Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives to participate in the Intergovernmental Leaders Forum in Ottawa on May 8, 2023.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
When Sanjay Kumar Verma came to Canada as India’s high commissioner he came with a mission to get tough.
The alarming extent of that, at least as alleged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, only came to light on Monday, when Mr. Verma and five other Indian diplomats were ordered out of the country.
The diplomats are accused of gathering information on Canadians by coercion and illegal means, part of a broad campaign that, according to the RCMP, saw Indian government agents involved in crimes in Canada including extortion and murder.
The details of Mr. Verma’s role in those things are still vague – the RCMP labelled all six diplomats “persons of interest” and they were expelled when India refused to waive their diplomatic immunity so they could be questioned by police.
But from the start Mr. Verma had come to Canada with a mission to demand Ottawa get tough on Sikh-Canadian activists who wanted to see a separate state of Khalistan carved out of Punjab. The Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted to press the issue and, we now know, pick a fight.
It wasn’t that it was a new issue. Indian diplomats have been raising it for decades, back to the days of the 1985 Air India disaster, when a terrorist bomb planted on a flight departing Montreal killed 329 people.
“India conflates the serious and genuine concern with extremism and terrorism that existed in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the separatist activism that exists today,” said Daniel Stanton, a former CSIS intelligence officer and now director of the National Security Program at the University of Ottawa Professional Development Institute.
But Mr. Verma intended to make it a top priority. And he was going to press Ottawa to see it differently.
The Canadian government drew a sharp distinction between terrorists or extremists and non-violent advocates of a separate Khalistan, but India didn’t. Mr. Verma thought Ottawa should see things from India’s perspective and do something about their concerns.
Mr. Verma, India’s former ambassador to Japan, was crystal clear about that in a dinner conversation with me a few months after he arrived in the fall of 2022. And he was clear that Khalistani separatists in Canada were at the top of his priority list.
Defence issues? India’s military, with 1.4 million troops, didn’t need co-operation with Canada’s. India wasn’t looking for geopolitical allies. It kept close ties with Russia when Western allies imposed sanctions over the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Verma was going to be concerned with some trade issues, to be sure. But he was especially preoccupied with pro-Khalistani activists in Canada.
It is an issue he kept bringing up over two years, before and after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused Indian agents of being behind the June, 2023, assassination of pro-Khalistani Sikh-Canadian activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. India’s government dismissed that allegation derisively, and Mr. Verma kept talking about what he referred to in a May speech as “national security threats emanating from the land of Canada.”
In the meantime, the threat of Khalistani extremists in Canada was being played up for Indian audiences in breathless news stories that cited sources in India’s law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.
One widely reported story based on sources from India’s National Investigation Agency claimed Sikh protesters had hurled two grenades into the country’s High Commission building in Ottawa in March, 2023 – though that never happened. Ottawa police said at the time they were investigating the “possible” use of smoke canisters by protesters.
Just last month, a new series of stories in India said the NIA had conducted raids in Punjab connected to the same grenade attack that never occurred.
Those stories were only a small part of a wave of stories in India that raised fears of a Khalistani threat coming from Canada – one linked to organized crime gangs that terrorize people in Canada and India.
That, Mr. Stanton argued, is a narrative being pushed by Mr. Modi’s government to raise fears among Indians – especially the Hindu-nationalist base of his Bharatiya Janata Party. “That makes the Khalistani movement and the Sikh diaspora pretty menacing in their imaginations,” Mr. Stanton said.
Now, the RCMP is alleging it is Indian government agents who have used organized crime gangs to perpetrate violence and extortion.
And Mr. Verma, who arrived in 2022 to demand that Ottawa get tough on Khalistani activists, is instead being booted from the country for playing a role in an Indian threat to Canada.