- Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The report said the Canadian government was tightlipped on the matter.
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar had a ‘secret’ meeting with his Canadian counterpart Melanie Joly in Washington during his recent visit to the US, the UK’s Financial Times has reported.
According to the news report, the foreign ministry of Canada refused to make a statement on it.
India and Canada are caught in a diplomatic spat ever since Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau accused the Narendra Modi government of being involved in the murder of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey in British Columbia in June.
India rejected the claim as “absurd” and “motivated” and besides suspending issuing visas to Canadian citizens, it also asked the Trudeau government to withdraw more than 40 Canadian diplomats stationed in India.
The deadline ended on Tuesday (10) and as per the FT report, Canadian diplomats remained in India even though an earlier report had said that Ottawa had sent many of its diplomats in India to either Malaysia or Singapore. The FT report said the Canadian and Indian governments were having talks about the future of the Canadian diplomats in the south Asian nation.
According to the FT report, “Canada and India are continuing talks about the fate of several dozen Canadian diplomats in New Delhi even as an Indian government deadline for Ottawa to slash its diplomatic presence elapsed on Tuesday.”
Last week, Trudeau and Joly said last week that their government was trying to privately resolve the stand-off with India. According to the Canadian diplomat, tensions between the two democracies underscored the “importance of having a strong diplomatic footprint in India”, the FT report added.
It then cited informed sources as saying that Joly had a ‘secret meeting’ with Jaishankar in Washington ‘several days earlier’ but the Canadian foreign ministry did not comment on the matter.
Jaishankar, during his visit to Washington last month, met US secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan and conceded that the Canada issue had come up on both occasions. The US, however, did not mention the Canada row in the read-out following Jaishankar’s meeting with Blinken.
