‘We won’t tolerate any...,’ All Indian diplomats ‘put on notice’ by Canada

Mélanie Joly, the 45-year-old foreign minister of Canada, declared Friday (Oct 18) all Indian diplomats in the country have been “put on notice”, in yet another statement poised to further escalate diplomatic tensions.

A standoff broke out between New Delhi and Ottawa Monday (Oct 14) when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that six Indian diplomats had been involved in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil last year. India responded by withdrawing all six diplomats immediately and accusing Trudeau of damaging ties by levelling absurd allegations. It also claimed Canada had not provided ‘a shred of evidence’ to back the claims up.

On Friday, Foreign Minister Joly took a step further, saying, “They (Remaining Indian diplomats) are clearly on notice. Six of them have been expelled including the high commissioner in Ottawa. Others were mainly from Toronto and Vancouver and clearly we won’t tolerate any diplomats that are in contravention of the Vienna convention.”

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The inexperienced diplomat even compared the alleged Indian activities to those of Russia that happen in Europe.

“We’ve never seen that in our history. That level of transnational repression cannot happen on Canadian soil. We’ve seen it elsewhere in Europe. Russia has done that in Germany and the UK and we needed to stand firm on this issue," Joly said.

Earlier, Canada’s RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) had accused Indian diplomats of sharing information about Nijjar with Indian authorities. Later, the information was allegedly handed over to criminal groups that carried out the killing.

India has vehemently denied the accusations, calling them "absurd" and retaliating by expelling six Canadian diplomats, including the acting high commissioner in New Delhi.

“It is strange that the very people we’ve asked Canada to extradite are now being accused of crimes in Canada,” the ministry of external affairs (MEA) spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in press conference earlier this week.

Later, in an embarrassing self-goal, Trudeau himself admitted in a public commission enquiry that his government didn’t have any ‘hard evidence’ in the case and only intelligence inputs.

(With inputs from agencies)