With regard to that disinformation issue and with regard to foreign interference more broadly, as I outlined, this is an institutional problem that's plagued successive governments for the last 40 years. There's evidence on the record in public media reporting and other government documents that India has been engaging in foreign interference and that there has been some degree of awareness of those activities in this country.
As you pointed out, the question of disinformation is particularly dangerous, not only because India's disinformation bolsters racist stereotypes about Sikhs and tries to paint the entire community as extremists and terrorists, but also because it is targeting Canadian institutions all across the board. Weldon Epp, the ADM for the Indo-Pacific, has noted that India has a massive potential to engage in this kind of disinformation activity.
You talked about the farmers' protest in particular. The rapid response mechanism that's housed in Global Affairs Canada started operating around that time. It noted that India was engaging in significant activity that was targeting Canadian officials, government officials and the Sikh community in particular.
In addition to this narrative of Sikhs being extremists or terrorists, I think one issue is that there is a concerted effort by Indian actors to paint political difference around issues of political rights in Punjab as a sectarian conflict. The RRM did actually observe in 2021 that pro-BJP outlets were trying to manufacture and amplify a narrative of tension between the Hindu and Sikh communities in the country, and that there was some degree of insecurity.
Earlier this year, in March 2024, CSIS provided a high-level security briefing in which it talked about the fact that India engages in foreign interference, particularly with its Hindu nationalist agenda at the forefront. One of its objectives is to target and marginalize Sikhs from political life in Canada altogether.
Therefore, the impacts of this foreign disinformation and this kind of interference are not only in terms of electoral interference; it also has corrosive impacts on social cohesion by trying to paint sectarian conflict in Canada where it doesn't actually exist.
In terms of the government's capacity and in terms of that rapid response mechanism, one of the most shocking things is that, in 2021, by the RRM's own account, its analysts, its employees and those involved in that project didn't actually have familiarity with non-western media ecosystems like India. It noted particularly that this makes Canada vulnerable to Indian disinformation and the amplification of those kinds of messages.
There's a lack of familiarity, then. There was an acknowledgement that this was the case. The mechanisms or methodology are particularly concentrated on mainstream messages or political leaders and are not actually trying to differentiate how Indian disinformation is targeting the community or acting in Canada particularly.
There's a methodology that's clearly ineffective. There's a lack of familiarity. Also, to my understanding, as of the spring of this year, there's nobody within the rapid response mechanism who even speaks Punjabi or Hindi, which are the languages of choice for Indian disinformation. Even broader than that, even within civil society, the Media Ecosystem Observatory, an academic resource to monitor disinformation, also doesn't have those resources.
We're looking at a country with a juggernaut of a media apparatus and social media capacities that is specifically and aggressively targeting Canada, and it doesn't look like Canada really has any mechanisms or capacity to monitor, understand, analyze and actually counter that disinformation.