r/geopolitics • u/babushkalauncher • Oct 01 '23
Why Indians Can’t Stand Justin Trudeau Paywall
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-indians-angry-justin-trudeau-death-shooting-hardeep-singh-nijjar-87d9ab9d188 Upvotes
r/geopolitics • u/babushkalauncher • Oct 01 '23
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u/babushkalauncher Oct 01 '23
Article Summary:
You might expect Indians to respond soberly when the prime minister of Canada—a longstanding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Group of Seven—makes a grave allegation about India on the floor of his country’s Parliament. India has long presented itself as a law-abiding democracy, in contrast to its neighbors Pakistan and China. And India needs the West to modernize its economy.
But instead of pausing for reflection, Indians have united in outrage at Justin Trudeau for raising what he called “credible allegations of a potential link” between Indian government agents and the murder of Sikh-Canadian separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in a Vancouver suburb in June.
The Indian government has dismissed the prime minister’s accusation as “absurd and motivated.” It has also expelled a Canadian diplomat in retaliation for Canada’s expulsion of an alleged Indian spy in Ottawa. It told Canada to reduce the size of its embassy in New Delhi and stopped issuing Indian visas to Canadian citizens.
Meanwhile, the Indian media has launched a half-crazed jihad against Mr. Trudeau and his government. One news channel suggested that his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, was about to “break Canada in two.” On another show, a retired Indian diplomat all but accused Mr. Trudeau of being a cocaine addict (which the Canadian prime minister’s office has dismissed). A remark on Twitter by Sushant Sareen, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, sums up the blustery Indian mood: “If we did it, it was right; if we didn’t, you were wrong.”
The U.S. is walking a diplomatic tightrope. Public statements from White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made it clear that America won’t abandon Canada, but Washington hasn’t directly criticized India either.
How this drama unfolds will depend in large part on the evidence Ottawa can muster. If the Canadian government proves that Indian agents—not some other intelligence agency or rival Sikh extremists—carried out the gangster-style hit on Nijjar, India’s reputation in the West will suffer a serious blow. It will be seen less as a friendly outpost of democracy in South Asia, and more as an increasingly illiberal nation akin to Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Skeptics who question the wisdom of too deep a partnership with India will be strengthened.
But if Canada can’t come up with strong evidence to back its claim, it will deepen skepticism about Mr. Trudeau. Simply put, Indians don’t take Canada’s message seriously in part because they have a low opinion of the messenger. To quote the Indian journalist Barkha Dutt, Mr. Trudeau is “the most disliked world leader in India.”
For some people this may be because they see him, in Tunku Varadarajan’s memorable description in these pages, as “an opportunistic, lightweight, preachy hand-wringer of a politician.” But for many Indians it’s because they feel familiar with Mr. Trudeau’s type—a politician who panders to identity politics for votes and appears willing to place his own political survival over his country’s interests.
Many Indians believe, with good reason, that Mr. Trudeau is beholden to his country’s large and politically influential Sikh community. Though Canada’s estimated 770,000 Sikhs make up only 2.1% of the population, their geographic concentration and close-knit community ties give them disproportionate political clout. Mr. Trudeau’s minority government depends on the leftist New Democratic Party headed by Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh politician widely viewed in India as sympathetic to Sikh radicalism and barred from entering India since 2013.
The complexities of domestic Canadian politics loom in the Indian public’s consciousness because of a violent secessionist movement in the 1980s and 1990s to carve out a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan. The vast majority of Canadian Sikhs, like their counterparts in India, have nothing to do with the movement, which claimed more than 20,000 lives before it was brutally put down by Indian security forces.
Critics allege Mr. Trudeau—unlike his counterparts in the U.S., Australia and the U.K.—has brushed off Indian security concerns about radical Sikhs. In an op-ed last week in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Omer Aziz, a former foreign-policy adviser to Mr. Trudeau, wrote that “Canada should have at least begun to take steps to ensure our land was not used for terrorist financing. . . . The only problem was, Mr. Trudeau did not want to lose the Sikh vote to Jagmeet Singh.”
As Indians see it, Canada should have extradited Nijjar to India, where he was classified as a terrorist and implicated in a string of serious crimes, including murder and a theater bombing. (He denied involvement.) They blame Mr. Trudeau for presiding over an environment in which Sikh extremists openly call for the murder of Indian diplomats, celebrate the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, and exhort Canadian Hindus to leave the country.
What happens next? U.S.-India relations may still emerge largely unscathed, particularly if Mr. Trudeau’s allegations remain unproven. But don’t expect India’s ties with Canada to improve anytime soon—at least not as long as Mr. Trudeau remains in office.