Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Amid the month-long Canada-India row, and New Delhi packing off 41 Canadian diplomats in one go last week, the media reported on Monday that these envoys were “misusing their power and granting visas to Khalistan supporters.”
According to reports, the Canadian diplomats had gone “very soft” on visas to these people despite knowing their antecedents. Their visas were also being extended just to support the Khalistan cause so that this separatist movement could gain momentum.
Canadian diplomats were misusing their powers in different consulates across Chandigarh and other areas of Punjab to grant visas to people with known criminal antecedents, who were Khalistani supporters, top government sources told CNN-News18 amid the face-off between India and Canada over the killing of Khalistani leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June.
“The Canadian diplomats have done this deliberately and the idea was very clear — to give visas to take certain individuals out of India. Even people who were involved in cases were given visas and sent to Canada by these diplomats,” the sources said.
Canada also refused to help India with extradition in certain cases as well as investigations into those who took shelter in the North American country. India has evidence of Canada supporting farmers’ agitation in 2020-21 too. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had supported this agitation and had since been cold-shouldered by New Delhi.
Recently, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said India has evidence of the Canadian government’s interference in India’s affairs.
“There’s this whole issue of parity that the size of how many diplomats there are of one country versus how many diplomats there are of the other country. Parity is very much provided for by the Vienna Convention, which is the relevant international rule on this,” he was quoted as saying on the issue of diplomats being withdrawn.
“But in our case, we invoked parity because we had concerns about continuous interference in our affairs by Canadian personnel. We haven’t made much of that public. My sense is over a period of time more stuff will come out and people will understand why we had the kind of discomfort with many of them”, he added.
The tensions between India and Canada escalated after the Justin Trudeau government announced last week that it had called back 41 diplomats. The withdrawal came a day before the deadline set by India, failing which they were liable to lose their diplomatic immunity.
New Delhi had sought “parity” in the strength of Canada’s diplomatic presence by bringing down those stationed in the country from 62 to 21.
Trudeau claimed India’s actions were a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961.