Everyone is angry.
India is, rightly, angry with Canada for not recognising the trauma that proKhalistan terrorists caused both to the Indian State and Indian society over the decades.
India is perplexed that Canada is willing to forget even the worst airline hijacking in its history, by pro-Khalistan separatists, where Canada’s own citizens were killed. India is furious that Canada has not just turned a blind eye to those who harbour a separatist agenda against Indian unity, but even legitimised those willing to engage in violence against the Indian State and Indian citizens.
India is angry that Canada has not just encouraged these activities, many of which border on crime under Canadian law itself, but instead accused India of engaging in killings on foreign soil. India is angry that Ottawa pulled in even senior diplomats, including the Indian high commissioner, into this vortex of allegations and sought a waiver of immunity to act against them, an unacceptable ask that no State, let alone one with India’s history, self-identity and power, will tolerate.
India is angry that just like the West had refused to heed Delhi’s early warnings on the threat posed by Islamist terror and China’s rise till the world learnt lessons the hard way, Ottawa is ignoring Delhi’s advice on the perils of its permissive attitude towards organised crime. And India is angry that Canadian politicians, purely because of narrow electoral purposes, have decided to totally undermine a valuable strategic relationship and discredit India in the wider West.
Canada is angry because it believes that Indian officials were involved in the surveillance of Canadian citizens and engaged in influencing its domestic politics. Canada is angry because it believes that India used this surveillance to then subcontract killings to organised criminal gangs. It is furious that India’s target was not just Hardeep Singh Nijjar, but also other Sikhs who were Canadian nationals with their own political views that India did not like and that India’s aggressive actions persisted and intensified over the past year.
Canada’s current political establishment is angry that Delhi has chosen to mock and dismiss Ottawa’s allegations and attribute them solely to domestic Canadian politics. Canada is angry that instead of showing remorse, India has doubled down and cast Canada as an active backer of terror, a banana republic of sorts that allows gangs to thrive just because one party and one leader is today hostage to a minority vote bank. Canada is furious that India cannot see that Ottawa’s actions do not stem from any conspiracy, but from a political culture that values the rule of law and, just like India, from the idea of post-colonial Statehood that values sovereignty.
America’s department of justice and intelligence community is angry that India, in its assessment, dared to attempt an assassination on American soil, the land of the most powerful country of the world, against an American citizen. America’s political representatives are angry that India, or select Indian officials, attempted to do this even as they have spent the past two decades celebrating the India-US relationship.
America’s wider civil society is angry because it believes that Indian external actions are in line with what they see as an internal turn towards authoritarianism. And America’s national security leadership is perplexed that someone in India attempted to do this at the same time as Washington DC was laying the red carpet for the Indian Prime Minister and opening its strategic and business doors. And all of America’s various political, institutional and strategic communities are angry that India thought it could get away with it, for which the only answer now is accountability.
Back home, Indian nationalists, especially on the Right, are angry that the West is making what they think is a mountain out of a molehill. Indian nationalists are furious that the world is once again discounting Indian security interests, that the world remains ignorant of what happened in Punjab in the 1980s, that the western media is projecting pro-Khalistan terrorists as innocent activists, and that India is having to pay a price just because it was willing to assert and act in a manner that all great powers, including the West and its allies, have always done.
There is only so much anger that geopolitics can absorb, that relationships can take, and that political systems can manage. When it crosses the threshold, it results in actions that defy rationality.
India’s fury, propelled by hubris, resulted in overreach, even if by a few.
Canada’s fury resulted in first neglecting the problem that was striking at the roots of its own society, then the blurring of lines between legitimate political expression and illegal violent action that threatened a friendly country’s interests, and now diplomatic excess that doesn’t deal with either the roots or the symptom of the issue but is catered for performative political outrage with an eye on elections.
At its worst, American fury and the Indian nationalist fury have resulted in demands of retribution and sanctions in Washington and defiance and anger in Delhi, with both using the incident to sow suspicions about each other’s intent.
At their best, though, American and Indian national security managers have channelled the fury into a sensible, systematic and discreet investigative process based on a degree of mutual cooperation. Both seek to fix a degree of accountability for the past but also focus on a forward-looking agenda. India is alerting American authorities to its vast and complex internal security concerns that now have an extra-territorial dimension due to the diaspora. America is alerting Indian authorities to the need for more careful political management and accountability of intelligence agencies, a need that will only grow as Delhi’s power and interests grow. And this, as HT reported on Tuesday, has resulted in cooperative action to address the allegations at hand. This story isn’t over and will continue to require statesmanship. But the DC-Delhi model of anger management may be the way out.
The views expressed are personal
