Canada vs India: A new set of sensational allegations

Written by: Aarthi Ramnath, Aakriti Anand & Raghav Bikhchandani

Canada vs India: A new set of sensational allegations

The context: In 2023, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau accused New Delhi of orchestrating the assassination of a Canadian Sikh—Hardeep Singh Nijjar. It resulted in a diplomatic war—with New Delhi aggressively denying the allegations. But two months later, India was implicated in a similar plot in the US—the attempted assassination of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. The entire Nijjar saga is explained in this Big Story. Everything on the Pannun plot is here.

What happened next: This summer, Canadian police arrested three men linked to the infamous Lawrence Bishnoi gang. News reporting suggested, however, the gang members may have been hired by New Delhi—apparently a standard practice for RAW (explained in this Big Story).

What happened now: Canada expelled six top diplomats—including the Indian High Commissioner, Sanjay Kumar Verma:

[Foreign Minister Mélanie] Joly said that Canada’s law enforcement agencies had identified the six as “persons of interest” in the Nijjar assassination. “The decision to expel these individuals was made with great consideration,” she said, adding that investigators had “gathered ample, clear and concrete evidence.”

The Indian diplomats were kicked out because the Indian government refused to waive their diplomatic immunity—to “allow them to participate in the Canadian investigations.”

The ‘Amit Shah’ dhamaka: The diplomats are specifically accused of gathering “information” that was used to “target members of the South Asian community”—including Nijjar. But this is the Amit Shah-sized shocker—included only in the Washington Post:

Conversations and texts among Indian diplomats include references to “a senior official in India and a senior official in RAW” who have authorized the intelligence-gathering missions and attacks on Sikh separatists, the Canadian official said. Canadian officials identified the senior official in India as Amit Shah, a member of Modi’s inner circle who serves as home affairs minister.

Not just Nijjar: Earlier in the day, the Canadian police chief Mike Duheme held a presser—making far broader claims against “Indian agents”:

Mr. Duheme said his officers had investigated and charged “a significant number of individuals for their direct involvement in homicides, extortions and other criminal acts of violence.” He said there had been more than a dozen credible threats to life against members of the Sikh community in Canada. The Indian government agents.. were based not just in Ottawa, the capital, but also in Vancouver and Toronto and other cities across Canada where Sikhs live.

New Delhi’s response: The Indian government responded with great fury—and expelled six Canadian diplomats including chargé d'affaires Stewart Wheeler and deputy high commissioner Patrick Hebert. New Delhi insists the Canadians have shared no evidence to back up their allegations.

An intriguing point to note: On the very same day, the US State Department announced that India is sending a team to Washington DC to investigate the plot to kill Pannun.

Additionally, India has informed the United States they are continuing their efforts to investigate other linkages of the former government employee and will determine follow up steps, as necessary.

Also interesting: A US court has summoned National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, former RAW chief Samant Goel and others in a case filed by Pannun. We presume New Delhi’s “cooperation” will not extend quite so far.

Reading list: New York Times (paywall), Washington Post (splainer gift link), and The Telegraph have details on the row. The Hindu has more on the Indian team in the US. Indian Express has an extended version of what the Canadians have alleged.

And the Nobel prize goes to…

The most intriguing of the lot are the winners of the prize for Economics—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A Robinson. They won the honour for their work explaining why some nations are far richer than others. The answer: They have better political and economic institutions.

But the reason the wealthier set has better institutions than the other: Colonial strategy. It all depends on how the colonialists chose to rule:

Countries with “inclusive” institutions that protected personal property rights and allowed for widespread economic participation tended to end up on a pathway to longer-term prosperity. Those that had what the researchers called “extractive” institutions — ones that helped elites to maintain control, but which gave workers little hope of sharing in the wealth — merely provided short-term gains for the people in power.

“Rather than asking whether colonialism is good or bad, we note that different colonial strategies have led to different institutional patterns that have persisted over time,” Dr. Acemoglu said during a news conference after the prize was announced.

Why this matters: If you accept this theory, then it explains why India is poorer than the United States:

When a colonial power did not want to settle in a certain country... it set up institutions that were extractive in nature and inimical to long-term economic growth. This may have been the case in India where the British set up institutions that were mostly devised to plunder the maximum resources within a short span of time rather than to promote long-term economic growth. But in countries where colonists wanted to settle for the long-run… [as] in the United States where the British set up inclusive institutions that promoted long-term economic prosperity.

The Hindu has a good explainer but is paywalled—you can check out New York Times (splainer gift link) instead. As for the rest:

Peace: The prize was given to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese atomic bomb survivors’ group which was formed in 1956. The organisation has been vocal about abolishing nuclear weapons from the world. In his acceptance speech, the co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo Tomoyuki Mimaki, expressed that the award should have been awarded to the peace fighters in Gaza. Watch a clip of the speech below. (Al Jazeera)

Physiology or Medicine: American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the award for the discovery of microRNA. (CNN)

Physics: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton—known as “pioneers of artificial intelligence” bagged the prize for creating the building blocks of machine learning. (Associated Press)

Chemistry: Google DeepMind scientists—Demis Hassabis and John Jumper—and biochemist David Baker, received the honour. The former developed an AI model AlphaFold—that predicts the structure of proteins—while the latter created entirely new kinds of proteins. (The Guardian)

Literature: South Korean author Han Kang who writes on “‘historical traumas’, colonial violence, and the ‘fragility’ of humanity.” Her works include ‘The Vegetarian’—which won the International Booker prize in 2016. FYI: Kang refused to hold a press conference while wars are raging in Gaza and in Ukraine. (TIME)

Robot cleaners gone wild

Robot vacuum cleaners were hacked in cities across the US. They suddenly went rogue in people’s homes—chasing dogs, yelling racial slurs. It sounds funny except… it’s not:

Six months earlier, security researchers had attempted to notify Ecovacs of significant security flaws in its robot vacuums and the app that controls them. The most severe was a flaw in the Bluetooth connector, which allowed complete access to the Ecovacs X2 from over 100 metres away.

The scariest bit: is that many of these cheap robot vacuum cleaners also allow remote video access. In one case, the person was accessing the live camera feed on the bot. ABC Australia released this creepy example:

Gizmodo explains why you should never buy cheap robot cleaners. ABC Australia has more on the rogue bots.

Solved: Mystery of ‘voices’ in the head

Some schizophrenic patients have ‘auditory hallucinations’—as in voices in their head. According to a new study, it is the result of a malfunctioning "corollary discharge" signal—which is a neurological mechanism that tells us to silence our inner monologue—when we want to speak or listen to others. So the patient can’t distinguish between internal and external sounds.

There’s also an added effect:

"People who suffer from auditory hallucinations can 'hear' sounds without external stimuli," the team explained in a statement. "Impaired functional connections between motor and auditory systems in the brain mediate the loss of ability to distinguish fancy from reality."

Futurism has lots more on the study.

Speaking of misguided brains: A new study confirms what we’ve always suspected: The less we know, the more stubborn we become—about an opinion or point of view. The researchers call this the “illusion of information adequacy”:

The less that our brain knows, the more confident it is that it knows all it needs to know. This makes us prone to thinking that we have all the crucial facts about a decision, leaping to confident conclusions and decisive judgments, when we are missing necessary information.

Popular Science has lots more on why this happens.

what caught our eye

business & tech

It’s been a bad first year for Apple’s Vision Pro headset—the brand has struggled to attract software-makers to develop apps for the headset.
When it rains, it pours for SpiceJet—the struggling airline has been hit with a fresh insolvency case over unpaid rental dues worth Rs 58 crore (580 million).
Led by Marxist PM Anura Kumara Dissayanake, Sri Lanka’s new government will reconsider an approval previously made for the Adani Group on a major wind power project.
404 Media (login required) has a must-read on the rise of AI-powered job application bots.

sports & entertainment

Say hello to your new women’s marathon world record holder—Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich, who achieved the feat at the Chicago marathon with a time of 2:09:56.
The Women’s T20 World Cup dream is officially over for India, as New Zealand thrashed Pakistan by 54 runs to qualify for the semifinals.
The Nigeria men’s football team were forced to boycott their Africa Cup of Nations qualifying match away to Libya. The reason: in bizarre circumstances, the Nigerians were left stranded at an abandoned airport for over 17 hours without food or water.
KJo’s Dharma drama rolls on—a week after reported talks with Saregama, the film studio is now in talks with Reliance over acquiring a stake.
Comic book nerds, get excited—Comic Con India is now expanding to Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Pune for the 2024 season.
In a landmark case that threatens to send shockwaves across the music industry, Limp Bizkit have sued Universal Music Group for unpaid royalties amounting over $200 million.
A Canadian boba tea company has apologised after actor Simu Liu accused them of cultural appropriation on an episode of the Canadian edition of startup investor reality series ‘Dragon’s Den’.
Stephen King in Variety has a good read on his favourite horror film of all time, ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
The Guardian turns the clock back to mark 30 years since the release of Quentin Tarantino’s seminal film ‘Pulp Fiction’.

as for the rest

Another day, another Israeli bombardment of Gaza—this time, an attack on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir el-Balah left the site and its civilians engulfed in flames.
Sticking with Gaza, Israel is allegedly using civilians as human shields to carry out its operations against Hamas.
Al Jazeera has a must-read on Cieco, a deaf and blind dog’s journey from Nabatieh to Beirut amid Israel’s war on Lebanon.
North Korea has accused its southern neighbours of flying drones over Pyongyang to drop leaflets critical of Kim Jong-Un.
Australia’s new Working Holiday Maker visa program is already seeing intense demand—40,000 Indians have applied for 1,000 spots.
As part of its plan to send migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to Balkan detention centres to assess asylum claims, Italy has sent its first boat carrying migrants to Albania.
An update on the MPox crisis—the World Health Organisation (WHO) has approved Bavarian Nordic’s MPox vaccine for adolescents aged 12 to 17.
Islamabad is under lockdown as India’s Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar—and other leaders—are set to arrive for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meet.
The fateful night Baba Siddique was assassinated featured a massive hole in his security detail schedule—of the three assigned, just one cop was guarding him.
Those in Delhi NCR, brace yourselves—you may have to pay a congestion tax just for entering the national capital.
A new study has found that drinking caffeine may reduce Alzheimer’s clumps in the brain.
Wall Street Journal (splainer gift link) has a must-read on how global efforts to reverse the shortage of babies have fallen flat. Check out our Big Story for more on the baby bust.
The Print has a cool read looking at how climate action has become the hot new career, with consultancies, communications and colleges going all in.

Six things to see

One: ‘Watch’ out for the Ronaldo collab with watchmaker Jacob & Co. The two models are inspired by his most iconic moments on the pitch. There are only 999 pieces of each —with prices ranging from $29,000 to $160,000. They look very cool and completely useless for telling the time:) (ESPN)

Two: A California-based startup—REMspace—claims to have made ‘Inception’ tech a reality. Two individuals in the state of lucid dreaming were able to exchange simple messages using its special equipment. Watch the animation to see how it happened. Interesting Engineering has all the nerdy deets.

Three: As part of a test flight, a launch tower successfully caught SpaceX’s biggest rocket—Starship—with two metal converging arms called “chopsticks”. Way cooler than robotaxis or bartenders. (CNN)

Four: The Sahara—which is the world’s largest hot desert—was flooded by heavy rains in south-east Morocco in September. The Guardian has lots more on what this rare event means.

Five: AR Rahman performed a 30-minute virtual concert—for the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Victory Fund—in support of hamaari Kamala. You can watch the full performance here. (The Hindu)

Six: We heart this joyous music video of ‘Bawla’—by Sushant Divgikar aka Rani KoHEnur. The fusion of Rajasthani folk funk and disco is irresistible. The song is part of Warner Music dupe of Coke Studio—‘Maati’.