NEW DELHI: Relations between India and Canada have reached a historic low as the countries expelled each other’s diplomats in an ongoing row over the killing of a Sikh separatist activist on Canadian soil.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India’s government on Monday of “supporting criminal activity against Canadians here on Canadian soil,” and the country’s Foreign Ministry announced the expulsion of six Indian diplomats, including the high commissioner.

The ministry said Canadian police had gathered evidence, which identified them as “persons of interest” in last year’s killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down in Surrey, British Columbia.

India immediately rejected the accusations as absurd, and its Ministry of External Affairs said it was expelling Canada’s acting high commissioner, his deputy, and the embassy’s four first secretaries.

Before the announcement, it also summoned the Canadian charge d’affaires and said it was withdrawing its high commissioner and “other targeted diplomats,” contradicting Canada’s statement of expulsion.

“Prime Minister Trudeau has been making these public statements repeatedly, but the evidence that he claims to possess is not available to us so we cannot make any kind of a judgment,” Dr. Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, told Arab News.

“This is the first time the relationship is so low … It has created a lot of problems and it has done damage to relationships between the two countries for the time being.”

This is not the first time India-Canada relations have been strained. In 1974, after India conducted its first nuclear weapon test, it drew outrage from Canada, which accused it of extracting plutonium from a Canadian reactor, a gift intended for peaceful use.

Ottawa subsequently suspended its support for New Delhi’s nuclear energy program.

“The relationship was also low in the 1980s with the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane and the bombing of the plane, in which many people died,” said Prof. Ronki Ram, political science lecturer at the Punjab University.

The explosion from a bomb planted by Canada-based militants killed 329 people — the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history. India had warned the Canadian government about the possibility of attacks and accused the Canadian Security Intelligence Service of not acting on it.

But the current strain in relations is the first in which diplomats have been withdrawn.

“This is the first time that the relationship has gone down so low,” Ram said.

“Allegations and counter-allegations will have serious implications both internationally and domestically. The Indian government should look into the allegations and try to address them.”

Nijjar, a Sikh Canadian citizen, was gunned down in June 2023 outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, which has a significant number of Sikh residents. He was an outspoken supporter of the Khalistan movement, which calls for a separate Sikh homeland in parts of India’s Punjab state.

The movement is outlawed in India, considered a national security threat by the government, and Nijjar’s name appears on the Indian Home Ministry’s list of terrorists.

Canada has the largest population of Sikhs outside their native state of Punjab — about 770,000 or 2 percent of its entire population.

“Many Panjabi diaspora are in Canada, and a mini-Punjab has been established there,” Ram said.

“The government is taking an electoral interest in the landscape of Canada also. Those things are becoming very critical.”

JAKARTA: Indonesia’s National Museum put on display on Tuesday hundreds of artifacts recently returned from the Netherlands, the bulk of which were looted by the Dutch during the bloody colonial conquest of Bali in the early 20th century.

Titled “Repatriation,” the exhibit features 300 items from a collection of over 1,700 stolen under colonial rule that the Netherlands has returned to Indonesia since 1978. It will run until Dec. 31.

Most of the artifacts on display comprise weapons, coins, jewelry, and textiles that the Netherlands had taken in the aftermath of wars in southern Bali between 1906 and 1908, when the Dutch military attacked the region’s kingdoms and killed at least 1,000 people.

It also includes large-scale Hindu-Buddhist sculptures, such as one of a likeness of the god Ganesha, which the Netherlands looted in the mid-19th century from a 13th-century Singhasari Kingdom’s temple complex in East Java.

“We hope that the public will learn that in the past, our country wasn’t an empty land that another nation chose to settle on. There were civilizations, kingdoms, and cultures, and all these artifacts are proof of those civilizations,” Bonnie Triyana, a historian and a member of the Indonesian Repatriation Committee, told Arab News.

“As such, people can learn from our history, the origins of our country, and how diverse we are, and how much we sacrificed to gain our independence.”

Indonesia declared independence in 1945, after a long colonial history under Dutch rule that began at the end of the 16th century.

Jakarta started to campaign for the Dutch government to return stolen Indonesian artifacts in 1951, but the Netherlands only started to return them in the 1970s in small numbers. The Indonesian Repatriation Committee has made big strides since last year with the repatriation of 472 artifacts, followed by 288 such items in September.

The repatriation process has been met with criticism, as some questioned how poorer countries like Indonesia will care for the returned artifacts. But Marieke van Bommel, director-general of the Netherlands’ National Museum of World Cultures, told the New York Times last month that “the thief cannot tell the rightful owners what to do with their property.”

For Triyana, who has served as secretary of the Indonesian Repatriation Committee since 2021, the National Museum exhibit is both a “gateway” and a “bridge” to connect Indonesians with their past.

“Colonialism came to our land and committed exploitation through conquest. Not only did they exploit our wealth and resources, but they also committed violence. It is a lesson for the current generation, both that colonialism was here and its character is still around,” he said.

“We must do decolonization to scrape off the remnants of colonialism, and one way to do this is by learning history … So, this exhibit is very important because repatriation isn’t solely about returning objects taken by our colonizers, but we also want to slowly collect pieces of knowledge about our civilization.”