Trump Jr outshines Trudeau – that’s how bad India-Canada ties are
While US president’s son kept his mouth shut and stuck to business, Canadian PM turned himself into a joke who is either genuinely foolish or is cynically playing to his Sikh vote-bank in Canada
It simply hasn’t worked out that way.
The junior Trump stuck to business events and largely kept his mouth shut, Though there was one awkward moment when he said that people in India might be poor but they were happy. “They are happy because your dad is not their president”, the US TV talk show host Stephen Colbert responded.
The Trudeau visit, on the other hand, has been a fiasco. And the Canadian prime minister himself has been treated as a joke by Indians; as a man who is tone-deaf to cultural sensitivities and is either genuinely foolish or is cynically playing to his vote-bank in Canada where Sikhs of Indian origin are part of his base.
Some of Trudeau’s problems in India should have been anticipated. Many stem from the baggage of history and would have arisen no matter who the Canadian leader was. But so dazzling is Trudeau’s global image that it blinded many Indians to the reality of the India-Canada relationship.