India’s remaining diplomats in the country ‘clearly on notice’: Canadian foreign minister

Amid heightened diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Ottawa, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly on Friday said that the Indian diplomats who remain in the country are “clearly on notice”, PTI reported.

Diplomats from both sides have been expelled or withdrawn in the past week.

Canada will not tolerate diplomats contravening the Vienna Convention or putting the lives of Canadians at risk, Joly was quoted as saying.

The convention is an international treaty establishing a framework for diplomatic relations between countries.

On October 14, the Indian government said it was withdrawing its High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and some other diplomats from the North American country. It also announced that it had expelled six Canadian diplomats. Ottawa also said that it had expelled six Indian diplomats, but Delhi maintained that the personnel had been withdrawn before the Canadian decision.

This had come as New Delhi rejected diplomatic communication from Canada naming Verma and other Indian envoys as “persons of interest” in an investigation in the country.

While it was unclear which investigation Ottawa was referring to, reports said that it was related to the June 2023 murder of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada.

On Friday, Joly compared India to Russia and said that the Canadian police had made allegations of links between Indian diplomats and homicides, death threats and intimidation in the country, PTI reported.

“We’ve never...

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