Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau sparked fury in India on Monday when he told parliament that authorities were investigating whether “agents” of New Delhi were behind the June killing of a prominent Sikh activist in a Vancouver suburb.
The allegations over the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, if corroborated by evidence, would put the world’s largest democracy in the company of governments that have carried out assassinations on foreign soil — including the recent likes of Russia and Saudi Arabia.
“India has never been accused of carrying out an assassination of a dissident abroad,” said Brahma Chellaney, a professor emeritus at the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi think-tank. “This is something that authoritarian regimes do.”