Indians will never forgive Trudeau. Or forget

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau | File Photo | Reuters

By the time he was forced to resign as Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau was not a popular leader. So, few tears were shed for him in his own country. None of the commentaries I read in the North American press said that his departure was a loss for Canada. Most of the articles tried instead to answer the key question: how did Trudeau, elected with so much hope, screw up so badly?

As Canada examines the fall of its prime minister, there is one country where there are neither measured assessments nor any attempts at analysis. There is just celebration and relief. Good riddance is the prevailing emotion.

That country is, of course, India.

Why India resents Trudeau

Even in the moment of Justin Trudeau’s greatest humiliation, nobody here has any sympathy for him. Instead, the news of his departure has been greeted with joy, triumph and even a bitter sense of vindication.

Why do Indians hate Trudeau so much?

It is simple: he interfered in our internal affairs. He supported those who would break up our country. That is something India will never forgive. We have turned against American presidents, global statesmen, so-called freedom fighters and one-time friends whenever we have believed that they have acted against our integrity.

Some Canadians claim that Indians began to loathe Trudeau only after his government accused Indian agents of assassinating a Khalistani on Canadian soil. But we hated him long before things got to that stage.

In 2018, Trudeau made a disastrous visit to India. Ostensibly, he was here to meet with Indian leaders but it rapidly became clear that the visit was aimed at boosting his credentials with Khalistanis who supported his government in Canada. He was accompanied by Canadian Sikhs who were clearly hostile to India. In 2017, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh had refused to meet Canada’s then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan during his India trip, calling him a “Khalistani sympathiser”.

The visit was a fiasco, but it did nothing to make Trudeau moderate his stand. It was obvious that Indians hated him. But he really didn’t care. He didn’t need us. He needed the support of Khalistanis in Canada.

When Trudeau accused India of being involved in the killing of a Canadian Khalistani, we regarded the allegations as par for the course, especially as Canada provided no evidence. We recognised that Trudeau was appealing to the prejudices and beliefs of his Canadian Khalistani supporters.

I don’t think any sensible person considers it impossible that Indian agents had been active on foreign soil. When the Americans made similar allegations, we took them seriously and took action. The United States provided evidence, and seemed to be acting out of a genuine concern for law and order. No Indian hated Joe Biden because the US made those charges.

But Trudeau was different. We suspected that he saw the incident as yet another way to target India and to please his Khalistani supporters. In the US, it was officials who explained the charges. In Canada, it was politicians including Trudeau’s ministers who briefed the press.

We don’t forgive or forget

Foreigners often fail to appreciate how sensitive India can be when our territorial or internal integrity is threatened. We have suffered through the secessionist Khalistan movement in the 1980s, and will never forget the murders and terrorism that characterised that period. And we will never forgive anyone who supports the overseas Khalistanis who want to revive that movement.

Either Trudeau didn’t get that or he didn’t give a damn.

We felt the same way in 1971, when the US supported Pakistan during the Bangladesh War. India had been dragged into the conflict because Pakistan had launched a reign of terror in what was then its eastern wing and over 90 lakh refugees had fled to India.

It was not a war India wanted. And we asked the world to recognise that what was happening in East Pakistan was genocide. Some countries agreed with us but the West would not get involved till the US did.

But the Americans had their own agenda. Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon‘s national security advisor, was in the midst of making a secret deal with China. The Pakistanis were the go-betweens. The China initiative was far more important to Washington than the millions of refugees and lakhs of people who had been brutally murdered by the Pakistan Army.

America backed Pakistan, warned New Delhi of the consequences of engaging in any conflict and eventually even sent the Seventh Fleet to intimidate India.

It didn’t work because Indira Gandhi refused to be intimidated. It was later revealed that the foul-mouthed Nixon used to refer to her as “that bitch”.

Mrs Gandhi launched the military operation that defeated Pakistan, liberated Bangladesh and ended the genocide. Through it all, Kissinger and Nixon were happy to let more Bangladeshi blood flow and kept trying to get India to pull its army back.

Indians never ever forgave Nixon who was, in any case, driven from the Oval Office in 1974. And we never respected Kissinger, a brilliant but deeply cynical man. They had committed the one sin that Indians will never forget: they had worked against the security interests of the Indian state only to suit their own agendas. At a time of national crisis, they had sought to weaken us.

Even our friends forget that you can’t question the territorial integrity of India. For years, we supported the Palestinian cause. Now we are much more ambivalent. Much of this is because Arab militant organisations, including those that claim to speak for the Palestinians, make bogus parallels with Kashmir. You can’t really question the status of Kashmir and list it among the places to be ‘liberated’ and still expect India to support you.

Another old friend who became an enemy of India was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader, V Prabhakaran. When the Tamil insurgency began in Sri Lanka, India supported it. Indira Gandhi even offered the LTTE military training. We believed, with some justification, that the Tamils had a genuine grievance. And because of a shared ethnicity, many Indians felt deeply about the mistreatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

India tried to negotiate a peace agreement but Prabhakaran broke the terms and his men went to war with the Indian peacekeepers. In 1991, when it seemed possible that Rajiv Gandhi would return to power, an LTTE hit team was sent to assassinate him in a suicide bombing.

After that, no matter how bad we felt about the Tamils, very few Indians had any sympathy for the LTTE. I remember going to Sri Lanka and being told by local Tamils there that India had deserted them. My answer was, I imagine, the same as the response of millions of other Indians: “Well what did you expect? Did you really think that you could come and assassinate our leaders and still expect us to support you?”

Eventually, the Sri Lankan Army polished off the LTTE and killed Prabhakaran. Outside of Tamil Nadu, where the Tamil insurgency still had some support, no Indian really gave a damn. Many thought it was about time. As far as we were concerned, Prabhakaran had crossed the line.

It’s a lesson that Justin Trudeau never learned. India is a very diverse country with a multiplicity of views and opinions. There is very little that all of us agree on. But one universal truth prevails: if you attack the integrity of India and its leaders, support secession, or weaken us when we are fighting a just war, India will never forgive you.

There are countries that we have foreign policy differences with. For instance, much of the West opposes our policy in Ukraine. We respect their position. And the American allegations about a planned hit on their soil have, as we have seen, also been taken seriously.

We respect all legitimate concerns and differences of opinion. But attack the integrity and unity of India and we will unite as a nation to repel that attack.

We will never forget. Or forgive.

Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)