The US has a few things to consider in its attempt to foster a constructive relationship with emerging world power India.
For starters, our immediate neighbor to the north is at a low point in its relationship with that south Asian nation:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to the floor of his country’s parliament to accuse Modi’s government of involvement in the June assassination of a Sikh nationalist—and Canadian citizen—on Canadian soil.
The shocking allegation has brought relations between two Commonwealth democracies in New Delhi and Ottawa to an all-time low. The details surrounding Trudeau’s claims remain murky, but the escalating tensions may nonetheless have repercussions for the complex relationship President Joe Biden is trying to build with the South Asian nation positioned as a potential bulwark against their common rival in China.
The high from the G20 meeting that positioned India as an ascendant world power didn’t last long. “Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar,” Trudeau told members of parliament last Monday, visibly angry. “Last week at the G20, I brought [the allegations] personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms.” Biden and other leaders from the “Five Eyes” alliance—an agreement that allows Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to share a broad range of classified intelligence—reportedly also privately broached the topic with Modi at the G20.
Nijjar, an Indian-born Canadian citizen, was shot and killed in June outside the Vancouver-area Sikh temple of which he was president. The Washington Postreviewed security footage from the day of the killing, which shows a multipronged operation to trap Nijjar in the parking lot of his temple. Two hooded assailants—assisted by the driver of a sedan who blocked Nijjar’s pickup truck—fired roughly 50 bullets, 34 of which struck Nijjar. Canadian investigators have not yet apprehended the shooters or their potential accomplices.
In a country that has the largest Sikh population outside of India, Nijjar wasn’t just any temple leader. He was active in the Khalistan movement, agitating for a Canadian referendum to support an independent Sikh homeland in the Indian state of Punjab. The separatist movement has a violent history in India, which reached its height in the 1980s when two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after she allowed the storming of the Sikhs’ holiest temple in the Punjab. While the calls for an independent Sikh state have mostly died down in India, they live on in the Sikh diaspora.
The Indian government has long claimed Nijjar was a militant—it said he was behind a bombing of a theater in Punjab, which he denied, and in 2020, it designated him as a terrorist. Indian officials also connected him to an alleged attack on a Hindu priest and were seeking his arrest.
India’s ministry of external affairs vehemently denied any involvement in Nijjar’s death, calling the allegations “absurd and motivated,” and accused Canada of harboring terrorists acting against India. Ministry officials have also suggested the accusation was an effort to drum up political support in the Indian Sikh diaspora community, roughly 2 percent of Canada’s population which largely backs Trudeau’s liberal party.
The Khalistan issue has long been a sticky one for India and Canada. India has often claimed Canada is too sympathetic to Sikh separatists. But if things had chugged along alright before, despite their differences, Trudeau’s claims kicked off a diplomatic doom spiral. Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat, which India reciprocated with a Canadian envoy. Ottawa tabled a new trade agreement between the countries, originally set to be negotiated at a meeting in October. Both countries have issued dueling travel warnings for their citizens. In a dramatic move Thursday, India suspended its visa program for Canadians wishing to travel to India and asked Ottawa to downsize its diplomatic presence in India.
“[Canada] announced, with a lot of fanfare, an Indo-Pacific strategy last year,” Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the political risk analysis firm Eurasia Group, tells TMD. “The ‘Indo’ part is basically D.O.A., right? So it is a problem, and I don’t see a near-term resolution.”
If the allegations of Indian involvement in the killing are true, they would represent a stark break in typical conduct between two democracies and a dramatic breach of Canada’s sovereignty. “The Indians absolutely have reason to be angry about the Canadians inadequately responding to their concerns about radicalism and promotion of terror,” Bremmer says. “But there are legal channels that two democracies use to work that through.”
Few concrete details have emerged about the nature of the intelligence that led to Trudeau’s dramatic statement on the floor of the House of Commons. Canadian security services themselves reportedly gathered the “smoking gun” evidence—surveillance of conversations between Indian diplomats in Canada—linking New Delhi with the murder. But U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen said Sundaythat intelligence shared through the Five Eyes network helped Canadian officials draw their ultimate conclusion about Indian involvement, though he refused to say whether that intelligence had originated with the United States. The New York Timeson Monday, quoting anonymous “allied officials,” reported that U.S. officials provided the Canadian government with contextual intelligence after the killing, but officials added the U.S. didn’t have advance warning about the hit or the perpetrators. India has said it has not seen evidence of Canada’s claims.
The rift between the U.S. neighbor to the North and its burgeoning strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific could put the Biden administration in a tight diplomatic spot. Biden officials have insisted on the importance of Canada’s investigation. “From our perspective, it is critical that the Canadian investigation proceed, and it would be important that India work with the Canadians on this investigation,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday. “We want to see accountability, and it’s important that the investigation run its course and lead to that result.”
Seemingly mindful of other countries’ attempts to off dissidents from a distance—as Russia has done repeatedly over the last two decades and beyond, and which Iran has attempted to do in the U.S. on several occasions—Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan struck a more forceful tone on what Blinken called “transnational repression” by foreign governments.
But India is a key element in the US effort to hold China at bay:
Biden aims to bolster a threatened global order by hastening India’s rise. As India rises, however, it will act in ways that sometimes challenge the very order Washington must defend. And if Biden’s team believes, as Asia policy czar Kurt Campbell has said, that the US and India have “the most important bilateral relationship on the planet,” then Washington will probably tolerate a lot of bad behavior to keep that relationship intact.
The geopolitical case for US-India cooperation is unimpeachable. Way back in 1904, British polymath Sir Halford Mackinder explained why.
Thanks to the modernization of both technology and tyranny, he wrote, there was a growing possibility that aggressive powers would dominate Eurasia and control its unmatched resources. So the era’s liberal hegemon, Great Britain, must cultivate “bridge heads” on the edges of the supercontinent — Korea, France and India — so it could keep the world in balance by keeping Eurasia divided.
Today, large swaths of Eurasia are ruled by US enemies — a prickly, bellicose China; a vengeful, violent Russia; an expansionist Iran. India, an increasingly prosperous country of 1.4 billion people, may be the key to holding the balance — and particularly to denying China a free hand on land as it also expands at sea.
India is no less critical as a global manufacturing hub, a contributor to resilient technological supply chains, and a diplomatic leader of the developing world. This is why Biden has so prioritized strengthening US-India relations by hosting Modi for a state visit in Washington, helping make the recent G-20 meeting a showcase for Modi’s leadership, and pursuing deeper cooperation across the board.
Yet Biden doesn’t view India as a prospective military ally; he isn’t counting on New Delhi to rush to America’s assistance in a war with China over Taiwan. The idea is simply that America and India share a vital interest in keeping Beijing from dominating Asia and, perhaps, the world. So the US helps itself by helping India develop economically, mature militarily, and otherwise put its power athwart China’s path to primacy.
It’s not all upside. A US president who initially talked about a great clash between autocracy and democracy has taken a very muted approach to discussing the infringement of human rights, civil liberties and political freedoms in Modi’s India — or the incendiary Hindu nationalism in which his government traffics.
Likewise, India hasn’t done much to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, it has benefitted greatly from the war, which allows it to obtain Russian oil at discount rates. And if indeed Modi’s men killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada in June, his government is emulating the transnational repression associated with harder-edged autocracies like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
The trouble with tying oneself to quasi-illiberal governments is that they tend to do the very things Washington deems corrosive to the liberal order. Indeed, if India is an indispensable partner, it remains deeply ambivalent about the system Biden means to preserve.
India opposes Chinese hegemony, but that doesn’t mean it loves American might. New Delhi wants a multipolar system, in which India stands among the great powers, rather than a unipolar system in which Washington and its allies tower above the rest. And as India’s influence grows, it will demand great-power prerogatives — including, perhaps, the right to trample the sovereignty of other democracies by targeting domestic enemies on their soil.
Right now, Modi’s government believes New Delhi holds all the cards. Indian officials have privately said they just don’t believe Washington will do anything to spoil the relationship, given how desperately America needs support against Beijing. They’re probably right.
This dilemma will govern Biden’s response to Nijjar’s murder. When Russian agents poisoned one of Putin’s enemies on British soil in 2018, there was a coordinated Western response featuring mass expulsions of Russian diplomats. Canada isn’t going to get a similar level of solidarity.
And consider that India is a pretty major player in the
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