India-Canada Patch Up? New PM Mark Carney Can Help Bury the 'Khalistan' Hatchet

With Trudeau gone, India is on the lookout for Canadian overtures to restore bilateral ties, writes Sumit Ganguly.

Mark Carney has assumed office at a particularly trying and fraught time in Canadian politics.

(Photo: Kamran Akhtar/The Quint)

Following a landslide victory in the recently held federal elections in Canada, Liberal Party candidate and so-called 'political novice' Mark Carney has replaced Justin Trudeau as the country's new prime minister. Since the Carney is not currently a Member of Parliament (MP), he will soon have to call national elections to secure a parliamentary seat.

A former banking executive at Goldman Sachs, Carney first served as the Governor of the Bank of Canada before serving as the first non-Briton to serve as the Governor of the Bank of England.

Carney was sworn in as prime minister of Canada on Friday, 14 March. His entry into the PM's Office comes at a particularly trying and fraught time in Canadian politics. The re-election of President Donald Trump in the United States has complicated Canada’s diplomatic as well as economic landscape. The coming months will also be crucial in determining whether Indo-Canadian relations can be salvaged.

Navigating Troubled Waters with US

Ahead of his re-election, Trump had argued on his campaign trail that Canada was not doing enough to stop the flow of a highly addictive synthetic drug, fentanyl, and was being lax on illegal immigration.

Since coming into power, the POTUS has been wreaking havoc on Canada’s economy through the abuse of tariffs. 

Former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, had tried to placate Trump but to little avail. He subsequently adopted a tougher stance toward the Trump administration’s policies. Carney, even before assuming office, has made it clear that he has no intentions of kowtowing to Trump and his vagaries. 

Fixing Relations with India

Apart from dealing with his very mercurial counterpart in the United States, Carney has other challenges that he will soon have to confront.

After decades of a mostly cordial relationship with India, dating back to the tenure of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, bilateral ties between the two countries have taken a particularly ugly and disturbing turn in recent years.

The issue that has roiled relations has to do with the presence of a small but vocal group of Sikh separatists in Canada.

The friction has historical roots and can be traced to the apparent unwillingness or inability of successive Canadian governments to vigorously prosecute the perpetrators of the bombing of an Air India flight in 1985. 'Emperor Kanishka', the Air India airliner, was on a routine flight from Montreal to London. The blast resulted in the deaths of all 329 passengers and crew.

The more recent tensions in Indo-Canadian relations, as is now well known, stem from an alleged plot that led to the successful killing of a Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver in British Columbia. PM Trudeau and members of his Cabinet had alleged that the officials within the Government of India had orchestrated this assassination. 

The government in New Delhi vehemently denied these charges. Ottawa nevertheless expelled India’s High Commissioner, claiming he was complicit in this plot. In turn, New Delhi resorted to retaliatory expulsions, leading to a drastic downward spiral in bilateral ties.  

News reports suggest that the Indian government is already considering restoring its High Commissioner to Canada, after Trudeau's exit. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service chief Daniel Roges is also scheduled to visit India next week for a meeting held by the National Security Council Secretariat. This will be the first such meeting after the heated war of words last October over the case.

Opportunity for Diplomatic Reconciliation

Will Carney now try to repair relations with New Delhi after he formally assumes office? Some remarks that he made while on the campaign trial suggests that he may be inclined to try and restore some comity to the relationship. 

There are a number of possible reasons for wanting to ameliorate this much-frayed relationship.

At the outset, as Carney had hinted in a public speech, Canada needs access to other markets given the trade impasse it finds itself locked in with the US. In 2022, India was Canada’s tenth-largest trading partner. If the diplomatic fracas that transpired under Trudeau can be set aside, India could again emerge as a significant market for Canadian goods and services.

Likewise, India (though to a far lesser degree) finds itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration over the issue of tariffs and may welcome a thaw in the cold Indo-Canadian relations.

Additionally, Carney, a political moderate, may be less beholden to the more radical members of the Sikh community in Canada. As he assembles a new Cabinet, he may not include individuals accused of harbouring Khalistani sympathies by multiple Indian politicians.

Furthermore, unlike his predecessor, Carney does not have any personal friction with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi places considerable stock in personal diplomacy. If Carney reaches out to him swiftly so, the two leaders could very possibly establish a new rapport and set aside the rancour that had come to characterise the relationship. 

New Delhi, especially under the present government, has highlighted its interest in pursuing a foreign policy based on multi-alignment rather than solely relying on traditional alliances. This approach suggests that New Delhi may be in a more receptive mood to any overtures to improve relations on Ottawa’s part. It will, without a doubt, watch for any tangible gestures that Carney makes toward India in the weeks and months ahead.  

(Sumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)