To most of the world, the Indian government’s response to Canada’s charge that it may have sponsored the murder of a Sikh activist in British Columbia must be befuddling. India has strenuously denied the charges, for which Canada provided no evidence publicly as yet.
But the Indian government has also gone further and blasted Canada for supposedly hosting a “nexus of terrorism,” serving as a “safe haven” for extremism and organised crime, and much else. Indian investigators have even released a list of what they call “terror-gangster networks” based in Canada. This is all absurdly detached from Canada’s popular image as a polite and welcoming multicultural utopia.
India’s rage is misplaced and hardly serves to endear the country to those appalled by the idea that it may have had a Canadian citizen killed. Still, it does reflect widespread sentiment — in India and beyond — that many countries in the West have long 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, for example, 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 urgent security needs against its constitutional commitments to free speech and dissent.
Of course, peaceful political expression must be defended. And countries with a reputation for taking in refugees and asylum seekers, such as Canada and Sweden, will 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 political radicals merely because they are confining their activities to their old homes, not their new ones?