Proxies and 'media manipulation': What the NSICOP report said about political meddling by India

Nine months after the prime minister accused India of involvement in the killing of a Canadian citizen, a damning new report has concluded that country is the second biggest foreign threat to Canadian democracy after China.

The report released this week by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), a cross-party group of MPs and senators with top security clearances, mentions India 44 times in its 84 pages.

It alleges India is «interfering in Canadian democratic processes and institutions, including through the targeting of Canadian politicians, ethnic media and Indo-Canadian ethnocultural communities.»

Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor at Carleton University and a former national security analyst, told CBC News India has been targeting diaspora communities in Canada for decades.

But the NSICOP report has added something new by describing attempts to interfere in Canada's democratic institutions «in the starkest terms we've ever seen,» she said.

The report says that while India's foreign interference efforts are not as widespread as those of the People's Republic of China, they are «of significant concern.»

«India seeks to cultivate relationships with a variety of witting and unwitting individuals across Canadian society with the intent of inappropriately exerting India's influence across all orders of government, particularly to stifle or discredit criticism of the Government of India,» says the report.

The use of proxies

The heavily redacted NSICOP document repeatedly cites intelligence reports alleging «foreign actors» used «Canadians as proxies who act at their behest, creating a separation between the threat activity and the foreign actor.»

«India has an active proxy, who has