All that could have gone wrong during Justin Trudeau’s recent India visit went wrong. First, he was royally ignored by New Delhi, and then when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he was rebuffed for Canada’s pro-Khalistan stand. The icing on the cake was the grounding of Trudeau and his team in Delhi for two days due to a technical issue with the prime minister’s aircraft. The Government of India did offer the services of Air India One, but the Canadian PM preferred to wait for his own plane.
All through, Trudeau appeared to be a sore loser, grumping at the cold-shouldering he met at the G20 Summit. His team members took six hours to respond to a simple Delhi offer to provide Air India One. They even refused to put Trudeau in the presidential suite that was specially arranged by Indian security teams during the summit, and instead opted for a normal room for the Canadian PM. And the first thing Trudeau did, after reaching Ottawa from New Delhi, was to launch a full-scale diplomatic war on India by alleging that Indian agents were responsible for the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Khalistani terrorist, on Canadian soil. Following Trudeau’s charges, Canada expelled the head of Indian intelligence in that country, Pavan Kumar Rai.
India, too, acted swiftly to expel a senior Canadian diplomat, Olivier Sylvester. The government also rejected Canada’s allegations and called the charges levelled by Trudeau “absurd and motivated”. Delhi then came up with a strong “advisory” for its nationals and students in Canada, reminding them of “the deteriorating security environment” in that country, besides advising them “to exercise extreme caution and remain vigilant”. And now it has asked Ottawa to reduce its diplomatic presence in New Delhi citing “interference of Canadian diplomats” in India’s internal affairs.
Not used to seeing India fighting fire with fire, nervous Canada has reached out for support to its Western allies, including the US and the UK. At a time when India is an important player in the Western scheme of things vis-à-vis China, the Canadian cry has found few takers.
No doubt, Trudeau is a past master in pampering and patronising anti-India Khalistani elements in Canada. Yet, India should be thankful to him for his diplomatic naiveté, if not dumbness, that has helped internationalise Khalistani terror operating on Canadian soil. After all, this anti-India network is neither a recent phenomenon in the North American country, nor is it a Justin Trudeau-centric development. There has been a flourishing Khalistani ecosystem in Canada since the 1980s, when incidentally Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, was at the helm of the country’s affairs.
In 1982, for instance, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi complained about it to Pierre Trudeau, his Canadian counterpart, it fell on deaf ears. In fact, the then Canadian government refused to entertain Indira Gandhi’s request to extradite Talwinder Parmar on charges of murder, saying India was insufficiently deferential to the British Queen. Canadian diplomats told their Indian counterparts that the extradition protocols between Commonwealth countries would not apply because India only recognised Her Majesty as Head of the Commonwealth, and not as Head of State!
“So, Parmar was free to roam. Draped in the robes of a medieval warrior-priest, with an elaborate turban and pointed slippers curled up at the toes, he raised money in Sikh temples and preached a puritanical brand of Sikhism. He also dabbled in real estate, sent cash to hijackers, plotted bombings and assassinations, promised to ‘kill 50,000 Hindus’, swore that ‘Indian planes will fall from the sky’ and schemed to make that happen,” writes Canadian journalist Terry Milewski in his 2021 book, Blood for Blood: Fifty Years of the Global Khalistan Project.
Such was the state of affairs that Canada’s high commissioner, Bill Warden, posted to New Delhi in the early 1980s, would find himself being repeatedly summoned and reprimanded for his country’s indifference, if not complicity, to the violence – first by Indira Gandhi’s government and then, after her death, by Rajiv Gandhi’s. Interestingly, Warden personally believed Indian complaints were not entirely misplaced.
In his memoirs, Diplomat, Dissident, Spook (2017), Warden writes, “At virtually the same time that I was providing, on instruction from Ottawa, assurances to the (Indian) foreign secretary with regard to the upgraded security being provided at Indian missions in Canada, an armed gunman walked into the consulate general in Toronto, fired some shots, and then slipped away unimpeded. Through the late spring and summer of that year, I was summoned to the foreign ministry to receive strong protests on some eighteen occasions.”
Warden further recalls how two months before her assassination, Indira Gandhi sent a letter to her Canadian counterpart, John Turner, accusing “in explicit terms” that Sikh outfits in Canada were financing violence against India while receiving “multiculturalism” funds from that government. “Indirectly,” as Milewski writes, “Canadian taxpayers were paying to kill Indians.”
Even the 1985 Kanishka disaster aboard Air India Flight 182, killing all 329 people, including 268 Canadian citizens, 27 British citizens, and 24 Indian citizens, couldn’t shake the Canadian government out of slumber. When the plane was bombed by Khalistani terrorists, Warden said categorically that this tragedy was “fully preventable”. According to him, “warnings of potential disaster had been delivered in spades. The failure of the Canadian authorities to act was, consequently, one of the root causes.”
The Canadian indifference to the Khalistani menace even astonished British Sikhs, who, writes Milewski, “were going through their own days of rage, although with a more robust official response”. He adds, “Piara Khabra of the Labour Party, Britain’s first Sikh MP, was similarly threatened by separatist thugs in his west London district of Southall. When I interviewed Khabra in 2003, he was baffled by the free rein given to Khalistanis in Canada: The sort of terrorism which was taking place in Canada was worse than what happened here in this country. We used to listen to the stories, read in the newspapers and I think it was a terrible situation in Canada. I don’t know why the Canadian government did not worry about this sort of situation and decide to take some positive steps actually. I can’t understand that.”
In Canada, the support for the Khalistani cause is across party lines, though the Trudeau-led Liberal Party has taken special care to cultivate this vote-bank. In his party, he has removed or sidelined Sikh liberals for extremists. Many a times he has given tickets to Khalistani sympathisers, bypassing the party’s old liberal hands. But even the Conservatives in Canada don’t mind bending backwards to gain this vote-bank.
Milewski shows how, during the 2007 Vaisakhi parade in Surrey, British Columbia, both conservatives and liberals vied with each other to impress upon the Sikh radicals. The posters of Khalistani assassins and mass killers, including those of Talwinder Parmar, openly floated at the parade even as politicians made a beeline to join it.
Premier Gordon Campbell first said there was no problem and that he would attend the parade again in future years. A day later, withdrawing that statement, his spokesman said that the premier was “upset” with the display of Khalistani posters at the parade.
Conservative MP Jim Abbott, who represented Prime Minister Stephen Harper — Canada at that time had a Conservative government — at the parade, too made a U-turn but in a contrasting way. On hearing of the Parmar posters, he said he was “flabbergasted” to hear that a terrorist had been honoured. But later, after consulting with party leaders, he denounced the CBC, and not the parade organisers, for linking the event with terrorists. “I disagree with the CBC’s coverage that portrays this event in a negative light by associating it with suspected terrorists in the community… I will vigorously defend this event along with thousands of Canadians of Sikh faith who won’t tolerate such a linkage,” his revised statement said.
In the past 40 years, both Conservatives and Liberals have pandered to Khalistani extremists operating on Canadian soil. What differentiates the two is the scale of support and patronisation for such anti-India elements. Justin Trudeau, in that way, has merely pushed the envelope to ‘mainstreamise’ these extremists on a scale not seen before. But then, he has also brought the menace to the global limelight. Had he not been so diplomatically unwise and uncouth, anti-India forces in Canada could still have had a free run and Delhi could have done very little except perhaps the lodging of a few random protests. India can be thankful to Trudeau just for that.
India has done the right thing by confronting Canada head-on. Along with diplomatic ties, the government can also look at downsizing economic relations with Ottawa. The time has come for India to put a price on such dubious, dangerous activities on foreign soil. And as a series of strong measures taken by the Modi government suggests, anti-India-ism wouldn’t go unchallenged. That’s the message India has sent to Ottawa and other Western capitals that pursue dubious terror policies in the name of human rights and freedom of speech and expression.
(This is Part 1 of a two-part series.)
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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