(New Delhi) Ottawa is showing “obsession” by investigating possible Indian involvement in the assassination of a Sikh leader in western Canada, the Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs reacted after the arrest Friday of three men suspected of the murder.
Canadian police arrested three Indian nationals in their twenties on Friday suspected of having belonged to a team that assassinated Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Law enforcement said it was trying to determine “whether there are any links to be established with the Indian government.”
“It is a political obsession in Canada to accuse India,” Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyan Jaishankar said on Saturday, according to comments reported by the Press Trust of India agency.
PHOTO JAM STA ROSA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyan Jaishankar
An activist for the creation of a Sikh state known as Khalistan, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who arrived in Canada in 1997 and became a Canadian citizen in 2015, was shot dead in June 2023 in the parking lot of the temple he led in Surrey, in the suburbs of Vancouver.
This affair plunged Ottawa and New Delhi into a serious diplomatic crisis in September after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of the involvement of the Indian government in this assassination.
New Delhi immediately described these accusations as “absurd”. A month later, the Canadian government was forced to repatriate several dozen diplomats present in India after New Delhi threatened to withdraw their diplomatic immunity.
Thousands of people were killed in the 1980s during a separatist insurgency aimed at creating a Sikh state of Khalistan, which was suppressed by security forces.
This movement has weakened on Indian territory, but can count on the support of a minority of members of the Sikh diaspora established primarily in Canada where it numbers some 770,000 people.
New Delhi is seeking to convince Ottawa not to grant either visas or any political legitimacy to the Sikh separatists, explained S. Jaishankar, since they “cause problems for [le Canada]for us and also for our diplomatic relations.
Canada does not “share evidence with us in certain cases, police agencies do not cooperate with us either,” he added.