Only friendly visitors are welcome
Updated On: 21 October, 2023 08:07 AM IST | Mumbai | Lindsay Pereira
It’s great that India has finally stopped tolerating foreign powers that question our government in any way
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau in September this year. Pic/PTI
By the time this column appears, India and Canada will probably resolve some of their many recent differences. That is conjecture, of course, because the situation may well get out of hand and deteriorate even further. I err on the side of optimism though, because I view the events of these past weeks as mere political theatre. It’s all a bit childish, this hurling of accusations and acts of retaliation involving asking diplomats to pack their bags. We’ve seen it before: one country pretending to rebuke another, and the other retaliating with some inane gesture to score brownie points with its own citizens. Everything will go back to normal soon enough because, no matter how bad something seems, capitalism will always trump patriotism every single time.
However, I believe the one good thing to come out of the whole fiasco was how India stopped issuing visas to Canadians for a few days. I could only imagine the outrage in Toronto and Vancouver, as the 10 or 20 Canadians desperate to visit New Delhi this month saw their lifelong dream crumble for no fault of their own. Every resident of the First World wants to visit the Third World at least once in their lives, to make them feel better about themselves, so this must have come as a shock. It was still a great political move though. If this sort of strong message is routinely sent by the government of India, I believe we will finally get to a stage where only foreigners who respect our country and its beliefs (with the exception of China, obviously) will be allowed to cross our borders.
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