Mending frayed diplomatic relations between India and Canada will be a long process after each side adopted maximalist positions, despite New Delhi’s surprise move to ease some visa curbs on Canadians, officials and experts said.
India recently decided to partially restore visa services, weeks after suspending them in anger at Ottawa’s claim that Indian agents might have been involved in the murder of a Canadian Sikh separatist leader from Punjab state.
Mutual recriminations since that accusation, which India strongly denies, have strained ties between the two countries — close for almost a century and with extensive links through the Sikh diaspora — to their worst in memory.
Photo: Reuters
And while India’s relaxation on visas might have raised some expectations of improved relations, it was not a breakthrough, as neither side has much incentive to hasten a return to normalcy, officials and experts in both countries said.
Neither New Delhi nor Ottawa looks likely to take dramatic steps to reconcile soon as Canada’s murder investigation proceeds and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares for national elections by May.
“The relationship is in deep crisis, perhaps its worst ever,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “Each side may have a strong interest in the crisis not getting completely out of control, but that doesn’t mean there are strong incentives to resolve the crisis.”
Ajay Bisaria, Indian ambassador to Canada from 2020 to last year, said that the relationship is in a “de-escalation phase” following “quiet diplomacy.”
Even with the reprieve, the visa curbs are expected to hinder the movement of tens of thousands of Indians and people of Indian origin who live in Canada or plan to study there.
Although both governments have spared business and trade links, the acrimony has delayed discussions on a free-trade deal and threatens G7 member Canada’s Indo-Pacific plans, where New Delhi is critical to efforts to check an increasingly assertive China.
On Sept. 18, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa was “actively pursuing credible allegations” linking Indian government agents to the June killing in a Vancouver suburb of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, who had advocated the fringe position seeking to carve an independent Sikh homeland of Khalistan out of India.
Canada expelled India’s intelligence chief in Ottawa. India quickly responded by halting 13 categories of visas for Canadians and cutting Canada’s diplomatic presence in India, a move Ottawa said contravened the Vienna Conventions.
Then on Oct. 25, New Delhi said it would resume issuing visas under four categories, a measure Indian officials said aims to help people of Indian origin travel to India during the wedding season beginning this month.
“This is not a thaw,” an Indian foreign ministry official said. “People can read whatever they want into it.”
Ottawa triggered the crisis and must take the first step towards climbing down from its position, another official said.
A senior Canadian government source said that while Ottawa’s ultimate goal was to return to where things were, unpredictability in coming months over the murder investigation and trial, as well as India’s elections, could interfere.
“This is a difficult moment, but Canada is not abandoning its Indo-Pacific strategy,” the source said.
Officials in India and Canada spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the subject.
The Indian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Canada’s foreign ministry pointed to comments made by Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Jolie on Monday last week.
“We have a long-term approach when it comes to India because this is a relationship that has spanned decades, and we all know that we have very strong people-to-people ties with the country,” Jolie said, adding that she continued to talk to her Indian counterpart.
Canada has the largest Sikh population outside Punjab, with 770,000 people reporting Sikhism as their religion in the 2021 census.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,