To most of the world, the Indian government’s response to Canada’s charge that it might have sponsored the murder of a Sikh activist in British Columbia must appear befuddling. India has denied the charges, for which Canada provided no evidence publicly as yet.
The Indian government has responded by blasting Canada for supposedly hosting a “nexus of terrorism,” serving as a “safe haven” for extremism and organized crime. Indian investigators have even released a list of “terror-gangster networks” based in Canada. This is all absurdly detached from Canada’s polite and welcoming multicultural image.
India’s misplaced rage hardly serves to endear the country to those appalled by the idea that it might have had a Canadian citizen killed. Still, it does reflect the widespread sentiment — in India and beyond — that many countries in the West have paid insufficient attention to the overseas activism of the immigrant communities they host.
That will no longer be possible. Even small, liberal countries such as Canada, Australia, and Sweden must now contend with the consequences of diaspora politics.
Sweden faced a particularly pernicious dilemma when Turkey blocked its entry into NATO on the grounds that it hosted Kurdish separatists. The Swedish government had to balance Turkey’s concerns and its own security needs against its commitments to free speech and dissent.
Peaceful political expression must be defended. Countries with a reputation for taking in refugees and asylum seekers, such as Canada and Sweden, would naturally host many more dissenters than elsewhere.
The problem is when, as sometimes happens in communities still focused on the disputes they left behind, dissent slides into extremism. How long can governments ignore radicals merely because they are confining their activities to their old homes, not their new ones?
Canada has had a long history of tolerating supporters of militancy abroad. Even after 9/11 built pressure on all Western allies to prevent support for terrorism, Ottawa resisted calls to stop the local financial support for Hezbollah.
Canadian communities also provided much of the financing for Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — who were the inventors of suicide bombing. Human rights activists have said that a large amount of that money was raised by intimidating Canadian citizens who had relatives in Sri Lanka.
Tensions have begun to flare domestically as well. Violence between Hindus and Muslims broke out last year in Leicester, England, while Sikhs and Hindus clashed in the middle of downtown Melbourne, Australia, in January. Two years earlier, a Hindu man who had been deported from Australia for allegedly attacking Sikhs was given a “hero’s welcome” when he returned to India.
It is easy to view such clashes as the natural consequence of India’s increasingly radicalized and divided politics, but that is only part of the story. In fact, diaspora communities are often more radical than those they have left behind and have exported their fundamentalism to back home.
The Hindu supremacism revival in India, for example, owes a great deal to the financing and ideological leadership provided by Indian Americans. Indian investigators have worried that the murders of Sikhs for supposed blasphemy are related to fundamentalist views being financed from Canada.
As Leicester and Melbourne show, ignoring the political churning within diaspora communities is unwise. Yet politicians have clear political incentives to minimize the danger, especially in places such as the UK or Canada that pride themselves on their multiculturalism. In 2019, for example, the Canadian government removed a reference to Sikh extremism from an official report on security threats after community complaints.
The risk is that the most deeply conservative, and sometimes extremist, members of a diaspora are then treated as their community’s legitimate voices. Law enforcement and political parties reach out to them for support.
Liberal figures within these communities are then severely disadvantaged. It creates tensions that threaten to spill out onto the streets of the West, which can then enrage the governments a country might have wished to befriend.
Western nations must welcome dissenters and persecuted minorities, and vigorously defend their rights to free speech, property and their lives. Governments should also promote healthier conversations with and within diaspora communities.
The West still struggles to do both. The concerns India is raising would not justify the actions of which it is accused. Nonetheless, Canada and other countries should examine those concerns for their own sake, and not India’s.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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