On September 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood before his country’s Parliament and leveled a dramatic charge: Ottawa had “credible evidence” that the Indian government had assassinated a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. The citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, had been gunned down outside the Sikh temple where he served as president. Trudeau declared the killing “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty” and “contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open, and democratic societies conduct themselves.”

The prime minister’s claim made headlines around the planet, but it shouldn’t have been altogether surprising. Nijjar was a prominent activist who called for Sikhs—a religious group mostly concentrated in northern India—to break away from New Delhi and form an independent nation. As a result, New Delhi had labeled him a terrorist. The Indian government has denied involvement in the killing, but under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it has become illiberal at home and bellicose abroad, such that assassinations on foreign soil are no longer an unimaginable part of its agenda. New Delhi, in other words, could well be a government that will do anything to silence dissidents.  

Nijjar is not the first Canadian whom India has labeled a terrorist, and he is hardly the first to support Sikh secession. During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Sikh insurgents in northern India waged a violent campaign to establish an independent Sikh nation, called Khalistan, and many Sikhs in Canada supported them by raising money and promoting the movement’s message in Canadian temples. Some Canadian Sikhs helped separatist cadres travel to Pakistan, where they received financial and military help. And in 1985, Talwinder Singh Parmar—a Sikh Canadian—orchestrated the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The plane exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 passengers and crew members in a plane attack deadlier than any the world would see until September 11, 2001.

Parmar was a terrorist, and experts believe that the Khalistani movement, with all its bloodshed, was unpopular among Indian Sikhs. But New Delhi was no less vicious. India responded to the Sikh insurgency with unremitting violence that killed thousands of civilians. At one point, separatists took shelter in the country’s Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest site, and the Indian government sent in the military, killing scores of people and damaging the building. Two Sikhs then assassinated India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, which in turn prompted an anti-Sikh pogrom. Pamar himself was shot by police when he traveled to India after the plane bombing.

Nijjar, then, wouldn’t even be the first Canadian to be killed by Indian state actors. But his fate feels discontinuous with this history. His activism was peaceful, the Sikh insurgency having come to an end more than two decades ago. If India is behind Nijjar’s killing, its actions don’t reflect fears of Sikh secession so much as India’s transformation into an illiberal state where the government has elevated one religion—Hinduism—at the expense of all others, and where policy makers tolerate little dissent.

Since Modi came to power in 2014, violence against India’s minorities has dramatically increased, and New Delhi has moved to strip many non-Hindus of protections. The country revoked the partial autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—and split the entity in half. It passed a law that could deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship, and it has done conspicuously little to stop the killing of members of tribal minorities in India’s northeast.

[Read: Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics]

So far, Sikhs have been spared the worst ethnonationalist measures. But this week’s incident suggests that they are no longer as exempt, and the reasons are not hard to fathom. Sikh farmers played a major role in forcing Modi to withdraw his agricultural-reform bills in 2021, one of his few political defeats. The prime minister may worry that, as his Hindu-nationalist project becomes more dominant, Sikhs could throw more obstacles in its path—or rekindle a separatist insurgency. He may have decided that the time has come to wage an open battle against the religion. But if he thought that doing so would preempt calls for secession, he miscalculated: Sikh activists across the world have already responded to Nijjar’s death with protests, some of them calling for the creation of Khalistan.

The killing has also antagonized Canada. But Ottawa’s anger is unlikely to trouble New Delhi. India has prohibited Jagmeet Singh—a Sikh Canadian politician and an outspoken defender of Sikh rights—from entering the country. (Singh now leads Canada’s third-largest political party.) India’s foreign minister has accused critics of the Modi government of colonialism and said that outsiders have no right to question India’s behavior. And India’s main Hindu-nationalist organization, to which Modi belongs, has called for the creation of Akhand Bharat: a greater India encompassing all or parts of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. India unveiled a new Parliament building in May that featured a mural of Akhand Bharat. Three countries lodged complaints in response.

[Read: Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi]

So far, Washington has professed to be “deeply concerned” by Trudeau’s allegations but has issued no serious rebuke to India, at least in public. In fact, according to The Washington Post, Trudeau originally asked the United States and its other closest allies to jointly announce the Canadian findings, but was rebuffed. (The Canadian government denied the Post’s report.)

The silence might seem logical: The United States sees India as an essential partner in its competition with China, so it does not want to alienate New Delhi. But American policy makers don’t just refrain from criticizing India. They praise the country’s politics and repeatedly declare that New Delhi is a natural partner for Washington. They invited Modi to address a joint session of Congress, where the prime minister crowned India the “mother of democracy,” its ambitions guided by the notion of “one Earth, one family, one future.”

Trudeau’s claim, if true, should remind the United States that India is not, in fact, a natural friend. The Indian government is trying to create not a great, peaceful democracy but an avowedly Hindu power that dominates South Asia. It may work with America to constrain China, but that is because challenging Beijing is in India’s interests, not because India supports the West.

Illustrations by Miki Lowe

Donald Hall wasn’t supposed to outlive Jane Kenyon, his wife and fellow poet. He was 19 years her senior, and in 1989, he was diagnosed with colon cancer that subsequently metastasized to his liver. Doctors told him he had a one in three chance of living more than five years. But Hall lived for roughly three more decades; Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995, when she was 47. Hall may once have thought his own cancer diagnosis was the major turning point of his life, but it was Kenyon’s death that divided his story between a before and an after.

In the after, much of Hall’s work was about grief, or Kenyon herself, including the collections Without and The Painted Bed, and his memoir of a marriage, The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon. In a December 1997 interview, he said that in the months after his wife’s death, he’d been completely unable to talk about anything but her. “I go into a diner and I have a hamburger and say ‘could you pass the ketchup?’” he joked, “and the man passes me the ketchup and I say, ‘my wife used to like ketchup, she died of leukemia.’” When the interviewer asked about Hall’s shift in appearance, nearly three years after Kenyon’s death, he explained: “My life has totally changed, and it’s as if with the beard I’ve acknowledged this change.”

Hall’s 2000 poem “Distressed Haiku” is clearly about Kenyon—but also, in a broader sense, about moving forward in time when it means growing farther from those you’ve lost. The English-language haiku typically consists of three lines: the first with five syllables, then seven syllables, then five. Here, Hall has ignored those rules. But he’s kept with another common feature of the form: The last line somehow contradicts, changes, or illuminates what came before it. The haiku, like Hall’s life, has a turning point.

His series of not-quite-haikus (“distressed” in both subject matter and form) takes bits of his grief and explores its contradictions. Kenyon is buried in the ground, under snow and ice—but someday Hall will join her. The initial sting of a death seems worse than anything—but the years that follow are harder. Hall is preoccupied with darkness—but the Earth keeps spinning. April, the month in which Kenyon died, is also a time of biblical and natural rebirth.

In the last stanza, Hall names what seems impossible: “The mouse rips / the throat of the lion / and the dead return.” By pairing this with his other, more logical segments, he seems to be emphasizing how absurd the idea of any change over time feels, when one is stuck firmly in grief. But perhaps he’s also suggesting that, however unthinkable and unfair it may be, standing still is not an option; life, like the haiku, has its inevitable arc. “I weep every day, but I don’t howl,” he said back in 1997. “I howled and scared the dog all the time, for a long time. And I’ve probably only howled once in the past six months … That the world should go on is such an outrage—but it does.”

— Faith Hill

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