The rift between India and Canada over the killing of Khalistani activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar has deepened into a first-rate diplomatic crisis with the ‘tit-for-tat’ expulsion of senior diplomats, including the heads of missions.

That this happened on a day when an Indian team of officials was heading to Washington for talks relating to the alleged plot to kill a US citizen in New York City may be a coincidence, but the coordinated moves by Canada and the US is an open secret.

Meanwhile, the broader question of alleged Indian interference in the internal affairs of the two North American countries is becoming the leitmotif. It hurts. A Reuters commentary hit the nail on the head: “For a developing country courting overseas investment, seeking to embed itself into the world’s supply chains, and encouraging its companies to go global, it is unhelpful, to say the least, to be dubbed by a rich country as the second-most significant “foreign interference” threat after China…

“Canada is home to some of the world’s big global investors, from Brookfield to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Their leaders, who between them manage some $1.7 trillion in assets may suddenly, for example, find it awkward to travel and negotiate deals in India if their government is effectively persona non grata in the emerging market.”

Puzzling out in what year this alleged shift in the Indian policies towards the North American region began, the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s narrative puts 2019-2020 as the timeline.

Indeed, 2020 happened to be a tumultuous year in Indian politics, when the farmers’ protests threatened to create an insurrectionary situation in Delhi that is commonly associated with ‘colour revolutions’. And the incontrovertible fact is that Trudeau government poured oil into the fire by empathising gratuitously with the agitating........

© Eurasia Review