India has rejected Canadian accusations of involvement in the killing of Khalistani separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and said they are part of “the political agenda of the [Justin] Trudeau Government that is centered around vote bank politics”.
“Prime Minister Trudeau’s hostility to India has long been in evidence”, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Monday. The allegation that senior Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Verma, were involved in Nijjar’s killing “serves the anti-India separatist agenda that the Trudeau Government has constantly pandered to for narrow political gains”, it said.
Khalistani separatism on Canadian soil has long been Trudeau’s blind spot. More than a year after he first alleged Indian government links to the Nijjar murder, what explains this week’s escalation?
Trudeau is on the brink
By all accounts, Trudeau’s days as prime minister are numbered. Elections are due in a year from now, and his party is trailing the opposition Conservatives by nearly 20 percentage points in the CBC News poll tracker. According to most experts, there is virtually no chance that his Liberal Party will win a third straight term.
In fact, Trudeau might not even make it until then. After defeats in byelections in Toronto and Montreal, and amidst the abysmal polling numbers, Liberal MPs are building pressure on him to step down, the Toronto Star reported earlier this week.
At least 20 MPs have signed a document calling for Trudeau to resign, CBC News reported. Liberal MP Sean Casey told the broadcaster on Tuesday: “The message that I’ve been getting loud and clear — and more and more strongly as time goes by — is that it is time for [Trudeau] to go. And I agree.”
After Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party last month pulled out of a deal to support the government in return for more social spending, the Liberals were left with only 154 of the 338 seats in the House of Commons, well short of majority. Trudeau will next face a confidence vote late in November or December, when the House has to ratify the so-called “budget update”.
An inquiry is ongoing
Trudeau’s critics in the Canadian media have said this week’s escalation may be intended to deflect from the government’s sinking fortunes, and to appear strong on national security — the proverbial Achilles’ heel for the Liberal Party historically. A federal inquiry is currently ongoing into alleged foreign interference in Canada’s political process. Trudeau appeared before the inquiry commission for a second time on Wednesday (evening India time).
The initial report of the commission published in May identified China as “the most persistent and sophisticated foreign interference threat to Canada”, but also named India among “possible foreign interference actors”.
“Indian officials, including Canada-based proxies, engage in a range of activities that seek to influence Canadian communities and politicians. These activities…aim to align Canada’s position with India’s interests on key issues, particularly with respect to how the Indian government perceives Canada-based supporters of an independent Sikh homeland (Khalistan),” the report stated.
The report cited Canadian intelligence to state that “Indian proxy agents may have attempted to interfere in democratic processes, reportedly including through the clandestine provision of illicit financial support to various Canadian politicians as a means of attempting to secure the election of pro-India candidates or gaining influence over candidates who take office”.
The vote bank incentive
According to Statistics Canada, the country’s official statistics agency, Sikhs were roughly 2.1% of the country’s population in 2021, up from 0.9% in 2001. However, more than half of this population is concentrated in and around Toronto in the province of Ontario, and Vancouver in British Columbia. This has meant that even though only about 1 in 50 Canadians as a whole are Sikh, members of the community are an important votebank in these areas.
“There are five or six ridings (electoral districts) in British Columbia and Ontario where there is a large concentration of Sikhs, and where they can influence election outcomes,” veteran Canadian journalist Terry Milewski had told The Indian Express last year.
Canadian political parties often rely on support from “power brokers” within the community to garner votes. Many of these community leaders have sympathy for the separatist cause — even though the vast majority of the Canadian Sikh population does not care for Khalistan.
“In British Columbia and Ontario, where the vanguards of the Khalistan movement are most active, Khalistanis have control over many gurdwaras, which then become centres of organisation for the movement,” Milewski said.
Community leaders here are highly influential even among those who are not directly involved in the Khalistan movement. This has led to Canadian parties supporting Khalistani leaders, and not objecting to their anti-India rhetoric. “It is not easy to look out at a throng of 100,000 on Vaisakhi Day, knowing they might vote for you if you keep your mouth shut, and then to open it instead and risk losing the votes,” Milewski wrote in his book Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project (2021).
“The Liberals under Trudeau in particular seem to have mastered the art of pandering [to the Khalistanis] in recent years,” Milewski said. This has happened despite strong pushback by Sikhs within the party.
“In 2014, a large group of Sikhs walked out of the Liberal Party after it picked Harjit Singh Sajjan, backed by the pro-Khalistan World Sikh Organisation, over the moderate and staunchly secular Barj Dhahan for the Vancouver South seat. But this ended up working for the Liberals, with Sajjan winning in 2015 and becoming Trudeau’s Minister of Defence,” Milewski said.
But it’s unlikely to work
The Trudeau government’s latest actions could be seen in this context, especially given that his party’s near-term survival rests in the hands of Jagmeet Singh, whom the MEA has described as a “leader [who] openly espouses a separatist ideology vis-à-vis India”.
But it is hard to imagine how this can save the sinking Liberal ship. The party’s abysmal polling is due to a host of issues, including inflation and rising rents, concerns about immigration, as well as Trudeau’s own unpopularity.
In an interview with Global News in September, Darrel Bricker, CEO of polling, research, and analysis company Ipsos Public Affairs, said that it was not just the government message that is unappealing to voters but the messenger himself.
Only 26% Canadians chose Trudeau as their preferred PM candidate in an Ipsos poll last month, much less than the 46% support for his Conservative counterpart Pierre Poilievre.
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