India said on Saturday that it had officially rebuked Ottawa over the “absurd and baseless” allegation and denied that home minister Amit Shah had planned to target Sikh activists on Canadian soil.
The largest Sikh community outside of India lives in Canada, where activists for “Khalistan,” a fringe separatist movement that wants an independent state for the religious minority carved out of Indian territory, are active.
This week, Canadian officials stated that Ottawa had implicated the powerful right-hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a campaign targeting Canadian Khalistan activists at the highest levels of India’s government.
Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, stated to reporters, “The Government of India protests in the strongest terms to the absurd and baseless references made to the Union Home Minister of India.”
“We had summoned the Canadian High Commission representative yesterday. “A diplomatic note was presented,” he continued.
Jaiswal said that Canadian officials had deliberately leaked to the media “unfounded insinuations” to “discredit India.”
