot make this distinction between
You know, the domestic nationalist politics of Modi and you know how Modi intends to operate as a superpower on the global stage.
And this idea of kind of an erosion of democracy and an erosion of democratic values being something that are respected by the Modi government is something you could argue you can see playing out in how it's now treating those it considers to be threats and dissidents internationally. And that actually it doesn't necessarily see the kind of domestic borders as ones that need to be respected when it comes to protecting what they see as India's interests.
It all makes me think that the rise of India that we're seeing, that we're going to continue seeing over the next few decades. From the point of view of the West, that might be a bumpier rise than we may hope. Yes, absolutely. That's what a lot of activists within India would say, that they see as Western countries giving this ringing endorsement to Modi, when in many ways what he has implemented domestically completely goes against certain democratic principles.
You can't not engage with India. I think that's also an important point to make. It's 1.4 billion people. It's a very fast-rising economy. But this idea of it being an ally without question, I think, is something that a lot of particularly activists and analysts are concerned about, because it's being seen as a ringing endorsement of Modi's policies domestically, as well as internationally.
Well, it's an incredible story about an amazing country. Thank you for sharing it with us. Thank you so much, Mike. And that was Hannah Ellis Peterson, the Guardian's South Asia correspondent. Her work on this story and South Asia more broadly are all at the Guardian.com.
Before we go, it's nearly the end of the year, and the Guardian is looking back on 2024 with a live event next month featuring John Christ, Marina Hyde and Pippa Krera together on stage dissecting this pretty wild year of elections, wars in Ukraine in the Middle East, race riots in the UK and the post office scandal.
The event will be on the 3rd of December at the Barbican in London, but it'll also be live-streamed. Book your tickets on TheGuardian.com forward slash live, forward slash year in Westminster, or just search Guardian live events. And that is it for today. This episode was produced by Nat Liktenaar. Sound design was by Joel Cox. The executive producer was Homer Khalili, and we're back with you tomorrow.
