New Delhi: The office of Canada’s opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has cancelled a Diwali celebration scheduled to take place at Parliament Hill amid the ongoing diplomatic standoff with India.
No explanation was given to the event’s organisers—the Overseas Friends of India Canada (OFIC)—regarding the cancellation of the celebration, which was to be hosted by Conservative Member of Parliament Todd Doherty.
The event was to be held on 30 October.
“Deepak Obhrai, the former Conservative Member of Parliament started hosting a Diwali celebration on Parliament Hill and this has continued for 23 years. After his death (in 2019) other MP’s stepped in and continued the tradition, with Todd Doherty being the most recent host. However, this year the office of the Leader of the Opposition called them and told them to cancel it,” OFIC president Shiv Bhasker told ThePrint Tuesday.
Bhasker added: “The event is non-partisan and held at the Sir John A. McDonald Building, with members from different parties in attendance. It was a private event and not a government sanctioned one.”
The event, which has seen a number of political leaders in the past attend, this year saw the “sudden withdrawal” of a number of leaders, which has left the community “feeling betrayed and unjustly singled out,” wrote Bhasker in a letter to Poilievre Tuesday, which ThePrint has seen.
The OFIC president has also sought an apology from Poilievre for this “insensitive and discriminatory act”, pointing out that the issues between New Delhi and Ottawa “while deeply concerning, should never have resulted in the unfair treatment of Canadians of Indian descent,” who have had no connection with the government of India.
In the Diwali celebrations hosted in November 2023, Poilievre and the then High Commissioner of India to Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma were among those who attended and addressed the gathering. Around 540 guests had attended the event, which was the twenty-third celebration of Diwali at Parliament Hill.
This celebration last year was held almost six weeks after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first raised his “credible allegations” of officials from the government of India of having links with the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was designated as a terrorist by New Delhi.
Nijjar was killed outside a gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia on 18 June 2023. Despite the diplomatic tiff last year, the celebration of Diwali continued. However, in recent weeks the standoff escalated, when the Canadian government requested New Delhi waive diplomatic immunity of six Indian diplomats in the country.
India chose to withdraw the six diplomats, including Verma who was deemed as a “person of interest” in the investigations into the killing of Nijjar. New Delhi also expelled six Canadian diplomats, including acting high commissioner Stewart Wheeler and deputy high commissioner Patrick Hebert.
As the row escalated, New Delhi stated that not a “shred of credible evidence” has been shared by the authorities in Ottawa till date, to open its own investigations. In comparison, New Delhi announced a high-level inquiry into the evidence shared by the US in a similar case—the foiled plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, another Indian designated terrorist, in New York City last year.
“This is not just about a cancelled Diwali event or an event where the politicians renege on their commitment to attend; it is about a much deeper and insidious problem. Racism and discrimination are thriving in Canada and this latest development has laid bare the systemic biases that still exist,” Bhasker wrote to Poilievre.
The letter declares that Canadians of Indian descent are citizens of the country, and that somehow are “less Canadian” because of their “ancestral ties to India”.
Chandra Arya, the Liberal Member of Parliament, who had addressed the Diwali celebrations in 2023, recently criticised the political patronage given by Canadian leaders to Sikh separatists. Both Trudeau and Poilievre attended an event celebrating Khalsa Day in April in Toronto, where they gave speeches amidst shouts of ‘Khalistan Zindabad’.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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