PM’s trip to India creates embarrassment, shame
In defence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, nothing that has occurred during his state visit to India 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.
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.”
Straight away, the tone was just weird. There he was with his wife Sophie Gregoire and their children at one mood- setting location after another, posing in elaborate costume.
Hey, who’s that posing for a photograph with Gregoire? Oh my goodness, it’s Khalistani would- be assassin Jaspal Singh Atwal, convicted 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.
Oh, look, there he is again, in a photo with Canada’s Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi.
This is awkward. Trudeau and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had just managed to finagle a meeting with the Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, a military man who made a name for himself by accusing Canada’s Sikh MPs and cabinet ministers of Khalistani terrorist sympathies. Everything was going swimmingly. Then Atwal shows up.
The posed photos were one thing. But in Atwal’s possession was an embossed invitation from the Canadian High Commission to attend a dinner with Trudeau and his ministers in Delhi Thursday night. Great. Just great.
It is worth keeping in mind that Trudeau didn’t have much else to do that was more important than disabusing everyone of the notion that Canada was a safe haven for Khalistani whack jobs again, that Canada wasn’t returning to the days when Liberal politicians were oblivious to the theocratic- fascist Khalistani movement that wants an independent Sikh homeland and had set itself up in Canada with dreams of carving out a Sikh state from the Indian portion of Punjab and its “government in exile” in Vancouver.
The movement 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. Then came Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the horrific anti- Sikh pogroms, and Canada’s own Talwinder Singh Parmar, commander of Babbar Khalsa, who masterminded the mass murder of 329 people aboard Air India flight 182 on June 23, 1985.
As for the cock- up that put that eventually rescinded invitation in Atwal’s pocket, 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.”
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.