This is intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Rathaza Hussein. In the weeks before the outbreak of renewed war in the Gaza Strip in Israel, a dark story emerged about the alleged involvement of agents of the Indian government in the assassination of a Canadian citizen near the city of Vancouver.

The alleged assassination targeted Hardeep Singh Niger, a leader in the Separatist-Khalistan movement that seeks to create a separate state for followers of the Sikh religion in India.

The United States has also been involved, reportedly sharing intelligence information with Canada that helped point the finger at Indian involvement in the killing.

The episode is shed light on an increasingly murky and dangerous world now emerging as rising powers seek to assert themselves globally.

The increasingly ultra-nationalist Indian government, led by Narendra Modi, looks to be a major player in this new order.

As the United States seeks to maintain support for conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, it's also courting India as a bulwark in its growing confrontation with China.

But it is also dealing with the country that is transforming into a far more belligerent, aggressive, and somewhat say dangerous power than it has been in the past.

To help us understand this new world order, we're not joined by Punkage Mishra. He's a Bloomberg opinion columnist and author, most recently of the novel Run and Hide. Welcome to Intercepted Punkage.

Pleasure.

Punkage, the Canadian government's recent accusation of Indian involvement in the killing of one of its citizens has generated a very intense and you could say a bellicose reaction from the pro-government media and some elements of civil society in India.

You wrote recently that the incident points to an extremely volatile factor in geopolitics today, Narendra Modi's India.

Can you tell us a bit about the changes in India that have animated this reaction and what people should know about the developments in India and Modi?

Very simply speaking, it's the arrival of India as a modern nation state, as an aspiring superpower.

Perhaps no longer aspiring, perhaps thinking, at least that's a thinking right now, that we've already arrived and that we should now enjoy certain privileges that Western powers have enjoyed for a very long time and that includes going after critics and dissenters in different parts of the world.

So there's a massive shift in Indian mentalities and worldviews over the last 20, 25 years. I have to say this process started well before the present government of Narendra Modi assumed power, which was in 2014.

This process has been going on since the late 90s or since the opening up of India to the rest of the world.

So I think looking at essentially 25 years of consolidation of hyper nationalist consciousness and that is coming to a lot of people outside of India as a great shock, as a great surprise.

But I think if you have monitored, if you've watched the red Indian newspapers or watched television channels or watched the movies coming out of Bollywood, watched the TV series, watched cricket matches and the passion and the sort of nationalism invoked at such occasions, you will know that this has been in the making for some time.

You know, at the moment, we're currently witnessing a broader crisis in the Middle East and obviously impact in the West and beyond. And many in India have also taken interest in the Israel Palestine conflict and projected their own internal domestic and foreign conflicts onto that.

Can you talk a bit about how people in India and various parties are viewing these events and what their responses have been?

You mean in the Middle East? Yes, in reference to the Gaza conflict at the moment.

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