So our PM is on a state visit to India which is turning out to be quite the fiasco. India is a country we've been trying to negotiate a better trade agreement with for a long time now. This visit wasn't supposed to finalize that or anything it's more of a goodwill trip to try to smooth things over with India for the Liberals. Their government is pissed at ours because the Liberal Party has long been accused/understood to have deep ties with Khalistani Sikh separatists. Trudeau especially pissed off India last year when he went to a Khalistani rally.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/nation...ms-presence-at-khalsa-day/article18420866.ece
So it's understandable that they've been pretty frosty towards Justin. PM Modi didn't greet him getting off the plane, he sent a junior minister in chinos and a windbreaker. He got in on Saturday and Modi isn't meeting him until today, Friday. So instead it seems he's just on an expensive family vacation on our dime for 8 days, posing for pics with his family in a different outfit everywhere they go.
Apparently a lot of Indian people think that he's a bit much with all this, and quite a few media outlets from there are clowning on him. People here are dumping on him for stuff like hyping a 2-way investment deal with India they just signed as resulting in $1 billion coming into Canada (when it's actually $250 million into Canada and $750 million to India), bringing along a celebrity Indian-Canadian chef who also happens to be a prominent Liberal supporter again on our dime (the Liberals defended it by saying it's diplomatic tradition to bring top chefs from your country on state visits to cook for host officials....but an Indian chef to India? Really?), and mostly for the overall photo-op feel of the whole thing.
But now the Indian government is pretty pissed. His main job was to smooth things over and it looks like his team has totally shit the bed on that. They invited an Indian-Canadian guy named Jaspal Atwal to a formal dinner at the Canadian High Commission in Delhi - he's a former member of a Khalistani extremist group who was convicted of attempted murder 30 years ago for trying to kill an Indian politician who was visiting Canada. He also was charged in another attempted murder (of Ujjal Dosanjh, also a Liberal who went on to be the premier of BC) and was convicted of being part of a car insurance scam, all around great guy.
http://nationalpost.com/news/politi...ip-over-invitation-error-reports-of-modi-snub
So yea he didn't end up at this dinner, but he legit had an invitation from an MP plus he was at an event with a bunch of high-ranking Liberals a couple nights ago where he took pics with Mrs Trudeau plus a cabinet minister. He traveled on his own to India though, not exactly sure how they let him in the country with his record.
Like this government had 1 job here really and they fucked it up. Or did they? One wonders how far this government will go to hold on to the Sikh vote, and the Khalistani vote specifically as it's said that there a very healthy percentage of the Sikh diaspora here is sympathetic to that movement. Now that the leader of the NDP is a Sikh, who has been accused of being a Khalistan supporter himself, will the Liberals ethnic-bloc, identity-politic based way of doing business backfire on them? Maybe they wanted to prove that they're still down, at the expense of a relationship with India that they figured isn't really salvageable at this point anyway. CTs aside, you have to think that a major motivation of this trip was to campaign for Indian vote in the next election, which isn't very cool since this is costing a lot of OUR money. This PM is a constant source of embarrassment and his government seems to be out for themselves rather than the people they represent. Harper's government was full of shit, but they were right about one thing: he's just not ready.