Mark Carney’s Diplomatic Test: Rebuilding Bridges with India
Apart from dealing with his very mercurial counterpart in the United States, Carney has other challenges that he will soon have to confront.
The issue that has roiled relations has to do with the presence of a small but vocal group of Sikh separatists in Canada.
The friction has historical roots and can be traced to the apparent unwillingness or inability of successive Canadian governments to vigorously prosecute the perpetrators of the bombing of an Air India flight in 1985. ‘Emperor Kanishka’, the Air India airliner, was on a routine flight from Montreal to London. The blast resulted in the deaths of all 329 passengers and crew.
The more recent tensions in Indo-Canadian relations, as is now well known, stem from an alleged plot that led to the successful killing of a Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver in British Columbia. PM Trudeau and members of his Cabinet had alleged that the officials within the Government of India had orchestrated this assassination.
The government in New Delhi vehemently denied these charges. Ottawa nevertheless expelled India’s High Commissioner, claiming he was complicit in this plot. In turn, New Delhi resorted to retaliatory expulsions, leading to a drastic downward spiral in bilateral ties.
News reports suggest that the Indian government is already considering restoring its High Commissioner to Canada, after Trudeau’s exit. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief Daniel Roges is also scheduled to visit India next week for a meeting held by the National Security Council Secretariat. This will be the first such meeting after the heated war of words last October over the case.
