India denies minister plotted anti-Sikh attacks in Canada

India on Saturday denied home minister Amit Shah had plotted to target Sikh activists on Canadian soil and said it had officially rebuked Ottawa over the "absurd and baseless" allegation.

Canada is home to the largest Sikh community outside of India, and includes activists for "Khalistan", a fringe separatist movement seeking an independent state for the religious minority carved out of Indian territory.

Ottawa has previously accused India of orchestrating the 2023 killing in Vancouver of 45-year-old naturalised Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistan campaigner.

But this week, Canadian officials said Ottawa had traced a broader campaign targeting Canadian Sikh activists to the highest levels of India's government, implicating Prime Minister Narendra Modi's powerful right-hand man.

"The Government of India protests in the strongest terms to the absurd and baseless references made to the Union Home Minister of India," foreign ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal told reporters.

Jaiswal said that a Canadian diplomat had been summoned and issued a letter to formally protest the accusation against Shah.

Testifying before a Canadian parliamentary committee this week, deputy foreign ministry David Morrison confirmed a Washington Post story implicating Shah in a plot to intimidate and even kill Canadian Sikhs.

The Post cited an unnamed senior Canadian official as having said that Shah authorised an intelligence gathering and attacks campaign, including the 2023 killing of Nijjar.

Morrison said he was a source for the information, telling the committee: "The journalist called me and asked me if it was that person. I confirmed it was that person."

- Diplomatic freefall -

Jaiswal hit back for New Delhi on Saturday by accusing Canadian officials of deliberately leaking "unfounded insinuations" to the media to "discredit India".

"Such irresponsible actions will have serious consequences for bilateral ties," he added.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the national police have in the past said there were "clear indications" of India's involvement in the murder, as well as a broad campaign of intimidation, violence and other threats against Khalistan activists.

India has repeatedly dismissed the allegations, which have sent diplomatic relations into freefall.

Delhi and Ottawa last month each expelled the other's ambassador and other senior diplomats.

The day after Morrison spoke, a Canadian spy agency issued a report warning that India was using cyber technology to track Sikh separatists abroad and had also stepped up cyber attacks against Canadian government networks.

Shah, 60, oversees India's internal security forces as home minister.

He is often called India's second-most powerful person after Prime Minister Modi, whom he has served loyally for decades.

Shah has a reputation as a masterful political strategist and was credited by Modi for engineering the 2014 election win that swept the leader to power.

Modi's fearsome right-hand man

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's most trusted and important lieutenant, Amit Shah, has been accused by Ottawa of authorising attacks on Canadian Sikh separatists on Canadian soil.

New Delhi on Saturday defended Shah, who oversees the nation's internal security forces as home minister, terming the allegations "absurd and baseless".

Shah, 60, is often called India's second-most powerful person after Modi, whom he has served loyally for decades, and has a fearsome reputation including accusations that he once orchestrated a series of murders.

Their enduring partnership has cemented the Hindu-nationalist worldview of their ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Modi is considered the charismatic frontman mobilising the masses behind the BJP, while Shah is seen as the enforcer keeping subordinates in line.

"The party is now completely dominated by Narendra Modi -- and of course also by Amit Shah... who has been his right-hand man for over 20 years," political scientist and India expert Christophe Jaffrelot said in 2024.

Both men began their political careers in Ahmedabad, the biggest city in the western state of Gujarat, where Modi took Shah -- 14 years his junior -- under his wing.

Modi was Gujarat's chief minister and Shah was a junior lawmaker when in 2002 the state was rocked by some of the worst religious violence in independent India's history.

A fire in a train carriage that killed dozens of Hindu pilgrims set off reprisals that killed at least 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.

Modi was accused of helping stir up the unrest and failing to order a police intervention -- claims he denies -- and the fallout saw him banned from entering the United States and Britain for years.

But the BJP won that year's Gujarat elections in a landslide. Modi appointed Shah to the state's powerful interior ministry.

- Murder and exile -

The following year was the start of a political storm that threatened to cut short Shah's career.

Haren Pandya, one of Shah's predecessors at the home ministry and an outspoken critic of Modi's conduct during the 2002 riots, was shot dead during a morning walk in Ahmedabad.

The case was never officially solved but suspicion fell on gangsters Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati -- both of whom were later killed by police in murky circumstances.

Critics claimed, but never proved, that Shah had ordered police to murder the pair.

Shah denied the allegations, saying they were concocted by political rivals to discredit him.

He was nonetheless arrested for the trio's murder in 2010, forcing him to relinquish his ministerial posts, and spent three months in jail before he was granted bail by Gujarat's top court.

Shah was banned from entering Gujarat for the next two years, prompting Indian media to dub him the "fugitive".

All charges against Shah were dropped, months after Modi became prime minister in 2014.

- 'Man of the match' -

Shah made good use of his exile, taking up residence in India's capital New Delhi and paving the way for Modi's political ascent.

By the time Modi was announced as the BJP's prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 elections, Shah had established a reputation as a masterful political strategist.

He was put in charge of the party's campaign in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with a bigger population than Brazil, where a near-sweep in the polls sealed Modi's victory.

Modi afterwards called Shah his "man of the match" during the election.

He appointed him BJP president, later smoothing his entry into the national parliament and again appointing him home minister.

Shah was born in 1964 to a prosperous business family in the financial hub Mumbai, but moved to Ahmedabad where he studied chemistry.

He flirted with careers in banking and stockbroking, but found his true calling in politics, just as his future mentor Modi had in the same city years earlier.

Shah married his wife Sonal Shah in his early twenties and the couple had one son, Jay.

Jay Shah was appointed secretary of India's cricket board aged just 31 in 2019, a rapid ascension to manage the country's most popular sport that sparked accusations of nepotism.

He was elected unopposed to lead cricket's world governing body five years later, a reflection of both India's outsized sway in the sport and his reputation as an administrator.