Did India kill a Canadian Sikh?

Spies from New Delhi’s intel agency lift veil on thinking behind the hunt for perceived enemies

Ajit Doval looks nothing like a spy.

Short, balding and bespectacled, the 78-year-old national security adviser to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has none of the James Bond daring you might expect from one of India’s most storied spooks.

But that changes when the veteran spymaster opens his mouth, as he did in a speech in 2015, the year after taking on the role, that justified “state-sponsored killings” and offered a cold-blooded justification for the type of act India is accused of having orchestrated in June in the slaying of a Sikh separatist leader in Surrey, B.C.

“You can’t say that somebody has got the freedom to carry out terrorist acts against you, but … that the state has got no right or the privilege to use its power which will deprive somebody of his life,” he told a Mumbai crowd filled with law-and-order types.

Eight years on, and with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau citing “credible allegations” that India had a hand in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh leader accused by India of conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism, Doval’s words sound less like philosophy, more like menace.

They provide a window into the thinking of Indian security agencies tasked with keeping order in a part of the world that resembles a geopolitical octagon.

There is no shortage of hawks arguing that India should have killed Nijjar after so many years beyond the reach of its justice system. And India certainly could have carried out such an act if it so wished.

The bigger, unanswered question is whether India would have acted to settle a blood feud with a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, knowing the risk to the country’s reputation and status as a rising democratic power.

Fight against Sikh extremism spills over

In India’s fight against Sikh extremism and the movement for an independent Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan, in the northern province of Punjab, the battles frequently spilled over into Pakistan, which is home to many Sikh temples and holy sites, as well as western countries with large Sikh diasporas.

And where overt diplomatic and political appeals by New Delhi have failed to compel full co-operation in foreign capitals, it has often fallen to Indian spies — particularly those in its external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) — to covertly track and investigate wanted fugitives, and, in some cases, bring them to justice.

In a string of cases in Germany stretching back a decade, intelligence agents operating from India’s consulate in Frankfurt recruited and paid members of the Indian diaspora to spy on German Sikhs.

One resulted in a Sri Lanka-born Hindu priest who worked as a clerk in the German immigration service being sentenced to three-and-ahalf years in prison for providing information on more than three dozen people to his handlers with the R&AW.

In a Canadian case, an Indian journalist identified as “A.B.” was denied permanent residency in 2016 after Canadian officials heard he had met Indian intelligence handlers 25 times over six years.

Such cases prompted some Canadian Sikhs in 2018 to ban Indian consular officials from entering gurdwaras, or temples, while on official duties.

India’s overseas espionage program was created more than four decades ago, according to a former R&AW senior official, G.B.S. Sidhu, who recalled being ordered to establish seven overseas listening posts to monitor the activities of the Sikh diaspora in western Europe, the U.S. and Canada.

In his 2020 book, “The Khalistan Conspiracy,” Sidhu, himself a Sikh, said the Khalistan independence movement in Canada at the time was a fringe idea supported by few in the diaspora. But he was instructed to report that the agency “had observed the growing extremist leanings among certain sections of the Sikh diaspora and there was every likelihood that the demand for Khalistan would gain momentum in these areas in the not-toodistant future.”

That prediction would be fulfilled in the coming years thanks to a charismatic preacher-turned-militant in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

Bhindranwale channelled Sikhs’ economic and political frustrations in the early 1980s to grow the proKhalistan movement in India and abroad. Its influence provoked a 1984 clash between his armed followers, camped out in the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, and Indian forces who stormed it in early June. Operation Blue Star was a bloodbath.

Estimates of those killed and injured run from the hundreds to the thousands. In retaliation, thenprime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards in October 1984, setting off anti-Sikh riots that, according to a 2000 commission of inquiry, resulted in the deaths of 2,732 people across the country.

“It also gave birth to a hitherto non-existent issue,” Sidhu wrote. “Khalistan.”

That dream has been kept alive outside of India. India’s historic enemy, Pakistan, has most eagerly fanned the flames of Sikh resentment. Its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has over the years been accused of providing weapons training and safe harbour to outlawed Sikh militants.

Among them was Talwinder Singh Parmar, the former head of the Canadian branch of Babbar Khalsa, and the mastermind of the 1985 Air India bombing, which killed 331 people, mostly Canadians. Parmar was wanted long before the Air India bombing. The story of how he evaded justice goes some way toward explaining the source of India’s long-standing frustrations.

In 1983, he was arrested on an Interpol notice in West Germany. Jailed for a year, he was released before India could have him extradited.

“The local Sikh community had exercised pressure on the government there to release him and let him go back to Canada,” Bahukutumbi Raman, the former R&AW head of counterterrorism, wrote in his 2007 spy memoir, “The Kaoboys of R&AW.”

Indian intelligence also passed on to the RCMP warnings about threats to Air India flights, but the Mounties and CSIS failed despite numerous troubling signs to uncover the plot. It was carried out June 23, 1985, shortly after a physical surveillance operation targeting Parmar had been called off.

Criminal charges against him in Canada were dropped for lack of evidence.

Parmar later fled to Pakistan before being killed in a shootout with Punjab police in 1992 — a death some of his supporters claim was a planned extrajudicial killing.

Still today, there are segments of the Sikh community who view Bhindranwale and Parmar — and now Nijjar — as martyrs for the Khalistan cause.

And still today, there is a strong sentiment in Indian security circles that Canada does not take seriously the threat of Sikh extremism, or New Delhi’s concerns, said Dheeraj Paramesha Chaya, a lecturer in the School of Criminology, Sociology and Policing at England’s University of Hull.

The most recent source of friction is a worldwide referendum on Punjab’s independence being organized by Sikhs for Justice, a U.S.-based organization considered a terrorist group by India. Voting was held this summer in Sydney, Australia, in Malton and in Surrey, B.C., with another B.C. vote scheduled for Oct. 27.

Indian politicians and commentators regularly accuse Canadian politicians of ignoring Sikh extremism, to maintain the support of the influential community. The result, they argue, is that Canada has become a safe haven for violent Sikh separatists and alleged criminals while India is repeatedly frustrated in its bid to have fugitives arrested and extradited.

Nijjar, who was associated with Sikhs for Justice and worked on the independence votes, was one of those wanted figures.

While the Canadian approach has angered India, it’s wrong to say that Canada has ignored Sikh extremism.

In February 2018, Trudeau made a state visit to India and received a list of 10 names of wanted Sikhs residing in Canada.

Nijjar’s name was there. Two other names — Baghat Singh Brar and Parvkar Singh Dulai — found out within months that they had been added to Canada’s no-fly list, which denies people deemed to be air security threats the right to board an airplane.

The two men learned of the allegations when they launched a court challenge.

Brar, who has not been charged with a crime in Canada, was alleged in a Federal Court hearing to have travelled to Pakistan several times, raised money for terrorist attacks in India and met with the leader of Pakistan-based Islamic terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.

Dulai, who also faces no criminal charges and denied allegations he supported and associated with Sikh extremists and terror groups, said during his court hearing that he “believed that being a vocal support of Khalistan was the kind of speech that would not be used” against him in Canada.

“The fact that his beliefs for selfdetermination are a consideration (for inclusion on the no-fly list) scares him and, as a result, he stopped talking about it,” said a court judgment dismissing his attempt to have his name removed from the list.

“He said that he does not attend rallies or protests anymore, does not tweet about political views anymore, and does not post online.”

It is the sort of statement, according to the University of Hull’s Chaya, that might normally mark the conclusion of a successful intervention for India’s intelligence agency, whose goal has traditionally been to disrupt and disable plots and plotters rather than attract attention with high-profile and traceable strikes.

Successful interventions like the one that found Doval, India’s unassuming national security adviser, inside the Golden Temple in 1988, just four years after the disastrous 1984 raid.

As head of operations for India’s domestic intelligence agency at the time, Doval and his team of spies entered the complex on the pretext that they were Pakistani intelligence agents who had come to help in the standoff with the Indian military.

“Our penetration was good, we were bang on target. We knew everything that was happening,” Doval said in a documentary. “Not just that, we won the trust of some so well that they were taking our advice.”

It was intentionally bad advice. Over time, as food and water rations dwindled, the Sikh militants found themselves with no choice but to give up.

“Over 200 terrorists surrendered there, one after the other,” said Doval, who was honoured for his role. “And there was no bloodshed.”

India also claims its hands are clean in Nijjar’s June 18 killing, which has the hallmarks of an organized hit, according to the evidence, including two shooters and a getaway car.

Ottawa has so far expelled India’s R&AW station chief, the senior intelligence official in Canada, and promised that additional facts to support Trudeau’s initial allegations will emerge.

Until that time, questions about the truth linger.

“This particular individual had a lot of enemies within criminal circuits and within the Khalistani movement, so there are sufficient reasons to believe that it could have been an internal hit amongst themselves,” said Chaya. “But at the same time, we cannot discount the fact that India did stand to gain.”

Neither can we discount the determination of the man in charge of India’s national security to fulfil his mission of protecting the state from all threats, foreign or domestic.

Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation, famously said: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

But with Doval running India’s national security establishment, a different philosophy is emerging — one laid out in his 2015 Mumbai speech and one that appears highly relevant.When its interests are threatened, “The nation will have to take recourse to all means which are necessary to protect itself,” he said.

‘‘ (Nijjar) had a lot of enemies within criminal circuits and within the Khalistani movement, so there are sufficient reasons to believe that it could have been an internal hit amongst themselves. But at the same time, we cannot discount the fact that India did stand to gain.”

DHEERAJ PARAMESHA CHAYA

LECTURER AT ENGLAND’S UNIVERSITY OF HULL