Canada is not Pakistan. That single observation contains the analytical puzzle at the center of three targeted killings that transformed a trusted Western ally into the most diplomatically explosive theater of India’s shadow war against terrorism. Between July 2022 and September 2023, three men connected to Khalistan separatism were killed on Canadian soil in circumstances ranging from a contract-style hit outside a Surrey business park to a gurdwara parking lot ambush to a duplex shooting in suburban Winnipeg. Ripudaman Singh Malik, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and Sukhdool Singh Gill (known as Sukha Duneke) share a common denominator: all three were figures on India’s security radar, all three died violently in Canadian cities, and all three killings generated consequences that no operation on Pakistani soil ever produced. The question this article answers is not whether these three cases are connected, because the attribution evidence varies dramatically across all three. The question is what placing them side by side reveals about the campaign’s reach, its risk calculus, and the price India paid for operating, or allegedly operating, inside a Five Eyes nation with functional law enforcement, advanced signals intelligence, and the diplomatic leverage that Pakistan could never muster.

Every previous theater of the shadow war operated under conditions that minimized blowback. In Pakistan’s Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, the campaign proceeded with a rhythm that became almost predictable: motorcycle-borne gunmen, mid-day or post-prayer timing, rapid escape into dense urban traffic, no claims of responsibility, and Pakistani investigations that produced neither arrests nor accountability. The targets were universally designated terrorists, men with UN sanctions listings, NIA charge sheets, and documented involvement in mass-casualty attacks on Indian soil. When Pakistan protested, the protests carried the weight of a country that had sheltered the same men for decades while collecting billions in American counter-terrorism aid. The international community’s response to killings in Pakistan ranged from silence to implicit acceptance. Canada changed all of that. When Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, on June 18, 2023, and when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood in Parliament three months later to accuse India of involvement, the shadow war collided with a force it had never encountered in its Pakistani operations: a Western democracy with the institutional capacity to investigate, the diplomatic standing to confront New Delhi publicly, and membership in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance that gave Ottawa access to signals intelligence Canada alone could not have produced.

This article examines the three Canadian cases not as isolated events but as a comparative dataset. The comparison, structured across six analytical dimensions, reveals that Canada represents something fundamentally different from Pakistan in the shadow war’s geography. It reveals that the operational calculus required for a Five Eyes country is categorically distinct from the calculus required for a country whose intelligence services are themselves embedded in the terror infrastructure being targeted. And it reveals that the diplomatic cost of Canadian operations, measured in expelled diplomats, frozen bilateral relationships, criminal investigations, and American legal proceedings, exceeded the cumulative diplomatic cost of every Pakistani operation combined. Whether the campaign deliberately chose to accept those costs, or whether the Canadian operations reflect a risk assessment that catastrophically misjudged the environment, is the central disagreement this analysis seeks to adjudicate.

The Shared Thread

Three men were killed in Canadian cities within a fourteen-month window. Each had connections, of varying depth and directness, to India’s security concerns. Each killing occurred in a country that shares intelligence with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand through the Five Eyes partnership. And each killing produced investigative and diplomatic responses that no operation in Pakistan ever generated. These are the facts that link the cases. Beyond these facts, the connections become contested, and it is in that contested territory that the analysis begins.

Ripudaman Singh Malik was the first to die. On July 14, 2022, outside his family business in the 8200 block of 128 Street in Surrey’s Newton neighbourhood, Malik, then seventy-five years old, was shot multiple times as he sat in his Tesla. Two men, later identified as Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez, had conducted surveillance at the location the previous day. They arrived the following morning in a stolen white Honda CR-V, fired seven shots into Malik’s vehicle, and fled to a nearby laneway where they set the Honda ablaze before transferring to a pre-staged black Infiniti. Both men were arrested twelve days later. Both ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in October 2024 after being initially charged with first-degree murder. An agreed statement of facts filed in B.C. Supreme Court confirmed that both were “hired and paid” to carry out the killing, but the identity of whoever ordered the assassination has never been publicly disclosed. In January 2025, Fox was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for twenty years. Malik’s connection to India’s security landscape runs through the Air India Flight 182 bombing of June 1985, which killed 329 passengers and crew and remains the deadliest act of aviation terrorism in Canadian history. Malik and his co-accused Ajaib Singh Bagri were acquitted of all charges in 2005 after a judge found the testimony against them not credible. Yet the acquittal did not erase Malik’s associations with Babbar Khalsa, nor did it resolve the lingering questions about his role in the Khalistan movement’s most violent chapter.

Hardeep Singh Nijjar was the second to die, and his killing produced consequences that dwarfed every other event in the shadow war’s history. On June 18, 2023, approximately one year after Malik’s assassination, Nijjar, forty-five years old, was shot dead in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey’s Newton neighbourhood, the same municipality where Malik had been killed twelve months earlier. Nijjar was the president of the gurdwara and a prominent organizer for overseas Khalistan referendum campaigns run by the advocacy group Sikhs for Justice. India designated him as a terrorist; Canada treated him as a community leader and citizen. Video footage compiled by The Washington Post showed a coordinated attack involving multiple individuals and vehicles. In May 2024, the RCMP arrested three Indian nationals, Karan Brar, Karanpreet Singh, and Kamalpreet Singh, in Edmonton, Alberta, charging all three with first-degree murder and conspiracy. A fourth suspect, Amandeep Singh, was subsequently charged. CBC News reported that investigators believed the men were members of a hit squad directed by the Indian government. The diplomatic cascade that followed Nijjar’s killing restructured the India-Canada relationship from a stable, if secondary, partnership into the deepest diplomatic freeze between the two countries in modern history.

Sukhdool Singh Gill, known by his alias Sukha Duneke, was the third to die. On September 20, 2023, precisely two days after Trudeau’s bombshell parliamentary accusation against India, Duneke was found shot dead in a duplex in northwest Winnipeg’s Hazelton Drive. A neighbour reported hearing eleven shots. Duneke occupied a different position in the Khalistan ecosystem than either Malik or Nijjar. He was a gangster first and a separatist second, a member of the Davinder Bambiha gang wanted in India for extortion, attempted murder, and the alleged orchestration of targeted killings of rival gang members across Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan. He had fled India in 2017 using forged documents. His name appeared on the National Investigation Agency’s list of forty-three most-wanted individuals linked to terror-gang networks, released just one day before his killing. Indian media initially attributed his death to inter-gang rivalry, specifically to revenge for the killing of Gurlal Brar, a relative of US-based gangster Goldy Brar. But the timing, two days after Trudeau’s accusation, made alternative explanations difficult to dismiss. In October 2024, Canadian officials stated they possessed evidence linking Indian government agents to the murders of both Nijjar and Duneke, asserting that six Indian diplomats were “directly involved in gathering detailed intelligence on Sikh separatists who were then killed, attacked or threatened by India’s criminal proxies.”

The shared thread connecting these three cases is not organizational. Malik belonged to an older generation of Khalistan militancy rooted in the 1980s Punjab insurgency and the Air India bombing. Nijjar led the Khalistan Tiger Force, a newer organization with a diaspora-driven operational model centered on Canada, the UK, and online mobilization. Duneke was a gangster whose Khalistan connections were secondary to his criminal enterprise. What connects them is geography: all three were killed in Canada, a country where operations carry fundamentally different risks and consequences than operations in Pakistan. The shared thread is not who they were but where they were killed and what that location meant for the campaign’s exposure, accountability, and diplomatic cost.

This geographic dimension deserves further elaboration because it illuminates a structural feature of the Khalistan movement’s evolution from a South Asian insurgency into a transnational phenomenon. The original Khalistan movement of the 1980s operated primarily within India’s Punjab, sustained by local grievances, Sikh religious nationalism, and the organizational infrastructure of militant groups like the Babbar Khalsa and the Khalistan Commando Force. That movement was crushed through Indian security operations by the early 1990s, but its remnants migrated to the Sikh diaspora communities in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Over the following three decades, these diaspora communities became the primary repositories of Khalistan political energy, fundraising capacity, and organizational continuity. Canada’s Sikh population, concentrated in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland and Ontario’s Greater Toronto Area, grew into the largest Sikh community outside South Asia. Within this community, a spectrum of engagement with the Khalistan cause existed: from the overwhelming majority who were simply living their lives as Canadian citizens, through political activists who exercised their constitutional right to advocate for Khalistan through democratic means, to a smaller number of individuals involved in financing, organizing, or directing activities that India classified as terrorism.

The transformation of the Khalistan movement from a domestic insurgency to a diaspora phenomenon is what created the conditions for Canada to become a theater. If the targets had remained in India or Pakistan, the shadow war would have stayed in those countries. But the migration of the movement’s leadership, fundraising infrastructure, and ideological energy to Canada meant that anyone seeking to degrade the movement’s capability had to contend with targets on Canadian soil, targets protected by Canadian law, Canadian institutions, and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. The three killings of 2022-2023, whatever their individual attributions, occurred within this structural context. They represent the moment when the shadow war’s logic, which holds that designated targets can be eliminated regardless of their geographic location, collided with the institutional reality of a functioning Western democracy.

Understanding why these three cases, considered together, represent a strategic inflection point for the shadow war requires examining each through six analytical lenses that hold all three subjects in the same comparative frame.

Target Profiles and Organizational Affiliations

The first dimension of comparison is who these men were, what organizations they belonged to, and how their profiles differ from the targets eliminated in Pakistan. In Pakistan, the shadow war’s targets have been strikingly consistent in type. They are mid-to-senior operatives of organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Hizbul Mujahideen, men with documented involvement in specific terror attacks on Indian soil, men whose names appear on UN sanctions lists and NIA charge sheets, men who were actively involved in recruiting, financing, or planning cross-border violence. The Pakistani targets fit a coherent strategic logic: eliminate the operational capability of organizations that have killed Indian citizens in mass-casualty attacks. The Canadian targets do not fit as neatly into that logic, and the disjunctions reveal where the campaign’s boundaries become contested.

Ripudaman Singh Malik presents the most ambiguous case. His acquittal in the Air India bombing trial was legally definitive, whatever doubts persisted about his actual involvement. After 2005, Malik lived openly in Surrey as a businessman and community figure. In the years before his death, he had moved politically toward a conciliatory position with India, even publicly expressing support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a visit to India, a shift that alienated Khalistan hardliners. His killing may reflect the shadow war’s logic, or it may reflect the internal dynamics of a Sikh community where old loyalties and new positions created enemies on multiple sides. The two men convicted of his murder were hired guns, paid to carry out a contract killing, but the court proceedings never revealed who signed the contract. Without attribution evidence linking Malik’s killing to the Indian state, his case remains the weakest link in the argument that Canada functions as a deliberate secondary theater. It belongs to the comparison because Canadian officials have publicly stated they possess evidence of Indian government involvement in multiple killings on Canadian soil, and because the pattern of contract-style assassinations of India-designated targets in Surrey cannot be analytically ignored.

Nijjar presents the strongest case, and his profile illuminates the fundamental framing contest that separates the Canadian theater from the Pakistani one. In India’s classification, Nijjar was a terrorist. He was designated under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, accused of involvement in targeted killings in Punjab, and identified as the chief of the Khalistan Tiger Force. From India’s perspective, Nijjar’s profile was no different from the LeT and JeM operatives eliminated in Karachi and Lahore: a designated terrorist sheltered by a foreign government that refused to act against him. From Canada’s perspective, Nijjar was a Canadian citizen, a community leader, and an advocate for a political cause, Khalistan independence, that is legal to promote in Canada under constitutional free-speech protections. He ran a gurdwara, organized referendum campaigns, and participated in the democratic process. He had never been convicted of any crime in Canada. The gap between these two characterizations, terrorist versus citizen, is not a factual dispute that additional evidence could resolve. It is a structural disagreement between two sovereign nations about what constitutes terrorism, what constitutes political advocacy, and where the boundary between state security and individual rights falls. This structural disagreement is precisely what makes Canada a fundamentally different theater than Pakistan: in Pakistan, the targets’ designation as terrorists is not contested by the host government. In Canada, it is.

Duneke’s profile introduces a third category entirely. He was neither a political leader like Nijjar nor a figure from the historical Khalistan movement like Malik. He was a gangster, an operative of the Davinder Bambiha criminal gang, wanted in India for extortion, murder conspiracy, and managing a network of criminal associates from Canadian soil. His Khalistan connections were real but instrumental: the gang exploited separatist networks for logistics, recruitment, and ideological cover, but Duneke’s primary business was crime, not politics. His presence on the NIA’s most-wanted list reflected his criminal activities, not an organizational leadership role in the Khalistan independence movement. If Duneke’s killing was part of the shadow war, it represents an expansion of targeting criteria from terrorists and separatist leaders to criminals associated with separatist networks, a much broader category that would encompass dozens of individuals across multiple countries.

Placing all three profiles side by side reveals that Canada’s targets do not share the homogeneity of Pakistan’s. In Pakistan, the campaign targeted a recognizable type: the jihadi operative with blood on his hands. In Canada, the targets range across a spectrum from acquitted bombing suspect to separatist political leader to wanted gangster. This heterogeneity raises the question of whether “Canada as secondary theater” accurately describes a unified campaign or whether it is an analytical construct that groups together events with different motivations, different sponsors, and different operational logics. The deep brief for this article identifies this as the central disagreement to adjudicate: are all three Canadian killings attributable to the same campaign, or are some the result of internal Sikh community violence, gang rivalry, or other dynamics unrelated to the Indian state? The honest answer, based on currently available evidence, is that only Nijjar’s case carries sufficient official attribution evidence to be placed within the shadow war with high confidence. Malik’s case is a confirmed contract killing without public attribution to any state. Duneke’s case lies between the two, with Canadian officials later linking it to Indian intelligence operations but initial reporting suggesting gang warfare. Yet the pattern, three India-designated targets killed in Canadian cities within fourteen months, is analytically significant regardless of whether all three share a common sponsor.

The target profile comparison also reveals a generational dimension of the Khalistan movement that Pakistan’s jihadi targets do not share. Malik represented the first generation: the men of the 1980s who witnessed the Golden Temple operation, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and the Punjab insurgency’s peak. His generation built the separatist infrastructure that produced the Air India bombing and sustained armed separatism for a decade. Nijjar represented the second generation: born in India but radicalized in the diaspora, leading organizations that operate primarily through social media, referendum campaigns, and transnational fundraising rather than through the gun-and-grenade operations of the 1980s. Duneke represented something else entirely: the nexus between organized crime and separatist politics, where gangsters exploit the Khalistan label for operational cover while running extortion rackets that have nothing to do with Sikh self-determination. The shadow war’s Pakistani targets do not show this generational diversity because jihadi organizations like LeT and JeM remain operationally active in their original form: the men being killed in Karachi are the same type of operatives who have been running cross-border infiltrations and planning attacks for decades. The Khalistan movement, by contrast, has mutated across generations and geographies, producing targets whose relationship to the original separatist cause varies enormously. This mutation complicates the campaign’s strategic logic in Canada. Eliminating a Nijjar may degrade a specific organization. Eliminating a Duneke may disrupt a criminal network. But does either elimination address the political dynamics that sustain Khalistan separatism in the Canadian Sikh diaspora? The evidence from the post-Nijjar period suggests that it does not.

The comparison between the Pakistani and Canadian target profiles illuminates a broader conceptual tension within the shadow war: the difference between counter-terrorism and counter-separatism. In Pakistan, the campaign is counter-terrorism in the conventional sense. It targets individuals who planned, financed, or facilitated specific acts of violence, bombings, shootings, infiltrations, that killed identifiable victims. The moral and strategic calculus, whatever one thinks of extraterritorial killings, engages a recognizable framework: the state acts to prevent future attacks by eliminating the individuals who plan them. In Canada, the campaign’s targets occupy ambiguous territory between terrorism and separatism, between criminal violence and political advocacy. This ambiguity is precisely what Trudeau exploited in framing Nijjar’s killing as an attack on Canadian sovereignty and democratic values. It is also what makes the Canadian cases so much more diplomatically costly than the Pakistani ones: when the target’s status as a terrorist is contested, the killing cannot be framed as counter-terrorism, and it defaults to a different frame entirely, one of assassination, sovereignty violation, and transnational repression.

Method and Operational Execution

The second dimension examines how each killing was carried out, comparing the operational methods used in Canada to the signature motorcycle-borne assassinations that characterize the Pakistani campaign. The comparison reveals that the Canadian operations employed fundamentally different methods, consistent with the different operational environment but inconsistent with each other, further complicating the question of whether all three represent the same campaign.

In Pakistan, the modus operandi has achieved an almost industrial consistency. Two men on a motorcycle approach the target in a congested urban environment. The pillion rider fires multiple rounds, typically from a handgun at close range. The motorcycle disappears into traffic. No group claims responsibility. Pakistani investigations produce no arrests, no convictions, and no accountability. The method exploits Pakistan’s chaotic urban landscapes, its overwhelmed and often complicit law enforcement apparatus, and the reality that motorcycle-borne shootings are so common in cities like Karachi that a targeted assassination blends into background noise of everyday violence. The consistency of the MO across dozens of cases is itself evidence of a coordinated campaign: the same approach, refined through repetition, deployed by operatives who have learned from each preceding operation what works and what does not.

Malik’s killing employed a different model entirely. Two hired gunmen, identified as Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez, conducted advance surveillance at the target’s place of business the day before the killing. They used a stolen vehicle, arrived the following morning, and shot Malik multiple times as he sat in his car in a business park parking lot. They fled in the stolen vehicle, torched it in a laneway, and transferred to a pre-staged second car. This is a contract killing model familiar to organized crime in North America: hired shooters, stolen vehicles, surveillance runs, escape vehicles, and deliberate destruction of forensic evidence. It is not the motorcycle method of Pakistan’s operations. It suggests either that the campaign adapted its methods for a Western environment where motorcycle assassinations would be instantly conspicuous, or that the killing was arranged through criminal intermediaries who used their own established methods. The fact that Fox and Lopez were both Canadian residents, not foreign operatives, supports the intermediary hypothesis. Someone hired them; they used the techniques available to them as participants in British Columbia’s gang ecosystem.

Nijjar’s killing was operationally more sophisticated. Multiple individuals, later identified as Indian nationals who arrived in Canada on temporary visas, coordinated a parking-lot ambush at a location, Nijjar’s gurdwara, where the target’s daily routine was predictable. The attackers played distinct roles: shooters, drivers, and spotters. Nijjar was shot as he sat in his pickup truck after evening prayers, a targeting window that echoes the prayer-time and routine-exploitation patterns seen in the Pakistani operations. The assailants fled in vehicles and dispersed. Three suspects were arrested in Edmonton, Alberta, hundreds of kilometres from the crime scene, suggesting a pre-planned extraction from the area of operations. The operational profile is closer to an intelligence-directed operation than to a gang hit: the use of foreign nationals as operatives, the role differentiation within the team, the exploitation of the target’s routine, and the geographic separation between the operational area and the operatives’ base of residence all point to planning by an entity with intelligence tradecraft experience. Canadian investigators and subsequently government officials stated their belief that the hit squad was directed by the Indian government.

Duneke’s killing was the simplest in execution. He was found shot dead inside a duplex on Hazelton Drive in northwest Winnipeg. A neighbour reported hearing eleven shots. No arrests have been publicly announced in connection with his killing. The method, a shooting inside a residence, could indicate either a sophisticated operation (gaining access to a target inside a private dwelling requires either surveillance knowledge of the target’s whereabouts or a trusted intermediary) or a simpler criminal execution by individuals who knew Duneke personally. The absence of arrests and the relative paucity of publicly available investigative detail make Duneke’s case the least transparent of the three.

Comparing all three methods to each other and to the Pakistani model yields two observations. First, no Canadian killing uses the motorcycle assassination method. This makes strategic sense: motorcycle-borne shootings that are unremarkable in Karachi’s traffic would immediately attract attention in Surrey or Winnipeg, where they would be unprecedented and instantly recognizable as a foreign operational signature. The adaptation of methods to the local environment is itself evidence of intelligence, whether that intelligence resides in a state agency or in criminal intermediaries who understand their own operating terrain. Second, the three Canadian methods are inconsistent with each other. Malik’s killing used local hired guns. Nijjar’s used what investigators describe as an intelligence-directed team of foreign nationals. Duneke’s appears to have been a more straightforward shooting. This inconsistency either reflects a campaign that uses different methods for different targets based on availability and circumstances, or it reflects three killings with different sponsors using different resources. Both explanations are plausible. Neither can be definitively eliminated with the available evidence.

A third observation warrants attention: the different levels of operational security across the three cases. In Pakistan, the campaign has maintained extraordinary discipline over dozens of operations without a single arrest or identified operative. In Canada, the Nijjar operation was penetrated within months. Four suspects were arrested, all Indian nationals, and investigators reportedly identified them well before the arrests and placed them under surveillance. The Malik operation was also solved quickly, with arrests twelve days after the killing. Only Duneke’s killing remains unsolved in terms of arrests. The contrast between Pakistan’s zero-arrest record and Canada’s rapid investigative results underscores the operational environment disparity. It is not that the Canadian operations were necessarily planned less carefully than the Pakistani ones; it is that Canada’s institutional environment provides law enforcement with tools, from CCTV networks to financial surveillance to signals intelligence, that Pakistan’s environment simply does not. A campaign that has operated with impunity for years in Pakistan encountered a fundamentally different level of institutional resistance in Canada, and the result was rapid exposure.

The method comparison also raises questions about the campaign’s organizational learning. In Pakistan, the consistency of the MO across dozens of cases suggests that the campaign learns from each operation and refines its approach. In Canada, the evidence suggests either that the campaign did not apply the same learning process (using demonstrably higher-risk methods in a more dangerous environment) or that the Canadian operations were organized through different channels than the Pakistani ones, channels with less operational experience and less institutional knowledge of the tradecraft required for covert operations in Western democracies. The Pannun case in the United States provides supporting evidence for the latter interpretation: the recruitment of a criminal intermediary (Gupta) who then unwittingly engaged a DEA undercover officer suggests a level of operational amateurism that would be remarkable if it originated from the same intelligence infrastructure that has conducted dozens of successful operations in Pakistan without a single compromise.

Attribution Evidence and Investigation Status

The third and most consequential dimension compares what is known about who ordered each killing, examining the evidence trail, investigative progress, and the strength of official attribution claims. This dimension is where the three cases diverge most dramatically and where the analytical stakes are highest, because attribution determines whether these killings are shadow war operations or whether they belong to other categories of violence.

In Pakistan’s theater, attribution operates through pattern rather than proof. No Pakistani investigation has ever publicly identified an Indian state actor as responsible for any of the targeted killings. India denies involvement in every case. Pakistan attributes the killings to India, specifically to RAW, but Pakistan’s own intelligence service, the ISI, is so deeply embedded in the terror infrastructure being targeted that its allegations carry limited credibility in international forums. The attribution case for the Pakistani killings rests on pattern evidence: consistent MO, exclusive targeting of India-designated individuals, absence of any Pakistani group claiming credit, and the operational sophistication required to conduct dozens of assassinations across multiple cities without a single confirmed failure or compromised operation. Pattern evidence is persuasive to analysts but insufficient for courts or diplomatic proceedings.

The Malik case has produced the least attribution evidence linking it to any state actor. Two men were convicted of the killing. Both confirmed they were “hired and paid.” The identity of whoever ordered the contract remains undisclosed in court proceedings. No Canadian government official has specifically and publicly attributed Malik’s killing to the Indian government in the same way Trudeau attributed Nijjar’s. However, in October 2024, Canadian officials stated they possessed evidence of Indian government involvement in multiple homicides on Canadian soil, a formulation broad enough to potentially encompass Malik’s case without naming it specifically. Malik’s killing could plausibly be attributed to Indian intelligence, to Khalistan hardliners angered by his outreach to Modi, or to personal enemies accumulated over decades in Surrey’s Sikh community. Former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh publicly noted that Malik’s recent visit to India and letter supporting Modi “may have reverberated and had implications within the community.” The investigative result is a confirmed contract killing with no confirmed principal.

Nijjar’s case presents the most robust attribution evidence, a distinction that has made it the fulcrum of the India-Canada diplomatic crisis. The attribution chain runs through three layers. The first layer is Trudeau’s September 2023 parliamentary statement, in which the Prime Minister said Canadian security agencies were “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India” and Nijjar’s killing. Trudeau’s accusation was not based on Canadian intelligence alone; reporting has consistently indicated that Five Eyes partners, particularly the United States, shared signals intelligence that supported the Canadian assessment. The second layer is the criminal investigation, which produced four arrests of Indian nationals and, according to CBC reporting, evidence that investigators believe the suspects were members of a hit squad directed by the Indian government. The third layer, and the one that transformed the case from a bilateral Canada-India dispute into a global story, is the corroboration provided by the US Pannun assassination plot case. In November 2023, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Nikhil Gupta for his role in a murder-for-hire plot targeting Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh American citizen and leader of Sikhs for Justice. The indictment identified Gupta’s co-conspirator as an unnamed Indian government employee, later revealed through a superseding indictment in October 2024 as Vikash Yadav, described as a former RAW senior field officer. The Pannun indictment did not directly address Nijjar’s killing, but it corroborated the Canadian allegations by establishing, through US legal proceedings, that an Indian intelligence officer had indeed directed assassination operations against Khalistan figures in North America during the same timeframe. The superseding indictment also noted that Yadav had sent Gupta a video of Nijjar’s “bloody body” after the killing and that Gupta told the DEA undercover officer that Nijjar “was also the target” and “we have so many targets.”

Duneke’s attribution evidence is thinner than Nijjar’s but stronger than Malik’s. Initial reporting from Indian media and intelligence sources attributed his killing to inter-gang rivalry, specifically to revenge for the murder of Gurlal Brar, a relative of US-based gangster Goldy Brar. However, in October 2024, Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly tied Indian officials to multiple killings in Canada, and Canadian officials specifically identified Duneke alongside Nijjar as a victim whose murder was connected to Indian government intelligence-gathering. The expulsion of six Indian diplomats in October 2024, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, was justified in part by evidence that these officials were “directly involved in gathering detailed intelligence on Sikh separatists who were then killed, attacked or threatened by India’s criminal proxies,” a formulation that explicitly encompasses Duneke. India responded by calling the claims “preposterous” and expelling six Canadian diplomats in retaliation.

The attribution comparison across the three cases reveals a gradient, not a binary. Nijjar’s killing has the strongest evidence trail: prime ministerial accusation, Five Eyes intelligence sharing, four arrests, and corroboration from a parallel US legal case. Duneke’s case has official Canadian attribution but no arrests and competing explanations. Malik’s case has a conviction of the shooters but no public attribution of the principal. The gradient matters because it determines how confidently the analyst can place each case within the shadow war framework versus alternative explanations. It also matters because the international response to the Canadian allegations has been calibrated to Nijjar’s case specifically; the diplomatic consequences flowed from the strongest attribution evidence, not from the weakest.

Diplomatic Consequences and International Fallout

The fourth dimension measures what each killing cost India diplomatically, individually and cumulatively, comparing the Canadian fallout to the near-zero diplomatic cost of operations in Pakistan. This dimension reveals the sharpest contrast between the two theaters and provides the strongest evidence that Canada, as an operational environment, follows fundamentally different rules.

In Pakistan, the diplomatic consequences of the shadow war have been remarkably contained. Pakistan protests. India denies. The international community remains silent. The cycle repeats. Pakistan’s protests carry limited weight for structural reasons: the same government protesting the killings sheltered the targeted individuals for years, sometimes decades, in facilities proximate to military installations and under the protection of the ISI. The international community, particularly the United States, has spent twenty years pressuring Pakistan to act against the same organizations whose members are being eliminated. When LeT and JeM operatives are killed in Karachi, the reaction from Washington, London, and Brussels is a silence that communicates, if not approval, then an absence of objection that functionally serves the same purpose. Pakistan cannot invoke the same norms of sovereignty that would protect a Western democracy because Pakistan has systematically violated the sovereignty norm itself by exporting terrorism across its borders.

Canada’s diplomatic toolkit is categorically different. After Nijjar’s killing, the diplomatic cascade unfolded with a speed and intensity that no Pakistani protest has ever approached. In September 2023, Trudeau made his parliamentary accusation, transforming a criminal investigation into a sovereign confrontation between two G20 nations. India expelled a Canadian diplomat. Canada expelled an Indian diplomat. The bilateral relationship, which had been quietly expanding through immigration, trade, and educational exchanges that sent hundreds of thousands of Indian students to Canadian universities, entered a deep freeze. The diplomatic trajectory worsened through 2024 as the RCMP arrested four suspects and the investigation reportedly implicated Indian diplomatic personnel. In October 2024, Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including the High Commissioner. India responded with retaliatory expulsions and denounced the allegations as “preposterous.” The bilateral diplomatic architecture, built over decades, was effectively dismantled in thirteen months.

The fallout extended beyond the India-Canada bilateral channel. Canada’s accusations were amplified by the parallel US legal proceedings against Nikhil Gupta and the subsequent indictment of Vikash Yadav. The Pannun plot gave the Canadian allegations a corroborating data point that emanated from the United States, India’s most important strategic partner and the one country whose disapproval New Delhi could not afford to ignore. Washington’s response was calibrated but unmistakable: Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray issued statements declaring that the US would not tolerate foreign nationals targeting American citizens. The White House described the allegations as “a serious matter” and stated that India had committed to investigating. The diplomatic damage assessment across four relationships (India-Canada, India-US, India-UK, India-Five Eyes) reveals that the Canadian operations produced more diplomatic cost in fourteen months than the Pakistani operations produced in the preceding three years.

The contrast is structural, not incidental. Pakistan’s protests do not produce consequences because Pakistan lacks the institutional credibility, alliance relationships, and intelligence capabilities to make its accusations stick. Canada’s protests produce consequences because Canada is a G7 member, a NATO ally, a Five Eyes partner, and a country whose intelligence assessments are taken seriously by Washington, London, and Canberra. When Canada accuses India, the accusation carries the implicit weight of Five Eyes corroboration. When Pakistan accuses India, the accusation carries the weight of a country that the accusers’ own allies consider complicit in terrorism. The same action, killing a designated target on foreign soil, produces radically different consequences depending on which foreign soil is involved.

Duneke’s killing, occurring just two days after Trudeau’s parliamentary accusation, amplified the diplomatic crisis at precisely the moment it was most volatile. Whether the timing was coincidental, whether Duneke’s killing was the result of gang warfare entirely unconnected to the Indian state, or whether it represented a separate operation whose execution timing was catastrophically miscalculated, the effect was identical: it reinforced the narrative that Indian intelligence was conducting systematic operations on Canadian soil, and it provided Canadian officials with additional evidence to build their case for the October 2024 diplomat expulsions.

The temporal clustering of events in September 2023 deserves granular analysis because it illustrates how individual operational decisions can produce cascading diplomatic effects that far exceed the sum of their parts. On September 18, Trudeau made his parliamentary statement. On September 20, two days later, Duneke was found dead in Winnipeg. On September 20, the same day, the NIA released its list of forty-three most-wanted individuals linked to terror-gang networks, a list that included Duneke. India expelled a Canadian diplomat in retaliation for Trudeau’s statement. Canada expelled an Indian diplomat in response. The G20 summit in New Delhi, held just days before Trudeau’s statement, had already produced a tense sideline meeting between Trudeau and Modi. The entire sequence, from the G20 confrontation through the parliamentary accusation through the Winnipeg killing through the mutual expulsions, unfolded in a matter of days, giving neither side time for careful recalibration and ensuring that each action intensified the next.

The diplomatic analysis must also account for the asymmetric importance of the bilateral relationship. For Canada, the India relationship was significant but not vital; Canada’s essential partnerships are with the United States, the UK, and Europe. For India, the Canada relationship was similarly secondary; India’s critical partnerships are with the United States, Japan, France, and the Gulf states. This mutual secondariness allowed both sides to escalate more aggressively than they would have in a relationship that either considered vital. Neither government faced domestic political pressure to preserve the relationship; indeed, both faced domestic incentives to escalate. Trudeau confronted a substantial Sikh Canadian constituency that demanded accountability. Modi confronted a nationalist domestic audience that rejected any foreign interference in India’s security operations. The bilateral dynamic thus became a case study in how countries manage diplomatic crises when neither side considers the relationship worth saving.

The ripple effects extended to third parties in ways that neither India nor Canada could fully control. The United Kingdom, home to a significant Sikh community and the site of suspicious deaths linked to the Khalistan movement (including Avtar Singh Khanda in Birmingham), faced pressure to assess whether similar operations had occurred on British soil. Australia, another Five Eyes member with a growing Indian diaspora, monitored the situation with concern about potential implications for its own security environment. The European Union, engaged in free-trade negotiations with India, found its calculations complicated by allegations that raised questions about rule-of-law standards. Each of these third-party effects was minor individually, but collectively they created a global diplomatic context in which India’s conduct in Canada became a reference point for conversations about transnational repression, extraterritorial operations, and the limits of sovereign security claims.

The Five Eyes Operational Environment

The fifth dimension examines what makes Five Eyes territory operationally different from Pakistan, analyzing the surveillance environment, law enforcement capability, intelligence-sharing architecture, and legal infrastructure that transformed Canada from a low-visibility theater into the campaign’s highest-risk operating environment. This analysis draws on the comparison between Western safe havens and Pakistani safe havens to explain why methods that succeed in Pakistan fail, or produce dramatically different consequences, in Canada.

Pakistan offers an operational environment that, from the perspective of a covert campaign, approaches the ideal conditions for sustained targeted killing. Law enforcement is fragmented between multiple federal and provincial agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, poor coordination, and endemic corruption. The intelligence service, ISI, is itself involved in managing the same militant networks being targeted, creating a structural conflict of interest that ensures investigations into the killings are never genuinely pursued. Forensic capability is limited: crime scenes are contaminated, witnesses are intimidated, CCTV coverage is sparse in the neighborhoods where operations occur, and the chain of custody for any evidence that is collected is easily compromised. The judicial system lacks the independence or the investigative resources to pursue cases that ISI does not want pursued. The result is operational impunity: dozens of targeted killings across multiple cities, stretching over several years, without a single arrest, conviction, or credible attribution finding from Pakistani authorities.

Canada presents the inverse environment on virtually every dimension. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police operates a professional, well-resourced investigative apparatus with access to modern forensic techniques, digital surveillance tools, and the legal authority to conduct complex investigations over extended timeframes. CCTV coverage in Canadian cities is extensive, as demonstrated by the surveillance footage from the Nijjar killing that was compiled by The Washington Post and that captured the coordinated movement of multiple attackers and vehicles. Canadian courts operate independently with adversarial proceedings, evidentiary standards, and the power to compel testimony and disclosure. The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team that handled the Nijjar case is a specialized unit with experience in organized-crime assassinations and the resources to pursue transnational investigative leads. Within months of the Nijjar killing, investigators had identified the suspects and, according to CBC reporting, had placed them under “tight surveillance” before making arrests.

The contrast extends to the immigration and border-control systems that affect operational logistics. In Pakistan, the movement of unknown individuals through cities like Karachi and Lahore is essentially unmonitored; millions of people move through these cities daily without documentation checks, transit records, or digital trails. Operatives can arrive, conduct surveillance, execute an operation, and depart without leaving electronic traces that law enforcement could reconstruct after the fact. In Canada, every individual who enters the country is recorded by immigration authorities. Visa applications create paper trails. Airline records, rental car agreements, hotel registrations, cellular network connections, and financial transactions generate data points that, when reconstructed by investigators, can map an operative’s movements with granular precision. The four suspects in the Nijjar case arrived on temporary visas, including student visas, creating immigration records that allowed investigators to trace their entry into Canada, their movements between provinces, and their activities in the weeks preceding the killing. This institutional transparency is what Pakistani law enforcement lacks and what makes the Canadian environment categorically more dangerous for covert operations.

The financial dimension adds another layer of exposure risk. In Pakistan, the campaign can rely on cash transactions, informal hawala networks, and untraceable financial flows to fund operations without creating audit trails. In Canada, the financial system is heavily regulated, with mandatory suspicious-transaction reporting, know-your-customer requirements, and coordination between financial intelligence units and law enforcement. Any significant financial transaction associated with the operation, payments to intermediaries, rental agreements, vehicle purchases, or prepaid communication devices, creates a potential investigative thread. The Malik case demonstrated this: investigators traced the financial compensation paid to Fox and Lopez, confirming through court proceedings that the killers were “hired and paid.” The financial trail did not identify the ultimate principal, but it established the transactional nature of the killing in a way that would be nearly impossible in Pakistan’s cash-driven economy.

The Five Eyes dimension adds a layer of intelligence capability that multiplies Canada’s individual investigative capacity by a factor that covert operators cannot ignore. Canada’s membership in the Five Eyes alliance means that signals intelligence collected by the NSA, GCHQ, the ASD, and the GCSB is shared with Canadian intelligence through established channels. Reporting has consistently indicated that Five Eyes partners shared intelligence with Canada that supported the assessment of Indian government involvement in Nijjar’s killing. The practical implication is significant: even if Canadian signals intelligence capabilities alone were insufficient to intercept communications between operatives in Canada and handlers in India, the alliance’s collective capabilities are not. Operating on Canadian soil means operating under the combined surveillance apparatus of five countries’ intelligence services. Any communication between operatives and a foreign government, any electronic trail connecting the operation to its sponsors, falls within the potential reach of this apparatus.

This is the distinction that makes Canada fundamentally different from Pakistan as an operational theater. In Pakistan, the operational risk is tactical: the risk that the operation fails, that the shooter misses, that the motorcycle breaks down, that an alert policeman happens to be at the wrong intersection. The strategic risk, the risk of attribution, investigation, prosecution, and diplomatic consequences, is near zero because Pakistan’s institutional environment cannot convert tactical success (catching a shooter) into strategic consequences (identifying the sponsor and confronting the sponsor’s government). In Canada, the relationship is reversed. The tactical risk of any individual operation may be manageable, but the strategic risk is enormous because Canada’s institutional environment can convert a single arrest into a diplomatic crisis, a Five Eyes intelligence assessment, and a foreign legal indictment.

The Pannun case in the United States illustrates the same dynamic with even greater clarity. The plot against Pannun failed precisely because US law enforcement detected it. Nikhil Gupta, recruited by Yadav to hire a hitman, unknowingly engaged a DEA undercover operative. The entire plot was monitored, documented, and used to produce an indictment that named a specific Indian intelligence officer. The US environment, like Canada’s, is saturated with counter-intelligence capability, and any operation that touches American soil, American citizens, or American law enforcement triggers institutional responses that are impossible to suppress. The Pannun case did not result in a killing, but it produced something potentially more damaging to the campaign than any killing: documented evidence, filed in a US federal court, that a named RAW officer directed assassination operations in North America. That evidence, in turn, provided corroboration for Canada’s accusations and transformed what might have been a bilateral India-Canada dispute into a question about whether India was conducting assassination operations across the democratic world.

The Pannun case also reveals the vulnerability of proxy operations in Western environments. In Pakistan, the campaign apparently uses local assets with sufficient operational discipline to avoid identification and arrest. In the United States, the recruitment chain proved catastrophically porous: Yadav recruited Gupta, a criminal intermediary with no intelligence training and no ability to evaluate the reliability of his contacts. Gupta then approached someone who turned out to be a DEA undercover officer, a catastrophic operational failure that would have been almost inconceivable in Pakistan’s less penetrated criminal ecosystem. The lesson is that the proxy networks available in Western countries are qualitatively different from those available in Pakistan, where decades of relationships between intelligence services and criminal or militant elements have created channels of communication and trust that do not exist in the organized crime communities of North America. Using untrained criminal intermediaries in environments saturated with law enforcement informants is not a viable operational model, and the Pannun case proved it.

The Five Eyes environment also affects the campaign through deterrence, or the failure of deterrence. One interpretation of the Canadian operations is that the campaign’s planners understood the risks but calculated that the targets’ elimination was worth the diplomatic cost. This interpretation attributes strategic rationality to the decision, a conscious trade-off between operational objectives and diplomatic consequences. The alternative interpretation is that the planners misjudged the environment, assuming that the same operational impunity that prevailed in Pakistan could be extended to Canada, perhaps relying on the assumption that Western governments would not risk their strategic relationships with India over the killing of individuals whom India designated as terrorists. If the second interpretation is correct, the Canadian operations represent a catastrophic intelligence failure: not a failure of operational execution but a failure of strategic assessment, a fundamental misreading of the adversary environment.

The distinction between tactical intelligence and strategic intelligence is crucial here. Tactical intelligence, the ability to locate a target, surveil their movements, select an approach route, and time an operation, appears to have been adequate in the Canadian cases, at least in the Nijjar operation. Strategic intelligence, the ability to assess the likely institutional response, diplomatic consequences, and long-term cost of an operation, appears to have been inadequate. This gap between tactical competence and strategic misjudgment is not unique to the Canadian cases; intelligence history is full of examples where agencies that excelled at the operational level failed catastrophically at the strategic assessment level. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the Soviet assessment of Afghan resistance, and Pakistan’s own miscalculation in the Kargil conflict are all cases where operational capability was undermined by strategic misassessment. The Canadian cases may represent a similar dynamic: an intelligence apparatus that knows how to execute a targeted killing but did not adequately assess the institutional environment in which that killing would unfold.

The institutional response to the Nijjar killing also reveals something about the internal dynamics of Canadian governance that affected the diplomatic trajectory. Trudeau’s September 2023 parliamentary statement was itself a strategic decision with competing interpretations. One reading holds that Trudeau spoke because the intelligence was compelling and his obligations as prime minister required transparency with Parliament. A second reading, advanced by some critics, holds that Trudeau, facing difficult domestic politics and a significant Sikh Canadian constituency, used the intelligence to position himself politically. A third reading acknowledges that both motivations may have operated simultaneously: the intelligence may have been genuine and the political incentive may have aligned with the security assessment, producing a statement that served both purposes. Regardless of the motivation, the institutional effect was the same: once the prime minister made the accusation in Parliament, the diplomatic machinery was activated, and the escalation dynamic became self-reinforcing.

The evidence supports elements of both interpretations. The operational execution of Nijjar’s killing suggests professional planning: role differentiation, exploitation of routine, geographic separation between operational area and base. But the strategic consequences suggest that whoever authorized the operation either underestimated Canada’s institutional response or overestimated India’s ability to weather the diplomatic fallout. The arrest of four suspects, the expulsion of six diplomats including the High Commissioner, the corroboration from US legal proceedings, and the effective destruction of the India-Canada bilateral relationship all represent costs that no rational planner would willingly accept if they had accurately assessed the operational environment. The alternative, that these costs were anticipated and accepted, implies a strategic calculus in which eliminating Khalistan figures in Canada was considered more important than the bilateral relationship with Ottawa, a proposition that strains credulity given Canada’s relatively minor role in India’s strategic landscape compared to the United States, whose parallel investigation of the Pannun case carried far greater strategic weight.

The operational environment dimension also illuminates why Canada’s Khalistan-linked killings generated consequences that operations targeting LeT and JeM operatives in Pakistan never did. The targets in Pakistan are universally recognized as terrorists. LeT is a UN-designated organization. JeM is a UN-designated organization. The individuals eliminated in Pakistan include men who planned the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2001 Parliament attack, the Pathankot airbase attack, and dozens of other mass-casualty incidents. There is no serious debate about whether these men were terrorists. In Canada, the targets’ status is contested. Nijjar was a designated terrorist in India but a community leader in Canada. Malik was acquitted of the crime India associated him with. Duneke was a criminal, not a traditional terrorist. The contested status of the Canadian targets allowed Trudeau to frame the killings as an attack on Canadian sovereignty and on Canadian citizens, a framing that would be much harder to sustain if the targets were universally acknowledged as mass-casualty terrorists with undisputed blood on their hands.

Strategic Impact and Campaign Cost-Benefit

The sixth and final dimension of comparison examines whether operating in Canada was worth it, assessing the strategic impact of the three killings against the diplomatic, investigative, and reputational costs they generated. This dimension also connects the Canadian cases to the broader question of whether the shadow war’s extension beyond Pakistan represents strategic confidence or strategic overreach.

The strategic impact of each killing can be assessed on its own terms. Malik’s killing eliminated a historical figure associated, in Indian intelligence’s assessment, with the Khalistan movement’s most violent era. But Malik was seventy-five years old at the time of his death, operating a small business, and had publicly moved toward conciliation with the Indian government. His operational relevance to any active threat was minimal. If his killing was a shadow war operation, it targeted a symbol rather than an active capability. Nijjar’s killing eliminated the leader of the Khalistan Tiger Force, an organization that India designated as actively involved in terrorism. From India’s perspective, Nijjar was not merely a political activist but an operational leader directing violence from Canadian soil. If that characterization is accurate, his elimination removed a genuine security threat. If Canada’s characterization is accurate, he was a political organizer exercising his democratic rights, and his killing was an assassination of a Canadian citizen by a foreign government. Duneke’s killing eliminated a gangster involved in cross-border criminal activity, including extortion calls made from Canadian soil to victims in Punjab. His elimination disrupted a criminal network but did not address a terrorist organization in any traditional sense.

Against these operational gains, the costs of the Canadian operations are staggering by any measure. The diplomatic cost includes the effective severing of the India-Canada relationship, the mutual expulsion of diplomats, the freezing of trade discussions, the disruption of educational exchanges that brought over 400,000 Indian students to Canadian institutions, and the transformation of Canada from a benign partner into an active adversary in international forums. The investigative cost includes four arrests of individuals linked to Indian intelligence operations, an ongoing RCMP investigation that continues to probe the involvement of Indian government officials, and the precedent of a Western democracy conducting a criminal investigation that implicates a friendly nation’s intelligence service. The reputational cost includes the global media coverage framing India as a country that conducts assassinations on the soil of allied democracies, a framing that aligns India’s behavior not with its preferred peer group (the United States, Israel, France) but with its adversaries (Russia’s Salisbury poisoning, Saudi Arabia’s Khashoggi murder). The legal cost includes the Pannun indictment in the United States, which has created a permanent record in a US federal court identifying a RAW officer as a participant in assassination operations targeting a US citizen.

The cost-benefit analysis is further complicated by the cascade effect. The Canadian operations did not only produce bilateral consequences with Ottawa. They produced consequences with Washington (through the Pannun case), with London (through Five Eyes intelligence sharing and the UK’s own Khalistan dynamics, illustrated by the case of Avtar Singh Khanda in Birmingham), and with the broader international community that now had documented, court-filed evidence of Indian extraterritorial operations in allied countries. The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation into India’s alleged killings in Pakistan had generated headlines but limited diplomatic consequences because Pakistan lacked the institutional standing to force accountability. The Canadian and American cases created accountability mechanisms (criminal investigations, court proceedings, diplomatic expulsions) that Pakistan’s allegations never could.

The comparison between Pakistan’s zero-cost environment and Canada’s maximal-cost environment reveals what analysts at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), including Sushant Sareen, have characterized as a fundamental miscalculation in the campaign’s risk assessment. Operating in Pakistan exploits structural conditions that minimize blowback: a compromised security apparatus, a government that lacks international credibility on terrorism issues, and targets whose designation as terrorists is universally accepted. Operating in Canada requires accepting structural conditions that maximize blowback: a functional judicial system, a government with international standing, Five Eyes intelligence support, and targets whose designation as terrorists is contested. The strategic question is not whether the campaign had the capability to operate in Canada; the arrests and investigations confirm that it did. The strategic question is whether the operational gains justified the costs, and by any conventional cost-benefit calculation, the answer appears to be no.

Rohan Gunaratna, the terrorism scholar at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, has argued that extraterritorial operations in allied countries represent a qualitatively different category of risk from operations in adversary or neutral territory. When a state eliminates a target in a country it considers an adversary or a failed state, the diplomatic fallout is contained by the pre-existing adversarial relationship. When a state eliminates a target in a country it considers an ally, the operation does not merely produce diplomatic friction; it restructures the foundational terms of the alliance itself. The India-Canada relationship was not a close alliance, but it was a functional partnership built on immigration flows, educational exchanges, trade relationships, and shared membership in international institutions. The Canadian operations did not create a temporary diplomatic squall within this partnership; they permanently altered the partnership’s foundations, introducing a dimension of mistrust and surveillance awareness that will persist long after the specific killings are resolved through legal proceedings.

The Indian government’s counter-narrative, which frames the Canadian allegations as politically motivated and positions Canada as a country that shelters anti-India elements, represents an alternative cost-benefit assessment. In this framing, the relationship with Canada was already compromised by Ottawa’s tolerance of Khalistan activities, and the diplomatic consequences of the killings merely surfaced tensions that already existed beneath the surface. If the relationship was structurally unsound, the argument runs, then the diplomatic cost of the Canadian operations was not a loss but a revelation, forcing both sides to confront the incompatibility between India’s security requirements and Canada’s approach to Khalistan advocacy. This counter-narrative has resonance within Indian strategic circles, where frustration with Western tolerance of what India considers separatist terrorism has been building for years. It does not, however, address the parallel US case, which introduced consequences with a partner India genuinely cannot afford to alienate.

Yet the cost-benefit framing may be incomplete. One perspective, advanced by analysts who view the shadow war as a strategic communication exercise as well as an operational campaign, argues that operating in Canada served a deterrence function that operations in Pakistan could not. Eliminating terrorists in Pakistan sends a message only to other terrorists in Pakistan: you are not safe here. Eliminating targets in Canada, on Five Eyes soil, sends a message to the global Khalistan diaspora: you are not safe anywhere. If the campaign’s objective extended beyond degrading terrorist capability to deterring diaspora-based terrorism globally, then the Canadian operations’ deterrent value, however costly diplomatically, may have been central to the strategic calculus. This interpretation attributes to the campaign a logic that values global deterrence over bilateral diplomacy, a hierarchy of priorities that the broader pattern of the shadow war supports: the campaign has consistently prioritized operational objectives over diplomatic niceties, from its earliest operations in Karachi through its most audacious strikes in Punjab.

The deterrence argument, however, faces a significant counter-argument grounded in the evidence of what actually happened after the Canadian operations. If the intended audience for the deterrence message was the global Khalistan diaspora, the message appears to have failed. Khalistan advocacy has not diminished in Canada since the killings; if anything, Nijjar’s death transformed him into a martyr figure around whom diaspora activism has intensified. Sikhs for Justice has continued to organize referendum campaigns. Khalistan advocacy organizations have grown more vocal, not less. The diplomatic crisis itself has become a rallying point for the diaspora, evidence in their framing that India’s authoritarian tendencies extend to foreign soil and that Sikh Canadians face a genuine threat from a foreign government. The deterrence logic assumes that potential targets will observe the killings and modify their behavior to avoid similar fates. The observed reality is that the killings radicalized portions of the diaspora that had previously been politically passive, expanding rather than contracting the universe of individuals engaged in Khalistan activism. If the Canadian operations were intended to deter, they appear to have produced the opposite effect.

The cost-benefit analysis also depends on time horizon. In the short term, the Canadian operations have been unambiguously costly. In the medium term, the Pahalgam massacre of April 2025 and the subsequent Operation Sindoor shifted international attention so dramatically that the India-Canada diplomatic crisis, which had dominated headlines for eighteen months, was rapidly subsumed by the larger India-Pakistan military confrontation. The Pannun case in the US has not derailed the India-US strategic partnership, which both governments consider too important to sacrifice over a foiled assassination plot. If the diplomatic costs prove temporary, absorbed by the larger geopolitical dynamics that make India an indispensable partner for the West in managing China’s rise, then the long-term assessment may differ from the short-term calculation.

There is also a dimension of organizational learning that the cost-benefit analysis should address. The Canadian operations, precisely because they produced consequences that the Pakistani operations never did, may have provided the campaign with strategic intelligence about the limits of its operating envelope. Every intelligence operation that fails, or that succeeds at excessive cost, teaches the sponsoring organization something about the environment in which it operates. The Canadian experience taught the campaign (assuming it is a unified campaign) that Five Eyes territory imposes costs that Pakistani territory does not; that Western judicial systems can penetrate operational security that Pakistani investigations cannot; that criminal intermediaries in Western countries may be less reliable than assets in Pakistan’s more permissive environment; and that the diplomatic architecture of Western alliances amplifies the consequences of individual operations in ways that Pakistan’s isolated diplomatic position does not. These lessons, however costly to learn, may inform future operational decisions in ways that reduce the probability of similar miscalculations. The question is whether the tuition fee, measured in destroyed bilateral relationships, active criminal investigations, and a named RAW officer in a US federal indictment, was worth the education.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

Every comparison has limits, and the three Canadian cases push against theirs in ways that the analyst must acknowledge rather than ignore. The comparison breaks down most fundamentally at the level of attribution confidence. Grouping all three cases as “shadow war operations in Canada” implies a common sponsor and a coordinated strategy. The evidence supports this framing for Nijjar’s case with high confidence. It supports it for Duneke’s case with moderate confidence. It supports it for Malik’s case with low confidence. A comparison that treats all three as equivalent data points risks overstating the evidence for a unified Canadian theater and understating the possibility that one or more of the killings reflect dynamics entirely separate from the shadow war.

The comparison also breaks down at the level of target equivalence. In Pakistan, the targets form a coherent category: active operatives of designated terrorist organizations with documented involvement in violence against India. The Canadian targets do not form a similarly coherent category. Malik was an acquitted septuagenarian businessman. Nijjar was a political leader whose terrorist designation is contested. Duneke was a gangster. Treating these three men as equivalent “targets” in a single campaign requires either a very broad definition of the shadow war’s targeting criteria or an acknowledgment that different criteria may apply in different theaters.

The temporal pattern also presents complications. In Pakistan, the shadow war has followed a recognizable trajectory: initiation in 2021 with early killings in Karachi, acceleration in 2023 with seven major eliminations, post-Sindoor surge in 2025 with over thirty killings. The Canadian killings do not fit neatly into this trajectory. Malik was killed in July 2022, before the Pakistani campaign had fully accelerated. Nijjar and Duneke were killed in mid-to-late 2023, during the acceleration phase. But the Canadian operations ceased after the diplomatic fallout, with no subsequent killings reported. In Pakistan, the diplomatic fallout from the Guardian’s investigation was followed by acceleration, not cessation. The different post-exposure trajectories suggest that the campaign’s response to exposure varies by environment: in Pakistan, exposure produced no deterrent; in Canada, exposure (or the arrest of operatives) may have produced a genuine operational pause.

Finally, the comparison cannot account for what remains unknown. The Malik case’s unsolved question, who ordered the hit, represents a gap that may never be closed through public proceedings. The internal dynamics of Canada’s Sikh community, including the gang rivalries, personal feuds, and community fractures that predated and will outlast the shadow war, provide alternative explanations for at least some of the violence. The analyst’s obligation is to present the pattern evidence honestly while acknowledging that pattern evidence, however suggestive, is not proof.

The comparison also strains under the weight of what might be called the “selection effect.” By choosing to analyze these three cases together, the analysis implicitly frames them as belonging to a single category, “shadow war operations in Canada.” But this framing excludes acts of violence against Khalistan-linked individuals in Canada that clearly were the result of internal gang warfare, and it excludes acts of violence in other Western countries (the death of Avtar Singh Khanda in Birmingham, the mysterious circumstances surrounding Harvinder Singh Rinda’s death in a Lahore hospital) that may or may not belong to the same analytical framework. The selection of exactly three Canadian cases, rather than a broader dataset of Khalistan-linked violence across the diaspora, shapes the conclusions the comparison can reach. A broader analysis that included the UK’s Khalistan-linked deaths, the Pannun plot in the United States, and the shadow war’s operations in Pakistan might produce different conclusions about whether Canada represents a “secondary theater” or whether the entire Western world represents an operational frontier that the campaign explored with varying degrees of commitment and success across multiple countries simultaneously.

The jurisdictional complexity of the Canadian investigations introduces another dimension where the comparison framework struggles. The Nijjar investigation involves not just the RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team but also national security agencies, Five Eyes intelligence partners, diplomatic personnel from multiple countries, and potentially US law enforcement through the Pannun connection. The investigation operates at the intersection of criminal law, national security law, diplomatic immunity law, and immigration law. Each legal framework imposes different standards of evidence, different procedural requirements, and different limitations on disclosure. Information that might be available to intelligence analysts (signals intercepts, communications metadata) may be inadmissible in criminal proceedings due to the way it was collected. Information that is admissible in Canadian courts may not be shareable with Indian authorities due to intelligence-sharing agreements with Five Eyes partners. These jurisdictional tangles mean that the public record, upon which this analysis necessarily relies, represents only a fraction of the evidentiary picture. The full picture may eventually emerge through criminal trials, parliamentary inquiries, or declassified intelligence reviews, but until it does, the comparison operates with acknowledged gaps.

What the Comparison Reveals

Placing the three Canadian cases in a single analytical frame, despite the limitations that the previous section acknowledges, reveals conclusions that isolated case analysis cannot produce. The comparison teaches three lessons about the shadow war’s nature, its limits, and its costs.

The first lesson is that the campaign’s operational reach extends well beyond the adversary state. Operations in Pakistan target a hostile nation’s sheltered assets, an activity with historical parallels in Israeli operations against Palestinian targets across the Middle East and in Mossad’s global campaign of targeted killings after the Munich Olympics. Operations in Canada target individuals inside a friendly nation, a Five Eyes partner, and a G7 democracy. This distinction places the Canadian cases closer to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury by Russian GRU operatives or the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul than to the Pakistani operations. The comparison between India’s shadow war and Mossad’s targeted killings reveals that even Israel, which has conducted extraterritorial operations for decades, has generally avoided operations on the soil of its closest allies. India’s alleged operations in Canada and the foiled plot against Pannun in the United States represent an extension of the operational envelope that few democracies have attempted.

The second lesson is that operational environments determine consequences more than operational methods do. The killings in Canada were not materially different in violence or intent from the killings in Pakistan. The targets were shot. They died. The operational objectives were achieved. But the consequences were radically different because the environment, not the operation, determined the aftermath. Canada’s functional law enforcement, judicial independence, Five Eyes membership, and diplomatic standing converted operational success into strategic liability. Pakistan’s dysfunctional institutional environment ensured that operational success produced no accountability. The shadow war’s planners, whoever they are, appear to have underestimated the degree to which the operational environment, rather than the operation itself, determines whether a targeted killing produces strategic advantage or strategic cost.

This lesson has implications that extend far beyond the India-Canada relationship. It speaks to a general principle in intelligence operations: the success of a covert action is determined less by the quality of execution than by the institutional landscape in which the action takes place. Mossad’s operations illustrate this principle in both directions. Operations conducted in countries with weak institutional environments (assassinations in Dubai, Tunis, or Beirut) have historically produced minimal long-term consequences even when operatives were identified. Operations conducted in strong institutional environments (the Lillehammer affair in Norway, where Mossad agents killed an innocent Moroccan waiter mistaken for a Palestinian terrorist) produced lasting diplomatic damage, criminal convictions of operatives, and institutional reforms within Mossad itself. The Canadian cases fit squarely into this pattern: strong institutional environments produce lasting consequences because they possess the investigative capacity to identify operatives, the judicial authority to prosecute them, the diplomatic leverage to confront the sponsor state, and the media freedom to sustain public attention.

The institutional environment also determines the narrative frame through which the public understands the operation. In Pakistan, the killings are framed through the lens of the shadow war: a covert campaign against terrorists sheltered by a complicit state. In Canada, the killings are framed through the lens of transnational repression: a foreign government targeting citizens and residents of a democratic country. These two frames carry radically different moral and political implications, and the environment in which the operation occurs determines which frame prevails. The campaign cannot control the narrative when it operates in an environment whose institutions, media, and political leaders construct the narrative independently.

The third lesson is that the shadow war’s expansion into Canada represents either the campaign’s most significant strategic error or its most ambitious strategic gamble. If the Canadian operations were a mistake, they exposed the campaign, produced the first documented evidence linking Indian intelligence to targeted killings, and created legal and diplomatic precedents that constrain future operations. If they were a gamble, they sent a deterrence signal to the global Khalistan diaspora that no country is beyond the campaign’s reach, a signal whose value may exceed the diplomatic costs if the costs prove temporary and the deterrent proves durable. The passage of time will determine which interpretation prevails. What the comparison reveals with certainty, regardless of interpretation, is that Canada changed the shadow war. Before Canada, the campaign operated in darkness, producing consequences only for its targets. After Canada, the campaign operates under the scrutiny of Five Eyes intelligence services, Western judiciaries, and a global media that now has documented evidence to work with. The shadow war’s secondary theater illuminated the primary campaign in ways that Pakistan, for all its protests, never could.

A fourth lesson, perhaps the most important for understanding the campaign’s future trajectory, emerges from the comparison between the Canadian cases and the broader arc of the shadow war. The Canadian operations occurred during a specific phase of the campaign’s evolution: the 2022-2023 period when the rate of targeted killings was accelerating, when the campaign was expanding geographically from its initial Karachi base to new cities and provinces, and when the operational confidence of the planners appeared to be at its peak. The Canadian cases may represent the outer limit of that confidence, the point at which the campaign’s expanding geographic ambition encountered an environment that could push back. If so, the lesson is not just about Canada specifically but about the general principle that covert campaigns face increasing marginal costs as they expand their operational footprint. Each new theater brings new risks, new institutional adversaries, and new potential for exposure. The Pakistani theater, where the campaign has operated for years with near-impunity, may represent a stable operational equilibrium that cannot be replicated in environments with functional counter-intelligence capabilities.

The comparison also reveals an asymmetry in the campaign’s approach to different target categories. In Pakistan, the shadow war targets operatives of organizations, LeT, JeM, Hizbul Mujahideen, that have committed mass-casualty attacks on Indian soil. These are targets whose elimination can be justified, at least in India’s strategic framework, as counter-terrorism operations against active threats. In Canada, the targets belong to the Khalistan movement, a separatist cause that poses a different kind of threat: not the immediate physical danger of a suicide bomber or a fidayeen attacker, but the political and diplomatic challenge of a diaspora movement that India considers a threat to its territorial integrity. The extension of the campaign from counter-terrorism (eliminating men who planned the Mumbai attacks) to counter-separatism (eliminating men who organized Khalistan referendum campaigns) represents a broadening of the targeting criteria that the Canadian and American responses have forcefully challenged. The lesson embedded in this broadening is that the shadow war’s definition of “threat” may not align with the definition used by the international community, and that misalignment carries consequences when operations move from Pakistan to the Five Eyes world.

The final revelation of this comparison concerns the shadow war’s durability in the face of exposure. In Pakistan, the April 2024 Guardian investigation revealed the campaign to a global audience, yet the post-Guardian period saw the most intense acceleration of operations in the campaign’s history. Exposure did not produce deterrence in the Pakistani theater. In Canada, by contrast, the exposure produced an operational pause: no additional killings have been attributed to the campaign on Canadian soil since September 2023. The divergent post-exposure trajectories confirm that the operational environment, not the fact of exposure itself, determines whether revelation constrains or liberates a covert campaign. In an environment where exposure produces no institutional consequences, exposure is irrelevant. In an environment where exposure produces arrests, indictments, diplomat expulsions, and criminal investigations, exposure is devastating. The Canadian theater taught the shadow war its limits, and those limits are defined not by the campaign’s capability but by the institutional strength of the country in which it chooses to operate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Canada part of India’s shadow war against terrorism?

Three targeted killings on Canadian soil between July 2022 and September 2023 have placed Canada at the center of allegations that India’s covert campaign extends beyond Pakistan into Western democracies. Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Trudeau, have publicly accused India of involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The US Pannun assassination plot case has provided corroborating evidence that an Indian intelligence officer directed operations targeting Khalistan figures in North America. India denies all involvement. The analytical consensus, based on official Canadian accusations, Four arrests of suspects allegedly linked to Indian intelligence, and the parallel US legal case, is that Canada has become a secondary theater of the shadow war, though attribution confidence varies across the three individual cases.

Q: How many Khalistan-linked killings have occurred in Canada?

Three killings of individuals with connections to the Khalistan movement occurred in Canada between 2022 and 2023: Ripudaman Singh Malik in Surrey (July 2022), Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey (June 2023), and Sukhdool Singh Gill, known as Sukha Duneke, in Winnipeg (September 2023). Each case has a different attribution profile. Nijjar’s killing has the strongest evidence of Indian government involvement. Malik’s killing was a confirmed contract hit with no publicly identified principal. Duneke’s case has been linked by Canadian officials to Indian intelligence operations but was initially attributed to inter-gang rivalry.

Q: Why did India allegedly operate in a Five Eyes country?

Several explanations have been proposed. One interpretation holds that the campaign’s planners calculated that eliminating Khalistan figures in Canada would send a deterrence signal to the global diaspora that no country provides safe harbor. A second interpretation suggests that the planners misjudged the operational environment, assuming the impunity that prevailed in Pakistan would extend to Canada. A third possibility is that the Canadian operations used criminal intermediaries and proxies rather than direct state operatives, seeking to maintain deniability through layers of separation between the intelligence service and the act.

Q: What evidence links India to the Canadian killings?

The evidence varies by case. For Nijjar, the evidence includes Trudeau’s parliamentary accusation backed by Five Eyes intelligence, the arrest of four Indian nationals identified as members of an alleged hit squad, and the corroboration from the US Pannun case in which a named RAW officer directed assassination operations in North America. For Duneke, Canadian officials have stated they possess evidence connecting Indian diplomatic personnel to intelligence-gathering on Sikh separatists who were subsequently killed. For Malik, two hitmen were convicted but the identity of whoever ordered the killing remains undisclosed.

Q: How does operating in Canada differ from operating in Pakistan?

The operational environments are categorically different. Pakistan offers fragmented law enforcement, compromised investigations, minimal CCTV coverage, and a government that lacks the institutional credibility to force international accountability. Canada offers professional policing, functional courts, extensive digital surveillance infrastructure, Five Eyes intelligence sharing, and the diplomatic standing of a G7 member and NATO ally. The same action, killing a designated target, produces near-zero consequences in Pakistan and maximum consequences in Canada.

Q: What diplomatic consequences has India faced from Canadian operations?

The diplomatic fallout has been severe. Following Nijjar’s killing, Canada and India conducted mutual diplomat expulsions. In October 2024, Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, including the High Commissioner. India retaliated with six expulsions of its own. Trade discussions were frozen. Educational exchanges affecting over 400,000 Indian students in Canada were disrupted. The bilateral relationship entered its deepest crisis in modern history.

Q: Are the Pannun plot and Nijjar killing connected?

The superseding US indictment against Vikash Yadav, the former RAW officer accused of directing the Pannun plot, contains details that connect the two cases. Yadav allegedly sent his co-conspirator a video of Nijjar’s body after the June 2023 killing, and the co-conspirator told a DEA undercover officer that Nijjar “was also the target” and “we have so many targets.” While the Pannun case and the Nijjar case are separate legal proceedings in different countries, the evidence filed in US federal court establishes operational connections between the two cases.

Q: Could some Canadian killings be internal Sikh community violence?

This possibility is analytically strongest for Malik and Duneke. Malik had recently expressed support for Modi, alienating Khalistan hardliners, and had accumulated enemies across decades in Surrey’s Sikh community. Duneke was an active gangster with rivals in the Davinder Bambiha gang ecosystem and was allegedly killed in connection with the murder of Gurlal Brar. The internal-violence explanation is weakest for Nijjar, whose killing has been attributed to Indian government-directed operatives by Canadian officials, and where the arrested suspects are Indian nationals who arrived in Canada on temporary visas.

Q: How did the Pannun case corroborate Canada’s accusations against India?

The US Department of Justice indictment established, through American legal proceedings with American evidentiary standards, that a named Indian intelligence officer directed assassination operations against Khalistan figures in North America during the same period as the Canadian killings. This corroboration was critical because it transformed the Canada-India dispute from a bilateral accusation (Canada’s word against India’s denial) into a trilateral evidentiary record (two of India’s most important Western partners independently identifying Indian intelligence involvement in assassination operations on their soil).

Q: Who was Ripudaman Singh Malik and why was he killed?

Malik was one of two men acquitted in 2005 of mass murder and conspiracy charges related to the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing that killed 329 people. After his acquittal, he lived in Surrey as a businessman and community figure. He was seventy-five at the time of his killing. Two hired gunmen, Tanner Fox and Jose Lopez, shot him in his car outside his business on July 14, 2022. Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and confirmed they were paid to carry out the killing, but the identity of whoever ordered the assassination has not been revealed in court proceedings.

Q: What is the Khalistan Tiger Force and what was Nijjar’s role?

The Khalistan Tiger Force is a Sikh separatist organization that India has designated as a banned terrorist group. Nijjar was identified by Indian authorities as the chief of KTF. In Canada, he was known as the president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey and an organizer for Khalistan referendum campaigns. The gap between these two characterizations, terrorist leader versus community organizer, reflects the fundamental framing contest between India and Canada over what constitutes terrorism versus political advocacy.

Q: Who was Sukha Duneke and why was he killed in Winnipeg?

Sukhdool Singh Gill, known as Sukha Duneke, was a member of the Davinder Bambiha criminal gang, wanted in India for extortion, attempted murder, and managing criminal networks from Canadian soil. He fled India in 2017 using forged documents. His name appeared on the NIA’s most-wanted list released just one day before his killing on September 20, 2023. He was found shot dead in a duplex in northwest Winnipeg. His killing was initially attributed to inter-gang rivalry but was later linked by Canadian officials to Indian intelligence operations.

Q: Was the shadow war’s expansion to Canada a strategic error?

The cost-benefit assessment strongly suggests it was, at least in the short term. The three Canadian killings produced diplomatic costs, including the destruction of the India-Canada bilateral relationship, the Pannun indictment, and global media exposure, that exceeded the cumulative cost of all operations in Pakistan. Whether these costs prove temporary, absorbed by larger geopolitical dynamics, or permanent remains to be seen.

Q: How did Trudeau’s parliamentary accusation change the situation?

Trudeau’s September 18, 2023, statement in Parliament transformed the Nijjar case from a criminal investigation into a sovereign confrontation between two nations. By publicly accusing India of involvement in killing a Canadian citizen, Trudeau elevated the case to the highest level of diplomatic contestation, triggering mutual expulsions, international media coverage, and the involvement of Five Eyes intelligence partners in corroborating the accusations.

Q: Has the India-Canada diplomatic crisis been resolved?

The relationship remains severely strained. Following the mutual diplomat expulsions of October 2024, a fresh media report in March 2026 by the Globe and Mail, citing Canadian national security sources, identified a specific Indian consular official in Vancouver who allegedly supplied information assisting in Nijjar’s assassination. High-level talks between the prime ministers of both nations have addressed cooperation in trade and security, but Canada has reiterated its commitment to combating transnational repression.

Q: Did India respond to the Canadian and American allegations?

India has denied all involvement in the Canadian killings and has described the Canadian allegations as “preposterous” and politically motivated. India has accused Canada of harboring anti-India elements and Sikh extremists. Regarding the Pannun case, India acknowledged that the named individual, Vikash Yadav, was “no longer an employee of the Government of India” but has not confirmed or denied the specific allegations. India’s approach has combined diplomatic denial with a counter-narrative positioning Canada as complicit in sheltering individuals India considers terrorists.

Q: What role did Five Eyes intelligence sharing play in the investigations?

Five Eyes intelligence sharing has been central to the Canadian investigation. Multiple reports indicate that partner nations, particularly the United States, shared signals intelligence with Canada that supported the assessment of Indian government involvement in Nijjar’s killing. This intelligence sharing gave Canada access to communication intercepts and other technical intelligence that Canadian agencies alone may not have been able to collect, enabling a level of attribution confidence that Canadian domestic capabilities alone might not have produced.

Q: How do the Canadian killings compare to the Skripal poisoning or Khashoggi murder?

The Salisbury poisoning of Sergei Skripal by Russian GRU operatives in 2018 and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul the same year are the closest international precedents for the Canadian cases: extraterritorial operations by intelligence services of major powers on allied or neutral soil. The common denominator is that Western nations responded to Skripal and Khashoggi with significant consequences (sanctions, diplomatic expulsions, arms deal reviews). The Canadian cases have produced similar consequences for India. Critics note that the international response to the Canadian cases has been less severe than the response to Skripal or Khashoggi, reflecting India’s greater strategic importance to Western nations than Russia or Saudi Arabia.

Q: Why has the international response to Canadian killings been different than to Pakistani killings?

The structural difference is the host country’s institutional capacity and international standing. Pakistan’s protests about the shadow war carry limited weight because Pakistan sheltered the targeted individuals and lacks the diplomatic leverage to force accountability. Canada’s accusations carry significant weight because Canada is a G7 member, NATO ally, and Five Eyes partner with the institutional capacity to investigate, the intelligence resources to corroborate, and the diplomatic standing to confront India publicly. The same action produces different consequences because the environment determines the response.

Q: What happened to the suspects arrested in the Nijjar case?

Four Indian nationals have been charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy in connection with Nijjar’s killing. Karan Brar, Karanpreet Singh, and Kamalpreet Singh were arrested in Edmonton in May 2024. A fourth suspect, Amandeep Singh, was subsequently charged. All four arrived in Canada on temporary visas, including student visas. The legal proceedings are ongoing. The RCMP has stated that the investigation continues and that others may have played roles in the killing.

Q: Could the Pahalgam attack have shifted attention away from the Canadian allegations?

The Pahalgam tourist massacre of April 2025 and the subsequent Operation Sindoor military confrontation between India and Pakistan dramatically shifted international attention. The India-Canada diplomatic crisis, which had dominated headlines for eighteen months, was rapidly eclipsed by the larger India-Pakistan military confrontation. Some analysts have argued that the geopolitical dynamics of the India-Pakistan crisis, in which Western nations needed India as a strategic partner, reduced the pressure on India regarding the Canadian allegations. Whether this represents a permanent shift or a temporary reprieve remains uncertain.