According to Foreign Minister S Jaishankar, India will resume issuing visas to Canadians if the safety of its diplomats there improves.

“Security threats” disrupted work at India’s Canadian missions last September, forcing them to stop providing visa services.

Sikh separatist leader in Canada was killed in a dispute between the two countries.

Canada’s foreign minister announced last week that 41 diplomats had left India.

In response, India requested the withdrawal of dozens of Canadian employees, stating that if they remained, their immunity would be revoked.

According to Canadian officials, this is a violation of international law. As a result of the move, both the United States and the United Kingdom have expressed concern.

However, Mr Jaishankar insisted that India’s insistence on “maintaining two-way diplomatic parity” was in accordance with the Vienna Convention.

“We invoked parity because we were concerned about continuous interference in our affairs by Canadian personnel,” he said at an event, noting that India and Canada were experiencing difficult times.

I do want to point out that we have problems with a particular segment of Canadian politics and the policies that flow from it,” he said.

Delhi-Ottawa relations are at a low after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country was investigating “credible allegations potentially linking” the Indian state to the murder of a Sikh leader.

The Indian government rejected the allegations as “absurd”.

In June, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, was shot dead in his vehicle by two masked gunmen outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia. In the 1980s, Nijjar led a violent insurgency over the demand for a separate Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan.