General
With Unusually Forceful Words, Canada Charges India With a Criminal Conspiracy
Canada expelled six Indian diplomats after the police said they had evidence that India used intimidation and even murder to silence its critics in Canada.
Thanksgiving has never been the outsize family gathering time in Canada that it is in the United States. (In Atlantic Canada, it’s not even a holiday.) But this year, it was marked in an unusual way.
The killing of a Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, outside this Sikh place of worship in Surrey, British Columbia, last year inflamed tensions between India and Canada.Credit…Chris Helgren/Reuters
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a force that normally defaults to stony silence about investigations, called a news conference in Ottawa on Monday. Matina Stevis-Gridneff, The Times’s Canada bureau chief, reports that the R.C.M.P. accused the Indian government of running a criminal operation to intimidate and even kill critics of India who live in Canada.
[Read: Canada Expels Indian Diplomats, Accusing Them of Criminal Campaign]
The Mounties were followed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as well as his foreign and public safety ministers, who announced that as a result of the police investigation, India’s high commissioner and five other diplomats from the country had been told earlier that morning that they were being expelled from Canada.
While the details of the operation, which includes allegations that India used criminal gangs to carry out its work, were not laid out, the rhetoric at both news conferences was unusually forceful for anything involving international diplomacy.
“We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil, a deeply unacceptable violation of Canada’s sovereignty and of international law,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters. Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly added that the decision to expel the diplomats was based on “ample, clear and concrete evidence.”
