India trip could have been salvaged with a few elephants

There were a number of firstclass opportunities missed on the Prime Minister’s costume tour of the great democratic state of India. The merest child, let alone the wizened sages of the PMO, could have told them that there should have been elephants, with Justin and Sophie doing yoga stands inside the howdah. How much more striking is a namaste from the back of a shrieking pachyderm.

Most likely his planners were just careless, or what is the same thing, not up on their Kipling, as they very well should be.

Well, he’s back in Canada now, but as with every good vacation, the memory lingers on. So much indeed, that in this week of Canada’s first full feminist budget (almost scoured clean, as Andrew Coyne has noted, of, well, economics) it was the trip not the budget that summoned the eyes and ears of every Canadian.

Now while debacle, mess, embarrassment, disgrace, waste, stupidity and gaucherie have earned their standing as descriptors of the eight-day folly, the term “odd” has not quite got the exercise it seriously deserves. Above all, the trip was just plain old-fashioned odd — odd, not as opposite to even, but as kissing cousin to weird.

It was very odd to send the leader of a mature nation state on such a so unfocused, evidently pointless mission; very odd too of the Prime Minister to reduce it to his and Sophie’s personal Bollywood dressup fantasy.

Oddest of all however, and by a long shot, was the mad coda to the pilgrimage. That’s when one Jaspal Atwal, who was accused (and acquitted) battering former B.C. premier Ujal Dosanj with an iron bar, and sent two bullets into the body of a visiting Indian cabinet minister, became officially intertwined with the tour. In the beginning that horror was blamed on the inattention of a backbench MP, Randeep Sarai. He was to be (the mind chills) “spoken to” after tour’s end.

Meantime, back in Ottawa a very senior intelligence official was being hauled out by the gurus of the PMO, to seed the national press with a ludicrous and insulting tale of “rogue factions” within the Modi government (perhaps intelligence operatives) working a conspiracy to undermine the Prime Minister’s grand tour.

Oddest (a) because as far as any undermining of the visit was required, the Prime Minister had achieved that to virtuoso effect all by himself. There really was no call for backup efforts. That well was dry, the shaft exhausted, the lake fished out. And (b) the only possible point of the ludicrous and slanderous claim was to nullify and cancel any possible — infinitesimally possible — good the trip may, accidentally, have achieved. Which indeed proved to be the case. India and Canada are less friendly now than before the grand hejira. It’ll be a cold day in Delhi before the Indian government shuts down the Taj Mahal for a Canadian dignitary again.

And then, pushing odd full into weird territory, was the Prime Minister’s upholding the fantasy in the House of Commons with his righteous declaration that when “our intelligence services” comment on public events ” it’s because they know it to be true.” Does the Prime Minister really, actually believe spies in the Indian government are out to get him, and have Atwal in their service? Does he believe that his visit was of such consequence to Indian politics that it stirred “rogue factions” to mess with it?

All this on the heels of Liberal backbencher Sarai having accepted the blame for the (ex, former, failed, repentant, retired, incompetent?) assassin’s presence on the tour, apologized for it, and having been demoted in caucus as a consequence.

These two tales do not correspond. It cannot be Randeep Sarai’s fault, and simultaneously the covert work of a nest of spies within the Indian civil service.

None of this looks good. The PM goes on a goodwill tour of India. The tour is a major flop. The PM blames India.

Now of course, the Indian government, being composed of adults, has utterly rejected the Pink Panther theory of Atwal the Assassin’s presence, without qualification calling it “baseless and unacceptable.” Back in Canada the government continues to back the travesty account, resulting in the grim spectacle of Ralph Goodale (who was quite coherent in a previous administration) reduced to gibbering non-sequiturs and patent nonsense to the press corps on Thursday afternoon. In that exchange Mr. Goodale had a choice to make between his dignity and sticking to the talking points. Alas, the talking points triumphed.

This is what happens, I suppose, when you skip elephants on the tour. The minor gods are angered and things turn odd.