Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, centre, with Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly, right, and Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc, takes part in a press conference about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's investigation into alleged violent criminal activity in Canada with connections to India, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Oct. 14.Blair Gable/Reuters
To dispense with the obvious: No, Monday’s extraordinary statement by the RCMP – that agents of the government of India, including the High Commissioner to Canada, have engaged in a far-reaching program of intimidation, extortion and murder of its opponents in this country – was not a ploy to distract attention from Justin Trudeau’s political troubles.
The Prime Minister may have been too willing to play politics with other cases of foreign interference; the RCMP may have been too cozy on occasion with prime ministers current and past; but that is a far cry from publicly accusing a major world power of murdering and terrorizing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil. The timing may be to the Prime Minister’s advantage, but whatever one thinks him capable of it defies belief that the RCMP Commissioner would play along.
To dispense with the somewhat less obvious: No, the government of Canada, presented with “clear and compelling” evidence that the government of India has been running what amounts to an organized crime operation out of the High Commission, was not obliged to keep quiet about it, for the sake of preserving “the relationship.”
The notion that this is just a “diplomatic spat,” or that Canada and not India is responsible for the “escalation of tensions” – as if the fault were not India’s, for having carried out this unprovoked attack on a supposed ally, but Canada’s for objecting – is one of the grimmer jokes to emerge from this affair.
Leave aside the question of what the Trudeau government should or should not have done in response. What “relationship” can there be with a government that murders our citizens? Those who counsel timidity in the name of pragmatism, keeping up appearances even as the hit squads are roaming about the countryside, are fooling themselves. If Canada cannot at the very least stand up and call this out we are only inviting more such contemptuous treatment.
Have governments in Canada been too slow to act against Sikh extremists? Have politicians of all parties, but especially Liberals, been too eager to court the votes of Sikh nationalists, sometimes seeming even to endorse the actions of Sikh terrorists, if only by their silence? Yes and yes. That does not begin to justify the actions of the Indian government.
Let us have no pretense, please, that there is still some question about its involvement. We are not in a court of law. No one’s liberty is at stake. And nothing in the behaviour of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi entitles it to the benefit of the doubt.
The government of Canada gave it every opportunity to participate in the investigation. It refused. The Modi government instead demanded that Canada present it with evidence of its agents’ complicity. It was presented with such evidence, and still refused. Are we then to suppose that the High Commissioner oversaw this scheme entirely on his own initiative, without his superiors at least knowing about it? Come on.
This is not, to say the least, the behaviour of an ally. Neither is it the behaviour of a democracy, in any meaningful sense. Part of what makes democratic government possible is respect for the rule of law: that is what ensures the government remains, in Churchill’s phrase, the servant of the people and not the master. The Modi government may still be constrained, just, by the institutions and procedures of Indian democracy. But its own actions, at home and abroad, reveal an alarming taste for autocracy, as this latest episode attests.
The geopolitical argument, then – that Canada, and the other democracies, should put up with the odd bit of state terrorism on India’s part in hopes of preserving it as a counterweight against China – is fraught, not only morally but strategically. Even if we were to pay the Modi government this sort of implicit ransom, it is far from clear it will win us any favours. Ultimately, India is on India’s side.
Sooner or later it will dawn on Canadians that we are living in a very dangerous world, for which we are distinctly ill-prepared. We have been sustained for too long in the illusion that we have no natural predators, neither enemies who wish us ill, nor bullies who don’t much care about us one way or the other but don’t mind pushing us about, either, in pursuit of their objectives.
How much current and past governments may have contributed to this is well worth investigating, as for example in the public inquiry now being led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue. What should be done about it now is equally worth debating. But the first step is simply opening our eyes.