【Text by Chen Zhuo, Observer Group】

In recent years, India and Canada have seen frequent conflicts, and bilateral relations have recently shown signs of improvement: from October 12 to 14, Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand visited India for a three-day trip, during which both sides announced the "India-Canada Relationship Roadmap" and agreed to restart cooperation in multiple areas such as energy, technology, and artificial intelligence.

Two years ago, in June, Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead, and the former Trudeau government publicly accused Indian intelligence agencies of involvement, leading to mutual expulsion of diplomats and a severe deterioration of relations. Now, high-level exchanges between the two countries have resumed, moving from confrontation to dialogue. On the surface, it is a resumption of cooperation, but essentially, it reflects Canada's adjustment on the Sikh issue.

Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand met with Indian Prime Minister Modi. Source: Indian media

I. Domestic Politics Drive the Improvement of Relations

The recent improvement in India-Canada relations stems from a shift in Canada's domestic political focus - the emphasis on immigration has shifted from promoting diversity to focusing on control, prompting the Kanai government to actively ease relations with India.

During Trudeau's tenure, the Liberal Party (LPC) relied heavily on the support of South Asian voters, including Sikhs, for its election strategy. These communities are concentrated in competitive key constituencies, and their votes were crucial for maintaining the party's majority in parliament. In this context, Trudeau frequently showed favor to the Sikh community, even being humorously referred to as "Justin Singh" - "Singh" is a common religious surname among Sikh men, used to describe his overly close stance on Sikh issues.

For example, during Trudeau's 2018 visit to India, he deliberately visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab. This site is not only a holy place for Sikhs but also carries sensitive political memories from the 1984 "Operation Blue Star" crackdown on Sikh separatist armed forces, making its symbolic significance highly sensitive. His delegation even included Jaspal Atwal, a Sikh separatist involved in violence, which caused strong dissatisfaction from India. After that, on the "Khalistan" separatist issue, the Canadian government continued to take a defensive and symbolic hard stance under domestic public pressure, further pushing the relationship with India into confrontation.

During his 2018 visit to India, Trudeau deliberately visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab.

However, since 2025, concerns about Canada's ability to accommodate immigrants have rapidly intensified. Approximately 800,000 Sikhs, due to their strong community cohesion and high visibility, have become targets of some public criticism. Polls show that 58% of Canadians believe there are too many immigrants, the highest proportion in four decades. The public discourse has shifted from cultural identity to competition over public resources. Faced with this shift in public opinion, the Kanai government has made "immigration volume control" a key policy focus. In 2025, the federal immigration department not only set limits on student visas but also introduced a three-year target for a decrease in the number of temporary residents, marking a shift from an open and inclusive approach to practical management.

Under these circumstances, Canada's approach to handling India-related issues has become more pragmatic. In September 2025, Canada designated the Indian gang leader Lawrence Bishnoi group as a terrorist entity and froze its assets. This move was completed just before Anand's visit to India, seen as a signal of cooperation to India. Canada no longer places the Sikh issue under the spotlight of value-based diplomacy, but instead handles it within the framework of criminal justice and law enforcement.

Anand told The Times of India, "Sovereignty and rule of law are crucial for Canada's public security," emphasizing that she would take India's concerns into account. This indicates that the Kanai government is willing to separate the sensitive Sikh issue from the realm of political confrontation and build a procedural cooperation mechanism based on security and the rule of law. For Canada at this time, managing immigration and stabilizing society is more urgent than maintaining specific ethnic political narratives. It is this change in domestic logic that has created a decisive political space for the thawing of India-Canada relations.

II. External Pressure Accelerates Practical Cooperation

The internal political shift in Canada has laid the decisive foundation for improving relations with India, while external pressure from U.S. trade policies has further accelerated this reconciliation process.

After the Trump administration introduced the "reciprocal tariffs" policy, it imposed high tariffs on products such as steel, aluminum, automotive parts, and timber exported to the United States, exposing the huge risks of Canada's single economic structure heavily dependent on the U.S. market (accounting for nearly three-quarters of exports). Combined with Trump's remarks that "Canada should become the 51st state of the United States," Canada faced not only economic shocks but also real anxieties about sovereignty and strategic autonomy. In this context, the Kanai government emphasized "economic priority" in its foreign policy, urgently seeking new cooperation points to diversify risks. With its large market size and manufacturing upgrade needs, India became a potential "secondary partner" for Canada.

During Foreign Minister Anand's visit, both sides announced the resumption of ministerial-level energy and technology dialogue mechanisms and launched a new round of cooperation in key areas such as critical minerals, artificial intelligence, agricultural technology, and green hydrogen. These measures indicate that both sides are trying to rebuild trust through practical cooperation, starting with economic complementarity. For India, Canada's minerals and clean energy technologies align with its energy security and industrial upgrading needs; for Canada, India's manufacturing potential and market openness provide a buffer for supply chain diversification. Although these collaborations are still in the initial stages, they do provide a new support point for the rebalancing of bilateral relations.

It should be clarified that external pressure can explain why India and Canada chose to repair their relations "at this time," but it cannot answer why "they were able to" repair them. While the Trump administration's tariff policy indeed prompted both countries to seek relief quickly, the real reason that made the repair possible was the Kanai government's repositioning in the political sphere - being willing to make limited concessions on the Sikh issue, no longer using it as a symbol for domestic electoral mobilization, but instead addressing it through institutionalized means such as law enforcement, immigration control, and cross-border security cooperation. This approach makes the India-Canada relationship have the practical conditions for resuming.

III. Prospects for Cooperation Under a Fragile Balance

The specific cooperation arrangements achieved during Anand's visit have indeed brought bilateral interactions back to a practical track driven by specific issues, injecting substantial content into the restart of bilateral relations.

However, if these developments are seen as a sign that the relationship has been fully repaired, it is clearly premature.

The current improvement is more based on a short-term political atmosphere improvement rather than the true reconstruction of institutional trust. Recent polls in Canada show that more than half of the population still holds a negative view of India. At the same time, the judicial proceedings related to the Nijjar case are still ongoing, and its uncertainty continues to cause dissatisfaction from India. These factors together indicate that although the policy adjustments in Canada have removed the most direct diplomatic obstacles, they have not fundamentally eliminated the sensitivity of the Sikh issue in bilateral relations.

A deeper problem lies in the fundamental differences in perception of the Sikh separatist issue in the political contexts of the two countries. For Canada, this mainly involves the politics of the diaspora and the balance of domestic elections; but for India, it directly touches on the national sovereignty and the safety red line against secessionism. This discrepancy makes the Sikh issue highly unpredictable - it may escalate public sentiment and quickly develop into a diplomatic crisis due to sudden violent incidents, or it may intensify again due to changes in Canadian domestic politics, causing the bilateral relationship to fall back into confrontation.

Image of the Sikh separatist leader Nijjar who was shot dead in Canada. Source: social media

Under these circumstances, although India currently shows a willingness to explore cooperative paths with an open attitude, its strategic bottom line is very clear: any form of bilateral cooperation must not come at the cost of weakening India's continuous monitoring and institutional guarantees regarding core security concerns. From India's perspective, the current "de-politicization" approach taken by Canada on the Sikh issue is welcomed, but it is still in the stage of observation and verification. India is not only concerned about official verbal commitments but also about the consistency of Canada's actions - whether the actual regulation of related community activities, fund flows, and transnational security matters can be consistently implemented.

This fragility of mutual trust determines whether the current "thaw" state of India-Canada relations can last. In other words, the future temperature of India-Canada relations largely depends not on the quantity of cooperation projects, but on whether Canada can maintain sufficient stability and institutionalized control between community pressures and diplomatic risks. Although the Kanai government has allowed India to once again see the possibility of cooperation, both sides are aware that if another incident similar to the Nijjar case occurs, or if Canada's policies fluctuate, the existing political consensus could easily be broken, and the newly restored trust would quickly collapse, forcing the previous cooperative achievements to be suspended or reassessed.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the recent warming of India-Canada relations is a tactical thaw, not a strategic shift. It was driven by Canada's domestic political shift and was advanced due to external pressure from the U.S. However, the Sikh issue, which remains a complex problem combining internal sensitivity and diplomatic explosiveness, has not been fundamentally resolved.

Historical experience shows that practical cooperation lacking political mutual trust often has extremely fragile risk resistance. "Breaking the ice" has been taken one step forward, but beneath the ice, there are still turbulent undercurrents.

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