Sikh separatism sinks Canada-India ties to lowest point in years

In this file photo, taken on September 10, 2023, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left) walks past Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as they take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at Raj Ghat, Mahatma Gandhi's cremation site, during the G20 Summit in New Delhi. (AP/File)
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Updated 20 September 2023
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Sikh separatism sinks Canada-India ties to lowest point in years

  • Two countries are swapping allegations, expelling each other's diplomats over killing of a Sikh separatist leader
  • New Delhi’s anxieties about Sikh separatist groups in Canada have long been a strain on its relations with Ottawa

NEW DELHI: Canada-India relations have sunk to their lowest point in years as the two countries are swapping accusations and expelling each other's diplomats over the killing of a Sikh separatist leader. Experts said it remains to be seen if it will create a lasting rift between the two U.S. allies, but it's nonetheless an awkward situation for western countries seeking woo New Delhi as a counterweight to China and win his cooperation on the Ukraine war.

Five years ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau captured headlines in India for enthusiastically embracing the country's culture during a weeklong trip with his family. He donned a series of colorful, glittering traditional Indian suits, visited monuments and even received Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature bear hug — a sign that their relationship was on the up.

Those days seemed gone for good when Trudeau said Monday that his government is investigating “credible allegations” that India may have been tied to the killing of a Canadian Sikh independence activist in British Columbia in June. India rejected that as “absurd” Tuesday and accused Canadian diplomats of interfering in “internal matters.”

New Delhi’s anxieties about Sikh separatist groups in Canada have long been a strain on the relationship, but the two have maintained strong defense and trade ties, and share strategic interests over China’s global ambitions.

Signs of a diplomatic rift emerged at the G20 Summit hosted by India earlier this month.

Trudeau skipped the official dinner hosted for the G20 leaders and local media reports said he was dealt a snub when he got a quick “pull aside” meeting with Modi, instead of a sit-down bilateral meeting.

Modi raised concerns that Canada's government was soft on Sikh separatists, according to an Indian statement released at the time. Trudeau's trip ended with even more awkwardness when his plane broke down, forcing him to stay in New Delhi for some 36 hours longer than planned.

On Monday, Trudeau revealed a likely reason for the chill, saying he confronted the Indian prime minister at the summit with Canada's suspicions about an assassination.

Canada has yet to provide evidence of Indian involvement in the slaying of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh leader who was killed by masked gunmen in Surrey, British Columbia.

India, though, has accused Canada for years of giving free rein to Sikh separatists, including Nijjar who was a leader in what remains of a once-strong movement to create an independent Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan.

While the active insurgency ended decades ago, the Modi government has warned that Sikh separatists were trying to stage a comeback and pressed countries like Canada, where Sikhs make up more than 2% of the population, to do more in stopping them.

In June, India summoned Canada's highest diplomat to complain about a parade float seen in a small Canadian town that commemorated the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the height of the Sikh insurgency. In late 2020, it did the same to complain after Trudeau made sympathetic comments about protests by farmers from Punjab, where Sikhs are a majority.

The issue never dominated ties between the two countries, but some experts say that could change.

“While both don’t want a rupture in relations, they’re going to have trouble finding offramps after events of the last few days,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

The tensions likely sparked Canada to recently halt talks with India on a new trade deal, a sign that “their relationship isn’t as resilient and foolproof as many would like it to be,” added Kugelman. The two countries are relatively minor trading partners, but proponents had argued that a trade deal could boost jobs and GDP for both.

The unsavory allegations could also hurt Modi's growing soft power in the west, Kugelman said, but values and morals don’t necessarily drive foreign relations.

“We’re not going to see the Western democracies try to remove India from their strategic calculus, especially in terms of countering China. The strategic convergences are too strong,” he added.

So far, allies like the United Kingdom and the United States have expressed concern about the killing, but have stopped short of commenting on India’s alleged role.

On Tuesday, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Canada’s allegations were “concerning,” and that Canberra was monitoring developments and had raised the issue with India.

Some Indian experts said Modi’s confrontational response to the allegations reflects a pattern of hyping separatist threats to consolidate its Hindu nationalist base.

“It is unprecedented, but not entirely unexpected, because of the way this government has held its foreign policy hostage to domestic politics,” said Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in India.

Modi has sought to cast India as a rising global power, adept at juggling ties with developing countries and Russia on one hand, and the West on the other.

Singh said the incident will “put India under pressure and it will have to devote a lot of energy to contain that fallout.”

A number of Indian news sites and TV channels ran headlines like: “India trashes Canada’s big charge” or referred to India’s “savage reply” to Canada. Social media users criticized Trudeau for not taking India’s separatism concerns seriously.

Some Indian commentators have also been skeptical over the allegations, saying Trudeau didn’t offer hard evidence and suggested he was trying to appeal to Sikh constituencies for political points.

But to many other Indians, especially students, Canada is more relevant as an attractive destination overseas. In 2022, the country had nearly 300,000 Indians students pursuing higher education.

Prabhjit Singh, a 21-year-old student in New Delhi, said he hoped the strained ties don’t affect the dreams and careers of young Indians like him. “Many people from India go to Canada for study and work — I also want to go there for a better future. I hope peace prevails between the two countries,” he said.


India says ‘open’ to return of undocumented immigrants in US

Updated 4 sec ago
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India says ‘open’ to return of undocumented immigrants in US

  • India was working with the Trump administration on the deportation of around 18,000 Indians
Washington: India is prepared to take back its citizens residing illegally in the United States, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said after meeting the top diplomat of President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Jaishankar’s remarks came after a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington on Tuesday a day after Trump’s inauguration.
Trump issued a raft of executive orders this week that aim to clamp down on illegal immigration and expedite his goal of deporting millions of immigrants.
Jaishankar said New Delhi was open to taking back undocumented Indians and was in the process of verifying those in the United States who could be deported to India.
“We want Indian talent and Indian skills to have the maximum opportunity at the global level. At the same time, we are also very firmly opposed to illegal mobility and illegal migration,” Jaishankar told a group of Indian reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
“So, with every country, and the US is no exception, we have always taken the view that if any of our citizens are here illegally, and if we are sure that they are our citizens, we have always been open to their legitimate return to India.”
Jaishankar was responding to a query on news reports that India was working with the Trump administration on the deportation of around 18,000 Indians who are either undocumented, or have overstayed their visas.
Rubio had “emphasized the Trump administration’s desire to work with India to advance economic ties and address concerns related to irregular migration,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a readout after Tuesday’s meeting.
India is the world’s fifth-largest economy and enjoys world-beating GDP growth, but hundreds of thousands of its citizens still leave the country each year seeking better opportunities abroad.
While its diaspora spans the globe, the United States remains the destination of choice.
The most recent US census showed its Indian-origin population had grown by 50 percent to 4.8 million in the decade to 2020, while more than a third of the nearly 1.3 million Indian students studying abroad in 2022 were in the United States.

As Trump declares ‘Gulf of America,’ US enters name wars

Updated 23 January 2025
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As Trump declares ‘Gulf of America,’ US enters name wars

  • “In claiming the right to force others to use the name of his choosing, Trump is asserting a sort of sovereignty over an international body of water,” Gerry Kearns, a professor of geography at Maynooth University in Ireland

WASHINGTON: For years, as disputes over names on the map riled up nationalist passions in several parts of the world, US policymakers have watched warily, trying to stay out or to quietly encourage peace.
Suddenly, the United States has gone from a reluctant arbiter to a nomenclature belligerent, as President Donald Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico will henceforth be called the “Gulf of America.”
In an executive order signed hours after he returned to the White House, Trump called the water body an “indelible part of America” critical to US oil production and fishing and “a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities.”
The term Gulf of America was soon used by the US Coast Guard in a press release on enforcing Trump’s new crackdown on migrants, as well as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, when discussing a winter storm.
Deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler said Trump’s declaration was “very silly” and would likely be ignored by maritime professionals.
A president has the authority to rename sites within the United States — as Trump also did.
“The Gulf of Mexico, however, is a body of water that borders several countries and includes pockets of high seas,” said Thaler, founder of Blackbeard Biologic Science and Environmental Advisers.
“There really isn’t any precedent for a US president renaming international geologic and oceanographic features. Any attempt to rename the entire Gulf of Mexico would be entirely symbolic,” he said.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has cheekily suggested calling the United States “Mexican America,” pointing to a map from well before Washington seized one-third of her country in 1848.
“For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said Tuesday.
The International Hydrographic Organization, set up a century ago, works to survey the world’s seas and oceans and is the closest to an authority on harmonizing names for international waters.
The United Nations also has an expert group on geographical names, which opens its next meeting on April 28.
Martin H. Levinson, president emeritus of the Institute of General Semantics, said it was unknown how much political capital Trump would invest in seeking name recognition by other countries.
“Does he really want to strong-arm them for something as minor as this?” Levinson asked.
“I think the political benefit is to the domestic audience that he’s playing to — saying we’re patriotic, this is our country, we’re not going to let the name be subsumed by other countries,” he said.
He doubted that other countries would change the name but said it was possible Google Earth — a more ready reference to laypeople — could list an alternative name, as it has in other disputes.

Among the most heated disputes, South Korea has long resented calling the body of water to its east the Sea of Japan and has advocated for it to be called the East Sea.
The United States, an ally of both countries, has kept Sea of Japan but Korean-Americans have pushed at the local level for school textbooks to say East Sea.
In the Middle East, Trump in his last term angered Iranians by publicly using the term Arabian Gulf for the oil-rich water body historically known as the Arabian Gulf but which Arab nationalists have sought to rename.
The United States has also advocated maintaining a 2018 deal where Greece agreed for its northern neighbor to change its name to North Macedonia from Macedonia, but Athens ulitmately rejected due to historical associations with Alexander the Great.
Gerry Kearns, a professor of geography at Maynooth University in Ireland, said that Trump’s move was part of the “geopolitics of spectacle” but also showed his ideological bent.
With Trump also threatening to take the Panama Canal and Greenland, Trump is seeking to project a new type of Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration by the United States that it would dominate the Western Hemisphere, Kearns said.
“Names work because they are shared; we know we are talking about the same thing,” he wrote in an essay.
“In claiming the right to force others to use the name of his choosing, Trump is asserting a sort of sovereignty over an international body of water.”
 


Trumps’ top diplomat Rubio affirms ‘ironclad’ US commitment to Philippines amid China threat

Updated 23 January 2025
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Trumps’ top diplomat Rubio affirms ‘ironclad’ US commitment to Philippines amid China threat

  • Marco Rubio discussed China's “dangerous and destabilizing actions in the South China Sea” in a call with his Philippine counterpart, says State Department spokeswoman

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday the United States under President Donald Trump remained committed to the Philippines’ defense, as tensions simmer with Beijing in the South China Sea.
In a call with his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo, Rubio “underscored the United States’ ironclad commitments to the Philippines under our Mutual Defense Treaty,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said.

The Philippines has been embroiled in wrangles at sea with China in the past two years and the two countries have faced off regularly around disputed features in the South China Sea that fall inside Manila’s exclusive economic zone.

China claims most of the strategic waterway despite an international tribunal ruling that its claim lacked any legal basis.

Rubio’s call followed his hosting of counterparts from Australia, India and Japan in the China-focused “Quad” forum on Tuesday, the day after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. The four recommitted to working together.
Quad members and the Philippines share concerns about China’s growing power and analysts said Tuesday’s meeting was designed to signal continuity in the Indo-Pacific and that countering Beijing will be a top priority for Trump.
In the call with Manalo, Rubio “underscored the United States’ ironclad commitments to the Philippines” under their Mutual Defense Treaty and discussed ways to advance security cooperation, expand economic ties and deepen regional cooperation, the statement said.
Just ahead of Trump’s swearing-in, the Philippines and the United States carried out their fifth set of joint maritime exercises in the South China Sea since launching the joint activities in 2023.
Security engagements between the allies have soared under Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who has pivoted closer to Washington and allowed the expansion of military bases that American forces can access, including facilities facing the Chinese-claimed but democratically-governed island of Taiwan.
Visiting the Philippines last week, Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya said a trilateral initiative to boost cooperation launched by Japan, the US and the Philippines at a summit last year would be strengthened when the new US administration took over in Washington.


New explosive wildfire erupts near Los Angeles

Updated 23 January 2025
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New explosive wildfire erupts near Los Angeles

  • Meteorologists say strong winds and low humidity create conditions ripe for rapid fire spread

CASTAIC, United States: A new wildfire erupted north of Los Angeles on Wednesday, exploding in size and sparking orders for tens of thousands of people to evacuate in a region already staggering from the effects of huge blazes.
Ferocious flames were devouring hillsides near Castaic Lake, spreading rapidly to cover more than 5,000 acres (2,000 hectares) in just a few hours.
The fire was being fanned by strong, dry Santa Ana winds that were racing through the area, pushing a vast pall of smoke and dangerous embers ahead of the flames.
Evacuations were ordered for 31,000 people around the lake, which sits around 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of Los Angeles, and close to the city of Santa Clarita.
“I’m just praying that our house doesn’t burn down,” one man told broadcaster KTLA as he packed his car.
The fire came with the greater Los Angeles area still suffering after two enormous fires that killed more than two dozen people and destroyed thousands of structures.
Robert Jensen, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, urged everyone in the impacted area of the new blaze — dubbed the Hughes Fire — to leave immediately.
“We’ve seen the devastation caused by people failing to follow those orders in the Palisades and Eaton fires,” he said.
“I don’t want to see that here in our community as well. If you’ve been issued an evacuation order, please get out.”
Television footage showed police driving around neighborhoods urging people to leave.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic was under an evacuation order, and around 500 inmates were being moved to a neighboring facility.
He told broadcaster KCAL9 that around 4,600 inmates being held at other jails in the area were sheltering in place, but buses were on hand in case conditions changed and they needed to be moved.
Melissa Camacho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, noted the rights group’s opposition to “the expansion of the jail system especially in dangerous fire zones,” adding that “we are gravely concerned for the safety of people incarcerated in those jails.”
California Highway Patrol said the fire was impacting traffic on the I5 freeway, with a section of the road — which runs the length of the US West Coast — shuttered.
Helicopters and planes were on the scene dropping water and retardant on the blaze.
That fleet included two Super Scoopers, enormous amphibious planes that can carry hundreds of gallons (liters) of water.
Crews from Los Angeles County Fire Department and Angeles National Forest were also attacking the blaze from the ground.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been the target of criticism by President Donald Trump over his handling of the Los Angeles fires, said he had ordered officials into action.
“State resources have been deployed to the Hughes Fire in the Angeles National Forest to assist in the federal response,” he said.
“We will continue to monitor the situation closely and provide the federal government with whatever it needs to extinguish this fire.”
It was not immediately clear what sparked the fire, but it occurred during red flag fire conditions — when meteorologists say strong winds and low humidity create conditions ripe for rapid fire spread.
Human activity, including the unchecked burning of fossil fuels, is changing Earth’s climate, increasing average global temperatures and altering weather patterns.
Even though January is the middle of the region’s rainy season, Southern California has not seen any significant precipitation in around eight months, leaving the countryside tinder dry.


Nearly 6 million Somalis need aid this year: UN

Updated 23 January 2025
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Nearly 6 million Somalis need aid this year: UN

  • Somalia is currently facing “widespread dry conditions following poor October to December rains,” says UN humanitarian agency OCHA said

UNITED NATIONS: Nearly six million people in Somalia, almost a third of the country’s population, need humanitarian aid this year, the United Nations said Wednesday as it launched a $1.43 billion funding appeal.
The Horn of Africa nation is one of the world’s poorest, enduring decades of civil war, a bloody insurgency by the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab, and frequent climate disasters.
“Somalia continues to face a complex, protracted humanitarian crisis,” a statement from the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said, citing a range of issues from conflict to “climate shocks.”

 

The country is currently facing “widespread dry conditions following poor October to December rains,” OCHA said.
The funding appeal launched Monday with the Somali government aims “to support some 4.6 million of the most vulnerable people in the country,” it added.