A week after Ottawa claimed New Delhi had a hand in the murder of a well-known Sikh activist, hundreds of Sikh demonstrators gathered outside Indian embassies in Canada on Monday, trampled images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and set flags on fire.
“We are not safe back home in Punjab, we are not safe in Canada,” said Joe Hotha, a member of the Sikh community in Toronto, referring to the murder in June of Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver.
The assassination of the Sikh leader may have implicated New Delhi, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested to parliament on Monday, setting off a serious diplomatic crisis between the two countries.
“Now our prime minister tells everything in the parliament, so there is no excuse,” said another Sikh protester, Harpar Gosal of Toronto.
“The Indians, they are terrorists, they killed our brother in Vancouver, so that’s why we are protesting here,” said the Canadian outside of the Indian consulate.
He held the yellow flag of Khalistan, an independent state that some Sikhs want to establish in the Indian province of Punjab, along with other demonstrators.
A few hundred people gathered in Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver to protest against the Modi administration.
With 770,000 Canadians, or 2% of the population, professing Sikhism in 2021, Canada will have the largest Sikh community outside of India.
The Indian administration angrily refuted the Canadian claims, calling them “absurd.”
It also advised its nationals not to travel to certain Canadian regions “given the increase in anti-Indian activities” and temporarily stopped processing visa applications in Canada.
Since then, diplomatic relations between the two countries have been at their lowest point, marked by reciprocal expulsions of diplomats while Trudeau has repeatedly called on the Indian authorities to cooperate in the investigation.
