When a government cannot silence its critics at home, it follows them abroad. That is the defining logic of transnational repression: the use of state power to intimidate, surveil, harass, or eliminate dissidents living beyond a country’s borders. For years, this was a problem associated with autocracies; however, India, the world’s self-proclaimed largest democracy, was rarely placed in this category. That is changing, and the evidence is no longer deniable.
From the streets of Surrey to a New York courtroom, from a Birmingham hospital to a Frankfurt court, a pattern has emerged that is consistent, documented, and deeply troubling. India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has, according to Western intelligence services, court indictments, and UN Special Rapporteurs, been accused of running a systematic campaign of transnational repression targeting its Sikh diaspora. The targets are not armed militants. They are lawyers, community leaders, temple presidents, and political activists exercising rights that democratic societies are built to protect.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Canadian national and president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia, was gunned down on 18 June 2023 by masked assailants outside the temple premises. Nijjar was a strong proponent of Khalistan, a separate Sikh state, which led to him being declared a terrorist in India, whereas the allegations were consistently rejected by him and his supporters in Canada throughout his life.
On 18 September 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau informed Parliament that Canada’s intelligence agencies were pursuing “credible allegations” of a possible connection between the Indian government and the murder. The Indian government described the allegation as “absurd.” However, further diplomatic fallout followed, and in October 2024, Canada expelled India’s high commissioner as well as five other diplomats.
Canada’s Foreign Interference Commissioner, Marie-Josée Hogue, later confirmed in her final report that the assassination was a specific example of transnational repression, warning that “India’s activities primarily target the approximately 800,000 members of the Sikh diaspora in Canada and aim to promote a pro-India and anti-Khalistan narrative.”
A leaked memo from India’s Ministry of External Affairs, made public in December 2023, reportedly showed that Indian consulates in North America had been instructed to launch a “sophisticated crackdown scheme” against the Sikh diaspora. The memo listed the names of several diaspora members, including Nijjar himself, who was killed two months after it was issued.
The Nijjar killing is presented by investigators and prosecutors as part of a broader set of alleged plots involving multiple jurisdictions. On 29 November 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an indictment against Indian nationals who allegedly plotted to murder another individual in the United States.
According to the charges, Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, was allegedly recruited by Vikash Yadav, a former member of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), to hire a contract killer. However, the individual he attempted to contact turned out to be an undercover agent working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Gupta was later detained in the Czech Republic and extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, murder-for-hire, and money laundering, carrying a maximum sentence of 40 years’ imprisonment.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton stated: “Nikhil Gupta planned on murdering a U.S. citizen in New York. This man believed that, from outside of this country, he could murder someone within our nation’s borders simply because they had expressed their thoughts in accordance with their freedom of speech under American law.”
Vikash Yadav, who was indicted in October 2024 as the alleged mastermind behind the plot, is still at large. The Indian government has referred to Yadav as a former employee and has sought to distance itself from him.
Three days prior to Nijjar’s murder in Canada, Avtar Singh Khanda, a 35-year-old Sikh activist based in Birmingham, died in a hospital following an illness that had not previously been detected by his family. His cause of death was recorded as acute myeloid leukemia.
However, Khanda’s family was not convinced by this explanation. He had received several threats following accusations of involvement in protests against the Indian High Commission in London on 19 March 2023. In May 2023, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) sent a team to London to investigate the protests alongside Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police. Khanda was admitted to hospital weeks later.
Human rights barrister Michael Polak, who also worked on the case of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, wrote to the Home Secretary demanding a full investigation, saying it was “more likely than unlikely” that Khanda was a victim of foul play. A consultant forensic pathologist, Dr Ashley Fegan-Earl, found that the results of Khanda’s post-mortem “do not exclude the possibility of poisoning” and advised investigators to consider whether he had been exposed to substances capable of triggering acute leukemia.
“If it was happening in a vacuum and we believed India was a law-abiding country, we would say that it is unlucky,” Polak told The Guardian. “But there were threats against him and he was named as enemy No. 1. At the very least, it is suspicious.”
Beyond physical violence and surveillance, India has also been accused of deploying legal and administrative tools as instruments of pressure. The Sikh Coalition’s report, “So Many Targets: Contextualising Modern Indian Transnational Repression Against the Sikh Community,” documents allegations that Indian authorities have suspended passports of activists abroad, filed terrorism charges against diaspora members who have no legal avenue to contest them from outside India, and pressured families of activists still living in Punjab through raids, interrogations, and intimidation.
Following the London High Commission protest of March 2023, India’s National Investigation Agency conducted coordinated raids on the family homes of approximately 30 to 40 UK-based Sikh dissidents, including the homes of the chair and vice chair of the Sikh Federation (UK). Relatives were summoned to Delhi, and photographs of protesters were shown during interrogations.
Freedom House, in its 2023 transnational repression report, observed that “Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have promoted an exclusionary brand of Hindu nationalism” and that “credible allegations by United States and Canadian authorities emerged last year of the Indian government targeting Sikh activists abroad.” The report concluded that Nijjar’s killing “illustrated the brazenness of India’s transnational repression campaign.”
The actions described represent, according to critics and some legal interpretations, potential violations of the right to life under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as breaches of the sovereignty of Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and of the principle that individuals granted asylum should be protected from persecution by the states they fled.
According to scholar Andrea Kendall-Taylor, in the context of democratic backsliding, “one of the most consistent indicators of authoritarian behavior is the decline of tolerance for dissent, initially within one’s borders and then extending outside of one’s territory.” The trajectory described appears, in this view, to reflect a pattern in which counterterrorism legislation is used domestically against journalists, dissidents, and minorities, while similar pressure is alleged to extend abroad.
Greater transparency is called for from Western intelligence services regarding the full scope of foreign operations on their soil. Enhanced protections are also urged for asylum seekers and diaspora activists designated as threats by foreign governments, alongside broader questions about how democratic states should respond when strategic partners are accused of engaging in transnational repression.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed outside a place of worship. Gurpatwant Singh Pannun was nearly killed in New York for expressing political views. Avtar Singh Khanda died after being publicly identified as an enemy of the Indian state. These are not abstractions. They are the human cost of geopolitical conflict and contested narratives playing out beyond borders.
