Canada Expels Indian diplomat after accusing India of killing their citizen on Canadian Soil

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Note that Hardeep Singh Nijjar is a Khalistan leader and is considered a terrorist.  States do this all the time: take out people who they consider terrorists and national security threats.  This sounds like a diplomatic failure between India and Canada.  This should have been resolved behind the scenes without going public mostly because this is pretty much SOP for powerful states to do all the time. 

Do these "powerful states" include the likes of Chiang's KMT dictatorship, Pinochet's Chile, and North Korea?

There are also a lot of BJP officials who publicly claim to be nationalist while secretly owning houses and bank accounts in Canada. We'll see how "powerful" they will be after these are seized.

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I could not think of a move that Trudeau did more to unify the Indian elite and electorate than this one.  He should have put a lid on it and worked this out with India behind the scenes. 

...in which case, it would have been leaked just before the next election, and Trudeau would have been denounced for hushing up a murder.

We'll see what happens once some BJP officials find their houses or bank accounts in Canada, obtained using stolen money, are frozen. Will they whine to the media and admit to their theft, or will they keep quiet and invite more seizures?

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Canada has provided no proof on this killing. No five eyes ally is willing to defend Canada and trudeau said in the house of commons not outside the commons where he can't be held libel. Dudes down 10-12 pts in the polls, he wants a distraction from the china inquiry, something doesnt add up.

https://www.ft.com/content/54721d57-fe1b-4d28-ab9b-a664f110770b

US President Joe Biden and other western leaders expressed concern to Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, about Canadian claims that New Delhi was involved in the murder of a Sikh activist in Canada when they met the Indian leader at the G20 this month.
Three people familiar with the discussions at the G20 summit said several members of the Five Eyes — an intelligence-sharing network that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — raised the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar with Modi. One said Biden felt it was important to raise the issue directly with his Indian counterpart.
Adrienne Watson, the White House National Security Council spokesperson, said “targeting dissidents in other countries is absolutely unacceptable and we will keep taking steps to push back on this practice”.
The leaders intervened at the G20 summit after Canada urged its allies to raise the case directly with Modi, said two people familiar with the situation, who added Ottawa asked them to mention the claims in private.

Are you claiming that Trudeau is manipulating the Financial Times, which is committing libel against the President of the United States?

As for nijjar? lets just say gods plan. This issue isn't partisan in india. Congress MP Singh Bittu a sikh himself said Canada needs to stop harbouring evil dooers and that nijjar was responsible for killing Mr. Singh Bittu's grandfather.

No Nijjar shouldn't have been shot, in an ideal world he'd be rotting away in Gitmo or in indian prison for the crimes hes commited. This was not a martyr that the media is making him out to b

The Indian authorities could have requested an extradition from Canada if that were the case, and the evidence would have to satisfy Canadian standards of justice. There have been successful extraditions from Canada to India in the past, so the Indian authorities would be aware of what is needed. These standards for extradition are important, because otherwise any tinpot dictator can accuse anyone of being a terrorist and demand their extradition. But, whatever the Indian authorities did provide to Canada about Harjeet Singh didn't meet Canadian standards for an extradition, so was rejected. That means the Indian authorities knew they didn't have the necessary evidence for an extradition, meaning his killing was purely outside the law. No country will tolerate this, regardless of its political situation.

As for the issue not being partisan in India, sure. We'll see what happens when property and bank accounts in Canada that are owned by both BJP and Congress Party members are frozen.

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If Canada had to disclose their evidence at some stage it can get really awkward since that would mean that some techniques on how Five Eyes does intelligence  gathering would be made public or at least to the Indian authorities.  Could be a great PR victory for Huawei "use us if you do not want to get spied on by Five Eyes"

It would be, if the CEO of Huawei himself wasn't found to have used Apple products. You'd think that if he was so confident that his products were the most secure, he would stick with them only.

https://www.sohu.com/a/349480938_499322
https://www.toutiao.com/article/7122395821189906985/?wid=1695405785566

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I would frame it as: It is easy for two states with similar civilizational worldviews to come up with a process (which embeds those civilization assumptions) to resolve such matters.  When two states with different civilizational worldviews have to deal with something like this it is hard for such a process, which embeds civilization assumptions, to work.  In such cases resorting to tactics outside said processes might be necessary.  The ability of such a state to get aways with such outside-the-process tactics is a function of said state's relative power to the target state.

...but, aren't the most vicious state-to-state conflicts between those of a similar cultural background? They speak the same language, eat the same food, read the same books, but what sets them apart is framed as an existential conflict. Russia vs. Ukraine, Taiwan vs. PRC, India vs. Pakistan, the Koreas, the Balkans, etc etc??

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Just because the Khalistan movement is "dead" in the sense that it will never feasibly become supported by a majority or near-majority of Punjabi Sikhs, let alone ever achieve its goals, the Khalistan movement can still inspire the occasional bombing or killing from time to time, something which furthermore makes India as a whole look like less functional as a multiethnic unified state in the eyes of both its own people and the World.

Quebec will never be an independent Marxist-Leninist single party state. Yet, if some Indian socialist mid-level bureaucrat approved the citizenship request of a former or current FLQ bigwig whom the Canadian government reasonably believed was still capable of inspiring terrorism, then I'm inclined to believe that the Canadian state - not to mention Britain and likely also the USA - would likely pursue an extrajudicial assassination of this "Indian citizen," even on Indian soil if necessary, and Canada would be completely justified in doing so in the case that this person was responsible for past FLQ attacks.

https://theintercept.com/2023/09/23/sikhs-fbi-canada-india-nijjar/

“The Khalistan movement today enjoys very little support in Punjab,” said Arjun Sethi, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Georgetown University. “Yet the Indian government continues to inflate its significance in order to galvanize their voter base, distract from their domestic failings, and further their national security agenda.”

So it's about hyping up an imagined threat from outside.

What I mean to suggest that is states with similar civilization worldviews will have similar assumptions on rules of engagements where there are not going to be asymmetrical misunderstandings of intentions and expectations regardless if the relationship is peaceful or in conflict.

But why is that relevant, if their common understanding of intentions means precisely they will be more willing to fight viciously?

Case in point: the issue of American draft dodgers hiding in Canada, although contentious, was certainly less problematic and less of a source of national pain, for both America and Canada, than the issue of American draft dodgers hiding in an Eastern-Bloc or Third-World country.

That's because the US and Canada are rule-of-law states, and they are overall geopolitically allied.

Defectors between West and East Germany, North and South Korea, or Taiwan and mainland China were denounced as worse than traitors: they delegitimized the very idea of the nation, which was exclusively represented by the state they defected from. Conversely, these same states were generous to defectors from the other side, for the same reason. They gave instant citizenship, cash handouts, even military promotions to successful defectors. Taiwan even gave defectors who served in the PLA their weight in gold.

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The killing of Nijjar was caused at least in part by Trudeau's own policies - the fact that he had the audacity to cause an international diplomatic dispute over it for his own political benefit shows his reckless, narcissistic and vacuous approach to international relations.

Yes, Trudeau should have hushed up the murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil to avoid hurting the feelings of those responsible.

Maybe the cause of the diplomatic dispute was the murder itself, not the fuss it caused?

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Firstly, the facts as they currently are don't exactly portray Trudeau in a positive light. Lax border security makes it very easy for nefarious actors to commit acts like this. Lax border security seems to have been a factor here, because the alleged killers of Nijjar entered the country on student visas. If Trudeau were seriously concerned about foreign actors killing our citizens, we would have much stricter border security and a foreign agent registry by now, yet we don't have these things. Trudeau is abdicating his own responsibility to defend our national security, which makes me roll my eyes when he expresses indignation toward the Indian government regarding the killing.

It appears the Indian government paid the "students" after they had arrived in Canada. These types of assassinations also happen in many countries with famously tight security. If not through "students", the hit could have been conducted in any other way. So, while border security could be tighter, I'm not sure that blaming this on immigration policy is quite accurate.

It's also very suspicious that the Conservatives were reluctant to expand the scope of the inquiry into foreign interference to cover all actions by all foreign powers. Could it be connected to CSIS investigating Indian interference in the Conservative campaign in last year's Oxford by-election? I guess that explains Pierre Poilevre's BS-ing on this matter: he refuses to obtain a security clearance to review top-secret intelligence, because he would rather continue BS-ing than know the full facts.

Secondly, publicly accusing a state of killing your citizen is not a decision to be made lightly. It's better to know you will have backing from other allies as well as to make sure you have somewhat complete information. There's still a lot we don't know about the level at which the Indian government was involved - was it just a rogue intel agent, or was it ordered at the executive level? If it was the former, for all we know, Ottawa could have informed the Indian government privately and they might have dealt with the rogue individual. The US could also have privately intervened to side with Canada. If Trudeau planned to go public about the allegation, how it is revealed could have been co-ordinated with the US and other allies. He lost a lot of leverage by trying to be self-righteous and recklessly revealing the allegation on his own. Early in the dispute, the US seemed to side with Canada but didn't want to discuss it publicly, making the whole thing harder to solve. The reckless manner in which the allegation was revealed also made Canada susceptible to propaganda from Indian media, which also didn't help the situation.

Trudeau could have handled the whole thing far more prudently.

The PMO wanted to keep the story quiet, until Robert Fife approached it for comment. After that, it became impossible to cover up the story. It's the cost of freedom of press. This isn't China where each media outlet has Party propaganda committees with powers to censor embarrassing stories.

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"The government refrains from commenting on ongoing criminal investigations." Obviously it was an ongoing criminal investigation, because they're just now making arrests. The Trudeau government has hardly had trouble during its time in power not telling the press anything, it's not like they have some grand commitment to transparency to where "we have to be open in public on this".

These guys were pretty dumb to stick around in Canada in my opinion.

This isn't a run-of-the-mill scandal like taxpayer's money wasted on an app. I don't think any government in any democratic country can get away with no-commenting reports that a foreign power committed an assassination on its soil. Even Iran cannot cover up all these assassinations in its territory by the Mossad.

In the end, Trudeau emulated Erdogan's approach after Khashoggi's assassination, but had better success in finding support from other nations.

Yes, this makes the Indian intelligence services look like amateurs. The Indian media were bragging about how they had the "new Mossad". They weren't even competent enough to exfiltrate the assassins out of the country.