PM's India Visit Goes Awry

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's eight-day trip to India has gone from bad to worse.

It got off to a bad start as soon as his family’s plane landed in Delhi. The Trudeau entourage was met, not by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but by a low-level politician.  Modi was also absent when Trudeau visited the Indian PM’s home state of Gujarat.

It then emerged that Jaspal Atwal, a man who had been a member of a Sikh terrorist group and convicted of attempting to murder an Indian cabinet minister, Malkiat Singh Sidhu, on Vancouver Island back in 1986, had been invited to a dinner reception at Canada’s High Commission. 

Randeep Sarai, a Liberal MP from the Vancouver-area riding of Surrey Centre, had submitted Atwal’s name. 

Soon enough, photos surfaced of Sophie Trudeau standing next to Atwal at an earlier event in Mumbai. These are not the type of photo-ops with which Trudeau wants to woo Canada’s large South Asian community in the 2019 election.

Sikh separatists remain determined to create an independent state of Khalistan in the Indian state of Punjab and Indian officials suspect that several members of Trudeau’s government are allied with the Sikh independence movement.

Years of violence in the Punjab had culminated in an attack in June 1984 by the Indian army on militants occupying the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar. Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, who had ordered the assault, was assassinated that October by her two Sikh bodyguards. 

Several days of mass violence followed, and at least 3,000 people were killed. Does Trudeau even know this history?

Ujjal Dosanjh, a former Liberal health minister, also accused the party of being too close to Sikh separatists. Atwal had also been charged, but not convicted, in connection with a violent 1985 attack on Dosanjh in Vancouver.

Trudeau and his family have been wearing traditional Indian outfits, including kurtas and saris, at various events.  Remarked one Indian politician, “We Indians don’t dress like that every day, sir, not even in Bollywood.” Another called it “too Indian even for an Indian.”

Apart from making the Trudeaus look silly – would Justin Trudeau wear a Chasidic outfit to Israel, or Sophie Trudeau a kimono in Japan?-- I would have thought our ever politically correct PM would know that, for many on the left, this amounts to “cultural appropriation.” It was jumping-the-shark territory.

Much of the international media began mocking Trudeau, one outlet calling the visit a “slow-motion train wreck.” Canadians may not realize what a laughingstock he is making of Canada.

Apart from all these snafus, Modi in any case makes a bad partner for Trudeau’s brand of liberal multiculturalist politics. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) espouses Hindutva, a term popularised by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, in 1923.

A religious form of Indian nationalism tinged with anti-Muslim rhetoric, it subscribes to the idea that Hinduism and Hindu traditions constitute the cultural and political identity of India.

So Modi’s party opposes the secularism of the Congress Party, for long the country’s rulers – and the party whose ideology is far more to Trudeau’s liking. 

One final bit of irony: Donald Trump Jr., the son of the U.S. president, has been visiting India at the same time as Trudeau, and, since Modi admires Donald Trump, the son has been getting a much warmer reception.

As Indian journalist Barkha Dutt wrote in a Feb. 23 article in the Washington Post, “Trudeau’s eight-day India expedition has been an absolute fiasco.”