There is no definitive link to a foreign state,” was the conclusion drawn by a high-level Canadian Federal Commission, tasked to investigate the former Trudeau government’s allegation of Indian involvement in the killing of Khalistani sympathiser Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023. The commission’s report also said that while India may have spread disinformation about Trudeau’s charge, there was again no definitive evidence to that effect.
India, which had dismissed the charge as “absurd” and “motivated”, will feel vindicated and Ajay Bisaria, Former High Commissioner to Canada, told StratNewsGlobal, that India has neither the will nor the capacity to interfere in elections in distant lands like Canada.
“The genesis of the issue is that Canada set up a Foreign Interference Commission in about 2023, and that was done as a political response of the Trudeau government to allegations from the conservative opposition and others that the government was asleep at the wheel when China was interfering in two of its elections. These were serious allegations against the Chinese who did interfere, I believe, in those elections,” he said.
In his view, India-Canada issues will die down given that elections are due later this year, and the ruling party will be absorbed with getting a replacement in March. Bisaria suspects Donald Trump’s return to the White House is far more important for Canadians than for Indians.
As he pointed out, “If any country is seen to be interfering in Canada’s internal politics at this point, it is the United States of America, this southern neighbour, because it’s quite well known that Trump’s arrival in the White House accelerated Trudeau’s political demise.”
Canada has far bigger fish to fry – notably Trump’s threat of tariffs, economic uncertainty, immigration, and so on.
What about the India-Canada relationship? Bisaria says that even if the political relationship is currently damaged, given the size of the Indian diaspora, which has contributed to people-to-people ties and economic links ($9 billion bilateral trade), the strain in relations is eminently repairable. Even during the period of strained ties, trade and business continued as before.
With Trudeau out of the picture, the new leader in Ottawa may prefer to let bygones be bygones and rebuild the bilateral relationship with Delhi.
