Instead, the meeting between Trudeau and Modi at the G20 summit in New Delhi recently, where the Nijjar killing was discussed, seems to have been a train wreck for the ages.
Trudeau said he brought the accusations to Modi “personally and directly”. The official Indian readout of the meeting, meanwhile, makes only one point, accusing Canada of supporting a “nexus” of religious militancy and “organised crime, drug syndicates and human trafficking”.
TRANSPARENCY AND PUBLIC COOPERATION
There’s a lot we still don’t know about this case. The official Indian view, that the Canadian establishment is riddled with sympathisers of the Sikh separatist movement who have allowed extreme viewpoints to colour a murder investigation, may turn out to have some merit in it.
What matters now is that the Canadians conduct an investigation that is as transparent as possible, and the Indian government cooperates as publicly as it can.
If there turns out to be sufficient evidence that this was a state-sponsored killing, we must then accept that there is a qualitative difference between this and past Indian policy on extremism abroad.
Sure, New Delhi is believed to have had militants in exile in Pakistan killed in the past. The larger diaspora has always been off limits, though, even when relations with the West were far worse than they are now.
When Modi runs for re-election next year, his supporters will no doubt point to this case as further evidence that he has changed India’s image in the world from that of a weak state to a strong one.
Yet, it is one thing to have the power to reach across continents and kill those you fear; it is another thing entirely to do it in a manner that insults your friends and the values they – and you, supposedly – cherish. To the rest of the world, India might end up looking a lot more like Rwanda or Russia than Israel or the United States.
Source: CNA
