Which India or Indias is Canada interacting with?
Standoff between the Beaver/Moose and Kamadhenu/sacred cow.
Recently, there has been a diplomatic spat between Canada and India mildly reminiscent of the Cold War. The expulsion of India's High Commissioner, Sanjay Kumar Verma from Canada along with 5 other officials was responded to with quasi-revenge expulsions of 6 Canadian diplomats including the High Commissioner, Stewart Ross Wheeler from India.
This originated from the murder of a prominent Canadian Sikh activist last year. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was assassinated by masked gunmen outside a Sikh temple in Vancouver. Shortly thereafter in the Canadian parliament, it was announced that there was credible evidence that the Indian government was connected to the murder. Nijjar had been designated to have been a terrorist because of his support for the Sikh homeland movement calling for Khalistan in Punjab state to be an independent nation. Nijjar had organized an informal referendum in Canada which would call for Khalistanic statehood. His guile at organizing this cost him his life.
In addition to this, it is worth digging into the nature of India from the beginning to the present day. What is the precise nature of the matrix of elements of Canada's current troublesome interlocutor?
In the beginning...
From the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, the path of the Indus River valley as well as all the way southeast thereof to the coast is what became India and the many nations of the subcontinent. These are the modern-day Republic of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.
The first major civilization dates from around 2500 BC. About a millennium later, various tribes from Afghanistan and Central Asia filtered into northwest India, establishing control which lead to the original inhabitants moving south. The relative newcomers expanded their area of control, establishing many kingdoms which amalgamated into several states. The Mauryan Empire was first pan-Indian empire, beginning to rule almost the entire subcontinent as of 322 BC. After its decline, there were a number of dynasties of varying sizes occasionally making India vulnerable to conquest from abroad, the earliest of which was the first Muslim Sultan of Delhi. A brief period of Indo-Greek rule preceded oligarchies and various dynasties which varied very little from each other even with the occasional battle against aggressive visitors, including the Turks.
Aside from court politics and occasional pitched battles, prehistory and early history gave rise to the development of aspects of culture. As is common worldwide, these became inground so that they now form the components of the Indian subcontinent. The interaction / interplay of India's diverse religious groups is a crucial aspect of India's identity. Many religions, but not every single one originates from India. Hinduism is a collection of doctrines, sects and ways of life which are followed by a majority of the population (precisely, 4/5 of India's population). The only state in which Hindus aren't a majority is Punjab. 60% of its population is Sikh, as well as Nijjar being born and grew up there. There are still Muslims in India, despite 10 million having emigrated to Pakistan during the partition. Christianity also exists in India as essentially the only imported faith.
One aspect of Indian culture that is at least 3,000 years old and still exists is the caste system. This is a form of social hierarchy that is passed down through families, strictly defining someone's profession as well as other aspects of life such as who one can marry. Generally designated by birth ("jati"), there are approximately 2,000 jatis with specific rules for proper behaviour such as kinship, occupation and diet. The other concept is social class ("varna"), which prescribes occupations in terms of social class such as scholars, rulers, farmers, and servants. Another group used to have the notorious title, untouchable. Theoretically excluded because an occupation and way of life brought them into contact with certain impurities. The term Dalit, meaning oppressed, is now in use instead as they tend to be landless and perform the dirtiest work. The continued use of such terms show that despite being officially illegal, it may still exist.
Communication is quite a mixed bag. The so-called "scheduled languages" are Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bodo, Manipuri, and Austroasiatic. The constitutionally designated official language is Hindi. English is also officially designated for government use as an "associate" language. English functioning as a lingua franca could be a hangover from a bygone era.
Along came the British...
One aspect that everyone is highly familiar with is the fact that India and much of the subcontinent used to be part of the former British empire. What later became known as the British Raj covered almost all of present-day Republic of India (except Goa and Pondicherry), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) and Myanmar (then known as Burma). 2 exceptions on the Indian subcontinent were Nepal and Bhutan who battled the British army successfully enough that they were recognized as independent states.
The British Raj is the artist formerly known as the British East India Company. Subjugation and annexation of territories growing spices, opium and cotton was supported by Indian nobles like bankers and merchants who were essential to developing and exploiting this part of the empire. Further expansion was motivated by threats like the Napoleonic wars, Russian expansion towards Afghanistan which was a century and a half before the USSR basically inspired the foundation of the Taliban. Thereby, many Hindu and Muslim rulers lost their territories brought about by the new concept which later became known as divide and rule, formally known as the "alliance system".
Furthermore, rules and regulations were passed by the British parliament, firmly stacking the legal deck in favour of the British East India Company. This enabled profiteering and exploitation, later formalized by the direct takeover of India by the British Crown in 1858 shortly after a failed rebellion. Queen Victoria was later also proclaimed to be the Empress of India. Princes and large land-holders who had not taken part in the rebellion were rewarded by being integrated into the British-Indian political system and not having their vast tracts of land expropriated by the Raj. The British were reluctant to change all or most social customs as they were too ingrained in the first place, and that making a profit was paramount to it by far as long as their Indian subjects weren't too troublesome.
Most raw materials extracted and processed in British India were exported, with many small farmers losing land, animals and equipment to money lenders. This mixture of practices caused the Great Famine of 1876-1878 during which about 10 million starved to death. In 1867, another part of the British empire gained autonomy when Canada was granted dominion status and established its own democratic constitution. However, in India there was still discriminatory behaviour including tight control of the domestic press partially instituted by new laws, along with exploitation through the use of Indian troops in imperial campaigns such as against Afghanistan 1878-1880.
A consequence of such British shenanigans was the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. The British had drained India of its wealth, made even more unjust by local taxes paying the exorbitant salaries of British civil servants in India. World War One had the Indian National Congress beginning to call for self-government for India, along with the emergence of a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1917. Him being the central figure in the Indian independence movement during the interwar period concurred with gradually inching towards it.
The quasi-beginning of it was the Government of India Act in 1935. All of the British provinces and princely states of British India established their own assemblies, and a central government was created. The future constitution of independent India was based on this Act. However, the electorate was divided into 19 religious and social categories, voters only voting in one's own category. Each category was also given separate representation in the Provincial Assemblies. Therefore, the Indian constitution was both partially plagiarized and divisive. The 1935 Act itself was designed with the purpose of cooling off nationalist sentiment, with mild autonomy under purview of the British government. The princely states did not implement it, remaining fully controlled by hereditary rules without a popular government.
The Indian National Congress, however, was secular and was very much against having any religious state. On numerous occasions while insisting on the natural unity of India, it blamed British divide and rule tactics for making Muslims perceive that they were alien from Hindus. It may not be because of this entirely, as demonstrated by their respective nature both then and now. Furthermore, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, then the governor general of Pakistan entirely rejected the concept of a united India. Such nationalism was artificial, wherein he firmly believed in the Two-Nation Theory. Both are supposedly two different civilizations based on conflicting ideas and conceptions. A single state for both would therefore be doomed to failure.
Amongst such infighting, the Indian National Congress started the "Quit India" movement, a campaign demanding withdrawal of the British from India accompanied by nationwide civil disobedience. It was met with mass arrests of all leaders of the Congress, tens of thousands imprisoned until 1945. With the British seemingly loosening their authoritarian grip, infighting extended beyond the realm of administration and diplomacy. Unity or partition was the main/only sticking point, culminating in Jinnah proclaiming Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 to highlight the demand for a Muslim homeland in British India. Hindu-Muslim riots started the next day in Calcutta, rapidly spreading to all of British India. Despite this, a Congress-led interim government was installed in September with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India's prime minister.
Nehru didn't last long as prime minister of a united India. The UK agreed to the partitioning of India, thereby establishing the modern state of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. The Republic of India is one day younger than Pakistan, declared independent from British colonialism the following day. One of the largest mass migrations ever took place during partition, between 14 and 18 million crossing the new border with Muslims moving to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs leaving. Much of this period has solumn unofficial title "trains of death" with tens of thousands of each side massacring each other for months.
With both theological enemies (wisely?) separated from each other and no longer being a colony of Great Britain, self-governing India was now free to begin become a modern developing state.
...& away went the British...
Since the previous occupants had left, it had been a mixed picture in a wide variety of contexts, both for the Republic of India and for the subcontinent as a whole. Despite 2 separate states existing, there have been battles between both, largely on the basis of opposing faiths. To this day, there is still tension between both Pakistan and India, as well as tensions within India itself. Besides the "trains of death", the caste system/culture persists in parts of India, despite it being made illegal in 1948 and enshrined in the Indian constitution in 1950. There are 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes, each related to a specific occupation. Beyond this remainder of ancient culture that really should have become obsolete, the Republic of India has retained the institutional arrangements of the Raj such as the civil service, universities and stock exchanges.
Formal borders and other United Nations niceties have been blatantly irrelevant to the former parts of British India such were and still are the theological stead-fastness that certain regions have always been theirs, and should remain so in perpetuity. Since 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three major wars and one undeclared war. This doesn't even include numerous armed skirmishes and standoffs, resulting in the India-Pakistan border being one of the most militarized international boundaries. Episode 1 was in the Kashmir Valley with Indian troops evicting invading tribes with winter initially making that grind to a halt. A UN resolution both requested a general Pakistani withdrawal from Kashmir then India to do likewise. The end result, if it can even be classified as such, was a ceasefire.
Episode 2 in 1965 was a major battle at West Pakistan, which also borders Afghanistan and Iran. It featured the largest tank battle since World War II. The USSR and the USA intervened, diplomatically, to negotiate a ceasefire which ended with the Tashkent Declaration. It turned out that this declaration matched the old expression of it merely being words on paper.
Since independence, Pakistan had essentially been a divided nation with India sitting in between them and effectively surrounding East Pakistan. India intervened in a Pakistani military operation committing genocide against the native Bengali population. India invading from 3 separate directions was Episode 3. This ended up destroying most of the Pakistani navy, along with 93,000 of their personnel surrendering. Afterwards, East Pakistan became the independent nation of Bangladesh.
Episode 3 and a half is also known as the Kargil War, once again set in Kashmir. During winter 1998 and 1999, the Pakistani army occupied posts a very high peaks in the Kargil sector that the Indian army has vacated. Having had the Pakistani army take advantage of their annual winter absence had the Indian forces severely pissed off, resulting in intense fighting ending with Pakistan eventually withdrawing.
China is India's other troublesome neighbor with whom there has been more than a single episode of bother, and also has the potential to remain disputed in perpetuity. This has its roots in 1959, when shortly after the Tibetan uprising the Dalai Lama crossed the border with India, which granted him asylum. The Tibetan government-in-exile is still based in Dharamshala, about which the Chinese Communist Party is probably still quietly pissed-off.
The original armed battle was the 1962 Sino-Indian War, an armed escalation of a long-standing border dispute when Chinese troops attacked Indian border posts in Ladakh in Kashmir. Even where there was full consensus regarding the border in the region of Sikkim, there was a brief border clash in 1967. Further south in 1987, there was another skirmish. Face-offs have taken place since 2000, most recently resulting in a shootout in Ladakh in June 2020. Potentially, this could have been reduced to mutual diplomatic ranting.
Even with such tension in its international relations, India itself was far from calm, domestically. After elections in 1977, the centre-right Sikh-centric party Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) came to power in Punjab state. In an Indian version of divide and rule, the Congress Party led by long-serving prime minister Indira Gandhi helped to boost the profile of an orthodox religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale on the political scene in Punjab. His own organization became embroiled in violence with another religious sect. When the owner of newspaper was killed as a side-effect thereof, Bhindranwale was arrested for it. He promptly disassociated himself from the Congress Party and joined SAD. The backfiring continued with him leading a campaign to implement the Anandpur Resolution, which demanded greater autonomy for the Sikh-majority state.
Government officials and police turned to repressing Sikhs for supporting the Anandpur Resolution. After a police Inspector had been shot dead while investigating a Golden Temple compound where Bhindranwale and some militants had their improvised headquarters, in June 1984, Ghandi ordered the Indian army to enter the compound and arrest Bhindranwale. The army stormed the compound using tanks in an assault named Operation Blue Star. In addition to many militants, innocent pilgrims were also killed. The death toll is anybody's guess, with Ghandi drawing widespread criticism, both domestically and internationally.
The most significant repercussion was for Ghandi herself, when 2 of her Sikh bodyguards shot her in the garden of the official prime minister's residence in New Delhi. She had been on her way to an interview with Peter Ustinov at the time. His character, Poirot, might have used his 'little grey cells' to ascertain that this could have been a form of revenge for Operation Blue Star. Regardless, when both surrendered instantly thereafter, only one of them went on trial with another, a conspirator, as the other was shot dead almost immediately.
Beyond riots and assassinations, there have been a few positive highlights to post-independence India. Something of a gradual boom in tourism has taken place, with numerous visitors curious enough to see the unique charms of India for themselves. The economic benefits for India are numerous. Growth of the service sector and foreign exchange revenue has created jobs and also brought a moderate amount of tourism-centered infrastructural development. It has also enabled funding to preserve and restore cultural monuments, putting India on the global map so that soft power and cultural diplomacy have become highly effective. Despite India's many issues on many fronts, there has been some renewal of cultural pride among Indian residents that having keen visitors from abroad have instilled.
Among the positive effects, there are also negative side-effects that tourism has everywhere, even though India has a few which are unique. The shortage of skilled personnel could be because many of India's best and brightest emigrate, given that there are many push factors which are also problematic for tourists such as crime, patchy infrastructure, and an absence of basic amenities entailing that much of India is somewhat unsanitary.
Aside from tourism being (mostly) positive, there is another post-independence development that is not only significant domestically, but is also a high-profile cultural export. Hindi cinema's first nickname was Bombay cinema, and it has long been best known a Bollywood. The period from the very beginning to the early 1960s is known as the Golden Age of Hindi cinema. This was when Bollywood began to have its most significant influence of shaping India's national identity, telling its own story beginning with the struggle for independence and what is an ongoing struggle mostly of truly achieving national integration, and also establishing a global presence.
Getting one's day in court is excruciatingly slow, with a few ending up being settled out of court (such as a remake of My Cousin Vinny). A few studios are now investing in complying with copyright law, securing rights in advance. Original content on a large scale could have been in decline since that Golden Age.
Hopefully, it is not symbolic of India and its economy as a whole, with growth appearing to be quite strong although it has been uneven with a sizeable proportion of the population remaining in poverty. Poverty in India's poorest states is triple that of the more advanced states, with that disparity still growing due to poor socio-economic development.
Trend since the dawn of the millennium: up, down, or sideways?
Hardeep Singh Nijjar wasn't the first assassination, even though his is the most recent extraterritorial and extrajudicial killing committed by individuals linked to the government of India. Ripudaman Singh Malik, a Sikh businessman, was shot dead in his car in Surrey, BC in July 2022. In 2005, he was found not-guilty of murder and conspiracy in a Canadian trial regarding the June 1985 bombing of an Air India flight which is Canada's worst ever air disaster.
Investigators blamed this bombing on Sikh separatists believed to have been seeking revenge for the Indian army storming the Golden Temple compound a year before which ended up with the assassination of prime minister Indira Ghandi. Malik himself used to be a supporter of the Khalistan separatist movement. 2 men recently pled guilty to second-degree murder for their role in killing Malik, which very well could have been similar to that of Nijjar, unofficial state-sponsored vigilante justice instituted by India.
Overwhelmingly concentrating on this has exacerbated the long-standing symptoms of the Republic of India having its priorities wrong. This has led to many of its neglected population wishing to emigrate. The tax regime, continuance of the caste system, lack of access to quality education, poverty, and lack of opportunity especially in research, science and technology are the main motivating factors. In terms of safety and crime, while Canada is ranked 12th in the 2022 Global Peace Index, India is a lowly 135th.
Despite efforts to improve it since independence, the caste system still exists. While negative discrimination on the basis of caste became (technically) illegal in 1948 and was made part of the Indian constitution in 1950, there remain 3,000 castes and social and economic equality is absent. Unfortunately (and shamefully), untouchability continues to be practiced in India.
The diplomatic poker game with Canada has been a convenient excuse for prime minister Narendra Modi and much of the apparatus of the Indian nation as a whole to shelve legitimate issues, perhaps on an indefinite basis. First of all came the need to react to having found out that the Canadian police now has a special unit investigating multiple cases of extortion, coercion and violence which includes murders linked to agents of the Indian government. The RCMP has alleged that Indian diplomats have used their positions to collect information on Canadians within the Khalistan movement in order to pass to criminal gangs to directly target specific individuals.
Resultantly, Indian staff and its High Commissioner were expelled from Canada on the grounds of the RCMP having clear and concrete evidence of them being persons of interest in the Nijjar case. Additionally, the RCMP investigation showed that connections with the government of India were involved in serious criminal activities, including over 10 threats to life especially for anyone involved in the pro-Khalistan movement.
Requesting the Indian government to support the ongoing investigation of the Nijjar case has fallen on deaf ears. Instead, the allegations of the Canadian foreign ministry and the RCMP have been greeted with furious blather. The claim that Canada had "not shared a shred of evidence" is preposterous given that it was handed to the Indian national security advisor at a low-key meeting in Singapore. That the RCMP investigation into Nijjar's killing is "a deliberate strategy of smearing India for political gains", and that the Canadian government has "consciously provided space to violent extremists to harass, threaten and intimidate Indian diplomats and community leaders in Canada" is a vain attempt to play victim while engaging in underhand deviousness.
Revenge expulsions of Canadian soon followed, in a more hardline approach that has changed to include forceful actions overseas to suppress perceived domestic threats. Whereas Canada views the Khalistan factor as activism and dissent protected by the principle of free speech, India views it as a domestic threat to the extent that it levels similar allegations against Canada that it has long been in the habit of levelling against Pakistan. There is broadly reflected sensationalist reporting in the Indian media, linking Khalistani activities to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.
Further implications are that this could have a negative impact on bilateral trade, and create immigration issues for Indian students in Canada. They are the largest proportion of Canada's international student population, with India's Hindi media baselessly provoking concerns of some kind of entry ban. This has been enabled by the decline of press freedom in India since Narendra Modi of the BJP, a far-right Hindu nationalist party, became prime minister. His ally Gautam Adani took over new channel NDTV in 2022, and the Upper House of parliament passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill last year. The government now has increased power to block access to information, compel journalists to reveal sources and engage in censorship. The population has far less access to neutral reporting, including about Canada-India relations, therefore the official title of this bill is completely irrelevant.
The "world's largest democracy" contains several TV channels that are now little else than government mouthpieces. There only saving grace is the YouTube channel Newslaundry which is satire of mainstream media, mocking the "stars" of Indian television which barely fits the category of 'journalism'. According to Reporters Without Borders and its press freedom index published this year, of the 180 nations considered, India ranks in 159th place (!).
Understandably, there are many push factors which motivate many Indians to study abroad, including/especially in Canada. Of all the international study permit holders in Canada, just under half of them are from India. A recent episode of admissions-related fraud has also featured one of them benefitting himself at the expense of others. An Indian immigration agent, Brijesh Mishra, cheated many Indian students by him producing fraudulent acceptance letters for Canadian colleges and universities that he provided to them in order to obtain study visas and permits.
Even the man himself gets strung along. The Russian bear praises Modi, especially at congresses of BRICS. As India is literally the largest purchaser of Russian crude, even Putin gives a smile that is as fake and plastic as Modi's whenever they meet.
BRICS is essentially Putin's method for circumventing those he despises (which is almost everyone) and establishing geopolitical control. Therefore, he plays his own game of divide and influence with his invasion of Ukraine's primary source of funds - $2.8 billion per month.
The nature of the "world's largest democracy" has become a mild plagiaristic form of Putin's Russia, despite never having deliberately copied it. Features such as centralization of executive power, intimidation of the media, and fully legal harassment of the opposition are combined with equating criticism with disloyalty to the nation. While key democratic institutions are still formally in place, practices that underpin democracy have deteriorated. While the legal right to dissent is also still formally in place, it being possible in a practical sense without harassment has almost entirely disappeared.
A key piece of legislation for the current behaviour of the Indian government and its classification of many opponents, especially Ripudaman Singh Malik and Hardeep Singh Nijjar is the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. It was amended/fine-tuned in 2019 to allow the government to designate individuals as terrorists without a specific link to a terrorist organization. Such a categorization cannot be challenged judicially. The law also specifies that it can be used to target individuals committing any act "likely to threaten" or "likely to strike terror in people." The state can and has intimidated opposition by broadly labelling criticism as contrary to the national interest, or "anti-national." The trial phase of this was against academics, with universities investigated followed by troublesome elements being disciplined or forced to resign due to their political views. This was quickly widened to encompass high-profile dissenters.
Autocratization of India is taking place, whereby Modi talks democratically while concurrently walking autocratically. Preserving a legal façade of democracy means that his most prominent political rivals have been disqualified from running in elections. Due to structural manipulation of the media, an ordinary citizen is unable to read critical appraisals of government policy or for free speech and assembly without recourse to the law, as it has already undergone tailor-designed surgery. Labelling, such as being "anti-national" or a terrorist is an excuse for both domestic repression as well as the extraterritorial and extrajudicial killings (etcetera) taking place in Canada.
Canada's troublesome interlocutor is no longer the world's largest democracy. This fake democracy, only outdone by Russia in that dastardly sphere, is now the India that Canada has to deal with, for better or worse.
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