Liberals under siege
Over PM’s India trip
The stunning oversight that allowed a man convicted of attempted murder to be invited to a party in New Delhi with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rocking Canada’s ties with India just as the government is trying to boost trade in Asia.
The fiasco has left relations between the two countries at an alltime low, said one former Liberal cabinet minister, while other observers call it proof the government must jettison the photo ops in traditional Indian clothing in favour of a more serious foreign policy stance.
Ujjal Dosanjh, a former Liberal health minister, ex-premier of British Columbia and one-time provincial attorney general, accused his old federal party of being too close to Sikh separatists even before Trudeau’s arrival Sunday in India.
However, inviting Jaspal Atwal, convicted of attempting to kill Indian cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986, to a reception was the last straw, Dosanjh suggested.
Everyone has an opinion on Trudeau’s trip to India. You can read those of Terry Glavin, John Ivison and Christie Blatchford in today’s paper. Also, see what we know about Atwal and what went wrong with the PM’s trip.
In defence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, nothing that has occurred during his state visit to India, at least so far, quite matches the scene U.S. president George H.W. Bush made at a formal dinner in Tokyo in 1992. Out of the blue, the president turned to Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, vomited all over him, and passed out in his chair.
Then there was the time Prince Philip, while attending a cultural display in Queensland, Australia, in 2002, turned to one of his Aboriginal hosts and asked: “Do you still throw spears at one another?”
During his various stops at folk dances and religious sites in India this week, Trudeau hasn’t said anything quite as questionable as that.
After the incident in Tokyo, the White House unconvincingly attributed the president’s predicament to a bout of the flu. Explaining Prince Philip’s remarks, Buckingham Palace said “They were lighthearted comments. There was no offence intended.”
The thankfully dead Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi used to cut quite a dash in his collection of outlandish admirals’ uniforms and silk-tassled robes and vestments, and it was his custom, whenever travelling abroad, to require that his hosts make such arrangements as would permit him to reassemble a gigantic Bedouin tent, in order to receive guests, dine and retire at the end of his busy day.
Trudeau has not done anything quite that weird.
But nobody seems quite sure why Trudeau is travelling around India with his wife and his children and an entourage of cabinet ministers and MPs and various officials and a celebrity chef from Vancouver.
It has struck the BBC’s Ayeshea Perera that the point of it “appears to be a series of photo ops cunningly designed to showcase his family’s elaborate traditional wardrobe.” There sure doesn’t seem to be much business to attend to. A half-day here, a meeting there, perhaps a whole day all told out of an eight-day state visit set aside for what you might call state business.
Straightaway, the tone was just weird.
There he was with his wife Sophie Grégoire and their children, Ella Grace, Xavier and Hadrien, at one mood-setting location after another, posing. And in elaborate costume. Different location shoot, a different costume. Oh look, here they are at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. And now they’re at the Mathura Wildlife Sanctuary, with the elephants Maya, Bijlee and Lakshmi!
The Taj Mahal, the Jama Masjid, and then Mumbai, with movie stars. Hey, who’s that posing for a photograph with Sophie Grégoire? Oh my goodness it’s convicted Khalistani would-be assassin Jaspal Singh Atwal, the triggerman in the attempted murder of Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on a back road on Vancouver Island in 1986, when Sidhu was in Canada to attend a nephew’s wedding.
And oh, look, there he is again, in another photo, posing with Edmonton MP and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi.
Crikey, this is awkward. Trudeau and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had just managed to finagle a meeting with the notoriously paranoid Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, a military man who had made a name for himself in Canada by accusing Canada’s Sikh MPs and cabinet ministers of Khalistani terrorist sympathies. The meeting had gone well. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Bygones, bygones. And then Atwal shows up.
The posed photos were one thing. But what do you know, in Atwal’s possession was an embossed invitation from the Canadian High Commission to attend a dinner with Trudeau and his ministers and all the other bigshots, in Delhi, on Thursday night. Great. Just great.
It is worth keeping in mind that Trudeau didn’t have much else to do in India that was more important than disabusing everyone of the misapprehension that Canada was becoming a safe haven for Khalistani whackjobs again. Trudeau’s one big job was to convince Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and everyone in between that Canada’s Liberal government was not backsliding to the ethnic-bloc politics of the 1980s.
Apart from posing for photos and sightseeing and attending a few meetings, the only thing Trudeau really needed to do was persuade India that despite appearances, Canada wasn’t returning to the days when Liberal politicians were happily oblivious to the theocratic-fascist Khalistani movement, which wants an independent Sikh homeland, had set itself up in Canada, with its dreams of carving out a Sikh state from the Indian portion of ancient Punjab, and its “government in exile” in Vancouver.
The Khalistanis went on to fund and arm mass terror in India. They seized the Golden Temple Complex, the holiest shrine in Sikhism, which paralyzed the Indian military, its generals afraid to move in. Then came Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the horrific ant- Sikh pogroms, and Canada’s own Talwinder Singh Parmar, commander of Babbar Khalsa, who masterminded the worst act of terrorism in North America preceding Sept. 11, 2001: the mass murder of 329 people aboard Air India flight 182 on June 23, 1985.
The Sikhs of Punjab, and just everybody else in India, are perfectly justified in fearing a return of the old days. There has been a revival of Khalistani terror in recent years, and a disaffection between Sikhs of the diaspora, especially Canada, and the Sikh leadership back in India.
Two years ago, the Khalsa Darbar gurdwara in Mississauga decided that the temple would be forthwith off-limits to Indian diplomats. The pretext was some row involving the visit of a diplomat accompanied by an RCMP security detail. The diplomat-barring quickly became a diplomat boycott involving 14 Sikh temples in Ontario. Within months, the boycott had spread to Sikh temples across the United States, Britain and Australia.
At the conclusion of his meeting with Trudeau and Sajjan, Chief Minister Singh gave them both a list of nine Canadians alleged to be involved in terrorist activities and “hate crimes” inspired by militant Khalistani politics.
The list almost certainly contains the same names that Indian officials had already passed on to the Canadian High Commission. The individuals, from Vancouver, Surrey, Brampton and Toronto, whose whereabouts are unknown, are alleged to be fundraisers and gunrunners for Khalistani terrorists. The men are associated with the Khalistan Zindabad Force, listed as a terrorist entity by the European Union, the Khalistan Liberation Force, a Pakistanbased group that has carried out a series of assassinations in Punjab over the past two years, and Babbar Khalsa International, listed as a terrorist entity in Canada.
As for the cock-up that put that eventually rescinded invitation in Atwal’s pocket — he says he’d gone to India on his own dime, for a Punjabi-language radio station in Surrey, B.C. — the job of taking the fall has gone to Randeep Sarai, Liberal MP for Surrey Centre.
“Let me be clear,” Sarai’s statement reads, “this person should never have been invited in the first place. I alone facilitated his request to attend this important event. I should have exercised better judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions. I apologize without reservation for my role in this situation, which has become an unfortunate distraction from the work, achievements and objectives of the prime minister and his team during this historic trip to India.”
As for what “the work, achievements and objectives” of this cavalcade of embarrassment might amount to, it would have been better, in hindsight, if Trudeau had gone to India alone, invited himself to dinner with Modi, and thrown up in his lap.