Invite to Khalistani ultra spoils Trudeau show

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's tour to India got embroiled in yet another controversy after it was revealed that a convicted assassin was invited to a dinner hosted by Ottawa's envoy to New Delhi in honour of the visiting North American nation's leader.

After the furore in both New Delhi and Ottawa, Canada's High Commissioner to India, Nadir Patel, rescinded the invitation to Jaspal Atwal, who had been convicted of making an attempt to kill Punjab's former planning minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu during his visit to Vancouver Island in the North American country in 1986.

What also came up as an embarrassment for Trudeau are his wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau's and his minister Amarjeet Sohi's pictures with Atwal “ all shot during Canadian Prime Minister's visit to Mumbai on Tuesday. An old picture of Trudeau and Atwal also started doing the round in social media on Thursday.

"Obviously, we take this extremely seriously. He should never have received an invitation. As soon as we received the information we rescinded it, a Member of Parliament had included this individual," Trudeau told media-persons in New Delhi.

Atwal was not a member of the official entourage of  Trudeau, the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi clarified.  

Atwal's presence in India during Canadian PM's visit also put New Delhi at unease. The government on Thursday said that it was trying to find out how the former activist of now-outlawed International Sikh Youth Federation had managed to get a visa to visit India.

"On the visa part, I cannot immediately say how that happened. There are different ways of people coming into India. We are ascertaining details of our mission. We will have to see how this happened," Kumar told journalists in New Delhi. Sources in the government also said that Atwal no longer figured in the "black-list" maintained by the Ministry of Home Affairs to ensure immediate denial of visas to people involved with activities inimical to India. There was no restriction on issuing visas to him, sources in the MHA said.

Atwal and three other Khalistanis had been arrested by local police shortly after they had made an attempt to kill Sidhu on an isolated gravel road near Gold River on Vancouver Island on May 25, 1986. They had been convicted in February 1987 and sentenced to imprisonment for 20 years. Their cases had been overturned when a lawyer showed that the evidence against the four attackers had been obtained on a fraudulent warrant by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Sidhu had later been killed at Moga in Punjab in 1991.

Trudeau, his wife and three children commenced a week-long visit to India on February 17. They already visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar before reaching New Delhi on Wednesday. He and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold talks after the Canadian PM would be accorded a ceremonial welcome at the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan.

"I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries," Modi tweeted on Thursday. The tweet was apparently aimed at dispelling the perception that New Delhi cold-shouldered Canadian PM's visit due to Ottawa's lack of actions on New Delhi's repeated call to rein in anti-India radical Sikh activists in Canada.