The heated diplomatic clash between India and Canada is drawing scrutiny and fueling spin elsewhere in Asia, with Chinese government mouthpieces seizing upon the issue.
In the week since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced “credible allegations” that Indian agents were involved in the shooting death of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia in June — a suggestion India called “absurd” — Chinese state media have covered the feud extensively.
Cankao Xiaoxi, an outlet under the state news agency Xinhua, has focused on reports that Canada based its accusation partly on intercepted Indian communications. Another Xinhua report highlighted the apparent role of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing pact between Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand, mocked by China in the past. Chinese commentaries have played up the perception of a rift in Western alliances that Beijing believes are designed to constrain its rise.
“The India-Canada diplomatic crisis undoubtedly highlights the fact that the U.S. alliance system is far from being monolithic,” academics Lan Jianxue and Lin Duo wrote for the Global Times on Sunday. “Members’ positions are unequal, and rights and obligations are unbalanced, leading to hidden agendas and making it challenging for the U.S. to ‘manage its little brothers.'”
India is a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with the U.S., Japan and Australia. President Joe Biden’s administration has made a point of pulling the world’s largest democracy closer, welcoming Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Washington earlier this year to firm up industrial cooperation in defense and technology.
Much of this appears aimed at checking China, a geopolitical rival for both the U.S. and India. This is seen as a major reason for the relatively subdued response by the U.S. and other allies to Canada’s allegation. In public, at least, they have largely limited themselves to voicing concern over Nijjar’s killing and urging a full investigation.
“The U.S. has been very careful not to be seen as criticizing Modi/India in general,” Willy Lam, a noted China watcher and senior fellow at Washington-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation, said in an email. “For Washington, India is too important a country to offend over this relatively minor issue (the Canadian-Indian spat).”
But the dispute has given critics of the West an opportunity to question democracies’ commitment to the human rights they regularly criticize China for failing to uphold.
An earlier story published by the Global Times cited Qian Feng, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute of Tsinghua University, as saying that in recent years the U.S. and its allies have been “waving the banner of common values of democracy and freedom, attempting to develop comprehensive cooperation with India in order to contain China.”
“They are willing to turn a blind eye to what they think are India’s human rights abuses and infringement on domestic ethnic minorities, which exposes the hypocrisy of the Western alliance with India based on their so-called common values,” the piece said.
State-backed Phoenix TV asked on its Weibo account whether the feud would “disrupt the Western camp’s plans to engage India and counterbalance China?”
“Regardless of how delicate the situation is, there is no doubt that the United States will always make choices that are most advantageous to itself,” it said.
Lam observed that the Chinese and Russian media are largely backing India’s “right to crush a separatist movement.”
They compare “Modi’s attitude toward the separatists to the Russian revanchist policies in Ukraine, and implicitly also China’s ‘right’ to keep the Uyghurs and Tibetans under tight control,” he said.
Likewise, Chinese social media has been lighting up with comments on nationalist accounts with millions of followers, many of them cheering a politician from the opposition Indian National Congress party who called Canada a “puppet” of the U.S.
Some Chinese nationalists refer to Trudeau as “small potato,” since his name sounds like tudou, the Chinese word for the tuber.
A banner with the image of Hardeep Singh Nijjar is seen at the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple, site of his June 2023 killing, in Surrey, in western Canada, on Sept. 20. He had been a vocal proponent of Sikh separatism in India. © Reuters
Meanwhile, countries besides China have also weighed in, looking at the conflict through their own geopolitical lenses.
Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Ali Sabry told Indian media outlet ANI this week that “terrorists have found safe haven in Canada.” New Delhi had declared Nijjar a “designated terrorist” before his death.
The Sri Lankan government, which has relied heavily on Indian support amid an economic crisis, had its own spat with Canada this year over Trudeau’s statements remembering anti-Tamil violence on the island in 1983. Trudeau referred to the bloodshed, which left anywhere from hundreds to several thousand dead, as a “genocide.”
“The Canadian prime minister has this way of just coming out with some outrageous allegations without any supporting proof,” Sabry told ANI. “The same thing they did for Sri Lanka — a terrible, total lie about saying that Sri Lanka had a genocide. Everybody knows there was no genocide in our country.”
Canada has not revealed what evidence it holds in the Nijjar case.
Not everyone has taken India’s side. Soon after the spat erupted, a spokesperson for archrival Pakistan’s foreign ministry said that the case “has shown that India’s network of extraterritorial killings has now gone global,” adding that it “calls into question India’s reliability as a credible partner and its claims for enhanced global responsibilities.”
Many other countries have kept quiet, perhaps hoping the dispute will blow over, or at least waiting to see how it develops.
“Right now, other states are not really party to the dispute and are unlikely to be unless there is more direct evidence made publicly available and they have equities in the dispute,” Chong Ja Ian, associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, told Nikkei Asia.
Source: Nikkei Asia
