There’s a maxim that goes: Once you go woke, you go broke. The opposite is also true — go unwoke, go unbroke. And while the main story of the last Canadian election was that the Liberals managed to win after dropping Justin Trudeau like a stale waffle, the tangent that matters most for New Delhi is the amputation of the Khalistani gangrene that had infected Canadian politics.
Not so long ago, Canadian politicians embraced Khalistanis with the enthusiasm of uncles hugging the bartender at a wedding reception. But if the 2025 result is any indication, the times are a-changin’.

From left to right, Liberal leader Mark Carney, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre before French-language federal leaders’ debate earlier this week

Let’s rewind.
The Khalistan movement was born in blood and delusion. In the 1980s, it took tens of thousands of Indian lives, culminating in the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which also killed scores of Canadian citizens. It was a terror attack that shook the world, long before 9/11.
It was terrorism dressed up as liberation. And while the fires died down in Punjab, they kept flickering in suburban gurdwaras across the West. Diaspora extremism exported a failed revolution — foreign passports in one hand, anti-India posters in the other.
Enter Canada: the Disneyland of diaspora radicalism. Trudeau’s Liberals treated Sikh extremism not as a national security threat, but as an ethnic mood board for vote-bank politics. His office deleted references to Sikh extremism from terrorism reports. Cabinet ministers smiled beside float parades featuring Indira Gandhi’s assassination. And when known terrorists like Gurpatwant Singh Pannun threatened violence, Trudeau’s government responded with mumbling about “freedom of expression.”
Then came Hardeep Singh Nijjar. When the Khalistani terrorist was gunned down in 2023, Trudeau broke diplomatic sound barriers to accuse India — without a shred of proof, a move that backfired spectacularly and made him a global meme, thanks mostly to the perennially online members of India armed with the world’s cheapest internet and knowledge of English. In fact, if one simply read about Nijjar from Canadian or American outlets, one would have assumed Nijjar was a loving plumber who doubled up as an activist, gurdwara worker, and scrubber of kitchens — which all failed to mention that Nijjar had even gone to Pakistan for arms training.

Like Father, Like Son

Of course, the son’s move was hardly surprising, considering that Pierre Trudeau had once refused to extradite Talwinder Singh Parmar — a prominent Khalistani terrorist and co-founder of Babbar Khalsa International. Parmar was wanted in India for the murder of two Punjab Police officers. The Canadian government’s refusal hinged on the technicality that India recognised the British monarch only as Head of the Commonwealth, not as Head of State. Canada argued that the Commonwealth extradition protocols therefore didn’t apply. Parmar remained in Canada and went on to mastermind the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing — the deadliest terrorist attack in Canadian history, killing 329 people, including 268 Canadian citizens.
Trudeau’s own intelligence chiefs later admitted they had no hard evidence. His Five Eyes allies blinked nervously. Even the Americans — never shy of sticking fingers into sovereign pies — politely urged Canada cooperate.
India, meanwhile, acted like the adult in the room. It didn’t roar. It didn’t flinch. It simply waited — like a seasoned poker player watching a drunk bluff on an empty hand. Trudeau expelled Indian diplomats. India returned the favour. Trade talks froze. Visas stalled. And Ottawa suddenly realised that when you pick a fight with the world’s fifth-largest economy, you’d better have more than just moral indignation.
And then the collapse came.

Khalistanis Lose

Jagmeet Singh, the turbaned torchbearer of Khalistani sympathy, went from kingmaker to cautionary tale. He lost his seat. It was a fitting end for a politician whose rise to NDP leadership raised some questions over the leadership process.
Back in 2017, Jagmeet Singh won the NDP leadership largely on the strength of new members signed up by his campaign — a victory some party veterans quietly questioned. While overall turnout was just 52.8%, Singh’s recruits showed up in force, handing him 53.8% on the first ballot. The three other candidates, backed more by traditional NDP members, were left trailing. It was an early sign of how identity politics and bloc sign-ups could tilt the internal balance of Canadian parties — and, in Singh’s case, how factions sympathetic to Khalistani rhetoric could find their way to the top through mobilisation rather than broad consensus.
Come 2025, and the NDP lost official party status. Voters made it clear: backing separatist rhetoric isn’t multiculturalism — it’s madness. The Liberal Party, already battered by amateur-hour foreign policy, watched Trudeau shuffle off into political sunset, his India gambit having detonated in his face.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The rot wasn’t limited to the Liberals. All Canadian parties — from Poilievre’s Conservatives to Singh’s NDP — played footsie with extremism. No one wanted to say the quiet part out loud: that Khalistani ideology, once draped in the language of rights and victimhood, had mutated into a cover for hate politics. Posters calling for violence against Indian diplomats. Temple attacks. Social media clips declaring Canada a settler state that must be decolonised — by whose army, one wonders?
The intellectual decay ran even deeper. Canadian gurdwaras ran “referendums” on Punjab’s independence with the zeal of a rogue polling booth. Academia became a launchpad for agitprop masquerading as scholarship. Cultural events hosted masked radicals shouting slogans louder than their logic. Meanwhile, Indian consulates were stormed, Hindu temples graffitied — and Ottawa responded with bromides about tolerance.
Through it all, India played the long game. Officials repeated a single line like a mantra: “We have not received any credible evidence.” Translated: prove it or pipe down.
Now, with Trudeau out, Mark Carney in, and a battered NDP nursing its wounds, New Delhi will smile quietly at the long game it has played in this diplomatic kerfuffle where it refused to give Canada the legitimacy it sought. When PM Narendra Modi tweeted post the election to congratulate Mark Carney, there was a particular phrase that found its way into the official wording.

One assumes quiet diplomacy will be underway soon as India and Canada recalibrate after the flights of fancy of the Trudeau era.
Let’s be clear: this was never about all Sikhs. It was about a fringe movement that hijacked microphones in gurdwaras, manipulated victimhood, and wore the garb of human rights while chanting the slogans of insurrection. They paraded images of Indira Gandhi’s assassination not as history, but as prophecy. They treated terror as theatre. And for too long, Canada applauded from the balcony.
But the curtain has now fallen. The West’s most Khalistan-friendly democracy just issued a political restraining order. India didn’t gloat. It didn’t need to. The Khalistan project in Canada didn’t end with a bang. It ended with a ballot — and a very loud silence from Ottawa. Good riddance to bad proxies. As Hillary Clinton famously said all those years ago when words mattered in the corridors of power: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them to only bite your neighbour.” Hopefully, it’s a lesson Canada will heed going forward.