After India, still more unforced errors By Trudeau
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau departed from India on Saturday, it was hardly possible to imagine that Canada’s standing in New Delhi could plummet any deeper into the abyss of humiliation than eight days of non-stop travelling gaucherie, diplomatic outrage and burlesque fiasco had already sunk it. But as things have turned out, the lurid spectacle has not yet come to anything like a merciful conclusion.
This is not going away any time soon.
It was bad enough that some “senior security official” in Trudeau’s government thought it would be clever to concoct and circulate a conspiracy theory to explain away the worst and most scandalous indiscretions committed by Trudeau and his entourage. The story he put about was that it wasn’t Team Trudeau’s fault at all, but rather a covert Indian intelligence operation of a possibly rogue nature that had somehow resulted in the procurement of invitations for the Humvee-driving convicted would-be assassin, Liberal party vote-farmer and former Khalistani terror-group hobbyist Jaspal Atwal to two of Trudeau’s public receptions in India.
Things got immeasurably worse when the author of this fanciful melodrama turned out to be no less a figure than Prime Minister Trudeau’s own hand-picked senior adviser on intelligence and national security, Daniel Jean. Even worse, and even after Surrey Liberal MP Randeep Sarai confessed that it was he whose profoundly poor judgment had opened the doors for Atwal, not Indian spies, and even after Trudeau had disciplined Sarai for it by securing his resignation as the Liberals’ Pacific caucus chair — well, it is almost impossible to believe what happened next.
On Tuesday, Trudeau got up in the House of Commons and responded to an Opposition question in such a way as to leave the unavoidable impression that he himself subscribed to the conspiracy theory that Daniel Jean had been circulating — the one involving elaborately covert black-ops shenanigans orchestrated somewhere down in the dark deep-state catacombs of India’s intelligence agencies. The one that fell apart even before Sarai’s admission, when it was determined that Jaspal Atwal was not suddenly lifted from India’s blacklist and quietly provided with travel documents last summer, as Jean had claimed, but had in fact travelled to India several times since serving a jail term for his part in the attempted assassination of Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986.
Here’s Trudeau on Tuesday, in response to a what-the-hell-just-happened question from Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer: “Our professional, non-partisan public service does high-quality work, and when one of our top diplomats and security officials says something to Canadians, it’s because they know it to be true.”
As if things weren’t weird enough all by themselves here, Trudeau’s statement directly and explicitly contradicted what his own spokesperson, Cameron Ahmad, said over the weekend — that the Prime Minister’s Office was definitely not trafficking in any of the Indian spy fantasies making the rounds.
Now, try to imagine just how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi must have reacted, after having given Trudeau a big bygones-be-bygones hug last Friday, upon being apprised on Wednesday morning of headlines across Canada such as these: “Trudeau stands by official who suggested Indian factions sabotaged trip” and “PM doesn’t refute ‘conspiracy theory’ that Indian government factions sabotaged his trip.”
Trudeau’s bizarre statement provoked an immediately terse rebuke from India’s External Affairs Ministry first thing Wednesday morning, in the form of a statement by ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar: “We have seen the recent exchange in the Parliament of Canada regarding two invitations issued to Jaspal Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner, for functions hosted in honour of the Canadian Prime Minister in India. Let me categorically state that the Government of India, including the security agencies, had nothing to do with the presence of Jaspal Atwal at the event hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner in Mumbai or the invitation issued to him for the Canadian High Commissioner’s reception in New Delhi. Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless and unacceptable.”
A brief digression: To appreciate just how disastrous all this has been, you’ll want to keep in mind that the only significant purpose of Trudeau’s trip to India in the first place was to cement a healthy working relationship between the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the two countries. The hope was that Team Trudeau would convince Modi and Amarinder Singh’s state government in Punjab that Canada is a country run by adults who take the threat of Khalistani terrorism seriously.
Anyway, here’s an awkward question about all this. When he introduced his hilariously reckless and immediately debunked rogue-spy theorem to reporters last week, was the soon-to-retire Daniel Jean, a career bureaucrat who came to his national security and intelligence post two years ago without any specific national security or intelligence entries in his curriculum vitae, simply following the colourful propaganda lead of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Sikh religious-political party based in Punjab? Or is SAD, as the notoriously excitable party is known, following Jean’s lead?
Whatever the case, by Monday of this week senior SAD official Manjit Singh, who presides over New Delhi’s Gurdwara Management Committee, was publicly accusing Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of conspiring with the opposition Congress Party to embarrass Trudeau during his travels in Mumbai, Agra, Delhi and Amritsar. As if Trudeau, who came off like some sort of human wardrobe malfunction for almost his entire sojourn on the subcontinent, wasn’t doing a sufficient job embarrassing the hell out of himself.
“Canadian PM was cold shouldered even as Canada has done nothing against India,” Manjit Singh complained. Paradoxically, SAD is part of the BJP’s ruling coalition. SAD has a habit of seeing conspiracies and shadowy hands behind things, but no conspiracy can account for an own-goal escapade so amazingly eventful in eruptions of gross incompetence, lousy manners, dumb-ass judgment and horrific optics that quite a few otherwise spectacularly boneheaded moves went almost entirely unnoticed.
For instance, it barely registered anywhere when Trudeau noted in a speech in New Delhi that Canada had just celebrated its 100th birthday — off by 50 years. Also mercifully overlooked last week: a map of India displayed at last Thursday night’s High Commission party in New Delhi omitted the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir — the shell-shocked, heavily militarized Muslim-majority Indian state that Pakistan claims as its own territory. Imagine the Indian High Commission in Ottawa throwing a party and showing off a huge map of Canada with Quebec missing, and you get the picture.
This whole thing has been an awful, trudging parade of error, idiocy and disgrace. And there is no end of it in sight.
This whole thing has been an awful, trudging parade of error, idiocy and disgrace.