The Canadian Prime Minister couldn’t have landed himself in a more embarrassing position even if he had tried. Like the guest that never left, Justin Trudeau is now grounded in New Delhi overstaying his scheduled G20 departure. His plane has developed technical snags leaving him with no choice but to impose on India’s hospitality after abusing it.
Indeed, after being part of a G20 declaration that pledges to uphold the territorial integrity of nations, Trudeau paradoxically invoked his country’s “historic defence” of “freedom of peaceful protests” to rebuff Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s well considered warning that Canada’s wide berth to anti-India Khalistan separatists “won’t help India-Canada ties”.
Over the last few years, separatists, who are based in some provinces in Canada and sworn to the cause of severing Punjab from India, have been issuing death threats to Indian diplomats posted in missions across the world. They have desecrated temples of Canadian Hindus and vowed to assassinate Indian leaders in India. Right under the nose of Trudeau’s administration, these Khalistani separatists, who have been denoted terrorists by India, have declared war on Bharat’s sovereignty. Given that they have repatriated money — reportedly routed from the Pakistani deep state — to Punjab-based Khalistani terrorists who have used it to develop the means to carry out terror strikes on Indian soil, their “activism” clearly poses an ominous threat to India.
In this context, Trudeau’s self-serving defence of the “freedom of expression” of Khalistani terrorists trivialises India’s concerns. His stand is self-serving because it is borne out of a cringeworthy expediency. Trudeau’s survival in office depends on a party called the NDP led by known Khalistan sympathiser Jagmeet Singh. Trudeau can ill-afford to cross Singh lest the latter withdraws support to the former’s coalition government.
Trudeau’s disingenuousness hasn’t gone unnoticed in Canada either. His domestic opponents, fearing that Trudeau is jeopardising precious ties with India, have called out his hypocrisy on freedom of speech. Conservative Opposition leaders and commentators have pointed out that in early 2022 Trudeau imposed an emergency to crackdown on a truckers’ march upon Canada’s capital to protest the government’s Covid-19 health rules. The action made a mockery of the right to peaceful protest as it gave the Canadian security establishment instant powers to freeze the bank accounts of protestors and limit their right to speak up against the government.
The duplicitousness of the stand taken by the Canadian PM has not escaped the attention of India’s external affairs minister S. Jaishankar either. In fact, the Modi government has contrasted Trudeau’s support for the Singur farmer protests in India with his ruthless crackdown on the truckers’ protest in his own country.
Aside from the mendacity, Trudeau’s stand is bad PR for Canada for two reasons. First, Trudeau has allowed his coalition compulsions to undermine Canada’s hard-won image of a principled actor on the global stage. Second, his tolerant views on “Khalistan terrorism” exhibit a scant disregard for the global war on terror. This is especially galling when one considers that they were expressed on the same day as the world marked the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Trudeau should know better. It isn’t as if Canada is any stranger to terror strikes in defence of the right to self-determination. When Trudeau’s father was the Prime Minister of Canada, he sent in troops into Quebec province. Rattled by a militant Quebecer separatist group’s decision to follow up its threats to politicians and diplomats by staging a daring abduction, Pierre Trudeau invoked emergency powers under the War Measures Act. Freedom of speech and expression be damned, the act limited civil liberties and granted the police far-reaching powers, allowing them to arrest and detain 497 people without charge. This was October 1970.
Given his father’s history of zero-tolerance for separatism in Canada, one would have thought that Trudeau would have been more open to calls from New Delhi to double down on Khalistani militants who are flourishing under his watch. Clearly, the apple has fallen far from the tree and Trudeau has bought into the “your terrorist is my freedom fighter” line for opportunism’s sake.
But now that we know that Trudeau junior can’t act, it is incumbent upon New Delhi to go beyond appealing to Trudeau’s conscience.
Several options exist to make Canada realise that it is a mistake to trivialise India’s concerns. India is Canada’s 10th largest trade partner and a vital cog in Ottawa’s plans to strengthen its economic ties to the Indo-Pacific.
So, as a preliminary first step, New Delhi could look to weaponise business talks with Ottawa on a transformative free trade agreement that the two nations are looking to conclude. By dramatically upping the stakes New Delhi could pressure Ottawa that reportedly has more to lose under the terms of the existing trade partnership.
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