The Duran Podcast - Trudeau's Skripal moment, ruins relations with India

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

Trudeau's Skripal moment, ruins relations with India

All right, Alexander, let's talk about Justin Trudeau and his shocking statement to the parliament in Canada, where Justin Trudeau claimed that, according to his intel agencies and the reports he's been given, that India assassinated a Canadian citizen in British. Colombia, who I found out, by the way, is actually many people emailed me and they told me that this person is not a Canadian citizen. He was trying to become a Canadian citizen. He was working towards becoming a Canadian citizen, but he didn't quite get there. I don't know. This is what various people told me. Either way, Trudeau came out with this allegation towards India, and here we are, we have something big brewing.

What's going on here? Well, I mean, it's a very, very interesting story. And I have to say, one of the most interesting things for me, this is, you know, from my own particular perch in London, is to see how the British media is covering this story because, of course, the British have been making a big effort over the last few weeks and months to try to improve relations with India,

Sunak, who is of course of Indian origin, who is our Prime Minister, has been trying to become friends with Modi. Modi doesn't seem terribly interested, by the way, but anyway, he has been. And it's a striking contrast, because, of course, what Trudeau is basically accusing

the Indian government of having done in Canada is exactly what the British accused the Russians of doing with the Litvinenko and Scripal affair. but the British media has been very, very careful not to cover this story about Canada and India with anything like the same kind of feverish indignation and outrage and anger that they showed in connection with the Litvinenko and Scriapal affairs. So, you know, I just wanted to point to that contrast.

By the way, we have an inquest underway in Britain over the Scripahle affair. It's very interesting. it's already clear that there are problems with the story and that the British government is trying to pass, you know, prevent information coming, has been disclosed in the inquest. All of that, a discussion for another day. But anyway, I just wanted to make that observation. So, first thing to say is,

I don't know whether the Indian government was involved in the assassination of this individual. I don't know. The Indian government has categorically denied it. The Congress party, which is the main opposition party in India, is supporting the Indian government fully on this issue. I don't know anything about the background of this person. I'd be given all kinds of information from all kinds of people,

which suggest that he might have been involved in some rather alarming and concerning things. But again, I'm not going to judge this. What I find most interesting is that this story has come. out now. The first thing I want to say is let's be frank and clear extrajudicial killings by governments happen. The British government does them. It did them in Northern Ireland. It goes after people who are jihadi fighters in all sorts of places. The United States does them on a much bigger scale. Of course, if India did do this thing, it would not be the first time a thing like this. has happened. Israel of course does this on a very very much bigger scale. The United States has been trying recently to develop good and friendly and close relations with India. It sees India as an

important counterbalance to China. So why, given that this sort of thing does go on, has it suddenly been promoted in this fashion? Because to be very clear, I I don't think Justin Trudeau says these things on his own initiative. He's been told to say it by his intelligence service, and his intelligence services are connected with the intelligence services of the United States. They're all part of the five eyes. Why has it come up? Well, I'm going to suggest it is because the Western governments,

especially the government of the United States, is deeply angry with Modi at this particular point of time. And what is it that has made them so angry? It was what happened at the G20 summit. The fact that the G20 summit statement included a paragraph about Ukraine, which many people around the world see as leaning towards the Russians,

didn't contain any of the criticism of Russia that the US and the G7 states, the Western states wanted. The G20 statement overall, as the Financial Times rather angrily said, contained Chinese talking points. This attempt to pull India away from the bricks has been a spectacular failure. The BRICS summit meeting happened in Johannesburg. India was fully engaged with it.

It supported the expansion of the BRICS. It supported the bricks of gender to build up this financial architecture. So some people in Washington are very, very angry, and they've seized on this particular issue of this particular individual in order to circulate this embarrassing story about Modi, about India, which is intended to embarrass the Modi government and is also shot across the sales of the Modi government. government that is telling them, look, we've been your friend up to this point, but if you continue

along this path that you are taking, working with the Chinese, working with the Russians, working with the Greeks, making the bricks, the centrepiece of your foreign policy, despite this meeting we had with you a few months ago when you came to Washington, if you continue along this path, then be aware, we will come after you in a big way. So I think this is what this story is about. I say that, because to be frank, I don't think that the Western powers are really as angry and has outraged about this affair as they pretend to be. Yeah, I agree with you. I think this is a threat, a warning to India. No doubt about it. That G20 meeting between Modi and Trudeau did not end well. I mean, the readout from India after that meeting that they had was pretty brutal towards Trudeau and Canada.

Just to add some context to this video, the individual is Hadidip Singh Nijad, who was killed in Vancouver, in a suburb of Vancouver, in British Columbia, Surrey, and he was killed on June 18th at a Sikh temple. he's been accused by the government in India of being a calisthani terrorist and part of a separatist movement which which goes decades back by the way and and to be fair to India they've they voiced their their grievance with Canada that's you know Canada has been harboring these separatist these individuals and the separatist movements for many, many years and India is not happy with the fact that Canada has been providing a safe haven for these guys. So that's just the backstory as to as to what happened. So this happened a couple of months ago and here we are with Trudeau sending out this this warning

shot to India and the warning shot to Bricks actually. Because trying to telling India, telling India stop with with bricks is is the ultimate way to to break bricks to break bricks apart yes yes say that fast three times yes well that that was the idea I mean I mean first we had a lot of pressure in South Africa with the ICC warrant against Putin and there were lots of attempts to undermine the South African management of the Brick Summit Then there was an attempt to get Modi to stay away from the Brick Summit. You remember there were rumours that he wasn't coming after all. And of course he did come.

And he had a meeting with Xi Jinping, which went very well. And of course these big decisions were made at the Brick Summit. And then of course we had the follow-up summit, which is the one that happened at the G20, when again it was the Indians of the Chinese, working together as leading members of the Bricks who basically gained control of the agenda. And I think, you know, this has been a very alarming and disappointing development for the US. I think they hoped after Modi's visit to Washington

a couple of months ago that they'd won him over. We said on our program, we said in the Duran that this was a misunderstanding, that Modi had made no such commitments. India does want good relations with the United States. why would it not? But it is not going to compromise on its position with the bricks and it is not going to compromise in its relations with Russia.

But with the neocons who are in the ascendant in Washington, whatever stripe of neocon they are, you're either with them or against them. It looks as if as far as they're concerned, India is not, and Modi is not fully with them. So they've raked up this business over this particular individual who was killed in Vancouver. So, you know, that's how it looks to me. And I was reading today there's an editorial in the Daily Telegraph.

So, you know, it's, you know, killing people on foreign territory is going too far. You must never do this sort of thing. Telling me, how often has the United States done this? how often has Britain done this? How often does Israel do these things? How often does France do them? Everybody does them. And the way to handle a story like this

if you get information that something like this has actually happened and you don't like it, if a Canadian government found out that the Indian Secret Service was really involved in killing this person and that they didn't, the Canadians were very unhappy about it,

what you do is, is you contact the Indians through diplomatic channels. They tell them, look, we know you did this. We don't like the fact that this happened. Don't do this again. If you continue doing this thing, it will cause major problems in our relations. That's the way it's done.

You don't go and go to your parliament and issue public speeches and say, well, we have, you know, it's very likely, it's highly likely, remember Theresa May saying that over the script, It's highly likely that it was India and pointing fingers in this kind of way. This isn't the way it's done. Clearly, a message was being sent.

So is the strategy now, in order to break bricks, is it now to go after India as a member of bricks and then to go after the United Arab Emirates as a member to be of bricks because we talked about how the United States, and the EU, they were making trips to the UAE to get them to move away from their aspiring memberships into bricks. And now we have this warning to India. Is that, are these the two countries that they're choosing? Because, you know, Lavrov met with Wang Yi the other day. Putin is going to China, I believe, in a month. Yeah.

obviously the strength of bricks right now is this this unbreakable bond between China and Russia. Is the U.S. now saying, okay, we're not going to break Russia, China apart. We're going to be going after these two countries. But let's work on India as a current member, and let's work on the UAE as an aspiring member and see what we can do there. Absolutely, that's exactly what they want to do. I mean, they want to go after the weakest, what they think are the weakest countries, not weakest economically, because India and the UAE are strong economically,

but they're weak in the sense that Americans believe and hope that they still have many friends there. Now, they do. They do have friends, certainly in India, and most probably also in the UAE, but what they don't understand and where I think they're miscalibrated, They miscalculated, for example, over the Congress party in India. These people who are their friends in these countries, nonetheless, are patriotic and loyal and wish to follow the best interests of their countries. And what we see with this business, with this Khalistani activist,

that's what the Indians say he is, is that instead of creating divisions within, India, this coming after India in this way has caused the Indians to close ranks. And as I predict what's going to happen in the UAE, and of course it previously happened in South Africa as well. In India, in the case of India, it is particularly crass, by the way, because the Congress party, the main opposition party is of course structured very much around the Nehru Gandhi family, which of course has dominated Indian politics and much of the period since India gained independence. And of course, one of the prime ministers,

the fact the most famous prime minister that the Neri Gandhi family produced, apart from Nairu himself, who was Indira Gandhi, was in fact assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards who were influenced by the Khalistan movement. So it's, you know, you're not going to win over friends amongst the Congress party by appearing to support

Khalistani activists in Canada and complaining about them but of course you know people don't understand that maybe in Washington maybe don't understand that in Ottawa either they never really get much feel for the politics of these countries and you can already see

that Brick's solidarity is not only tightening but it is becoming more more effective. Now, we have at the moment a meeting of the General Assembly in the United Nations, the big world body.

And it's clear now that the BRICS countries are coordinating and working together with each other. And whilst Lavrov, Blavrov is at the UN because he's representing Russia at the UN.

And there was a meeting of the representative, of the Brick states, and Lavrov chaired him. And they were coordinating their moves in the General Assembly, on the various committees and the General Assembly, in the various discussions. They're all making sure that each knows exactly what the other is going to say, what they're hammering out their positions.

So you could see that even if this isn't getting a block, it's starting increasingly to look like a team. Now, we have had a serious, are very important and consequential meetings between the Chinese and the Russians. But notice that these have happened directly after Wang Yi, who was travelling to Europe, met with Jake Sullivan in Malta. Mysterious meeting, unannounced beforehand, not clear what Sullivan was trying to achieve there, but the sense that I get is that he was trying to string the Chinese along,

get them to agree to a summit meeting with Biden. The Chinese don't see to have been very interested in that. So anyway, there's a meeting in Malta. The Chinese have not published a readout of that meeting. So they weren't happy with what happened in Malta. But then Wang Yi gets on a plane. He flies to Moscow. This is a longstanding meeting.

And he has three days of meetings in Moscow. Firstly, he meets Lavrov. And the Russian readout, says quite clearly that Wang Yi briefed Lavrov about the meeting Wang Yi had with Sullivan in Malta. So Lavrov now has a full briefing from the Chinese about what happened in Malta between Wang Yi and Sullivan. And then of course Wang Yi has another meeting with Putin's national security advisor, who is Nikolai Petruc. It's a huge meeting, apparently. There's not been much of a readout about that,

but apparently, again, they're coordinating policy. And then afterwards, Wangyi has a very friendly meeting with Putin himself. I doubt that this was a very detailed or substantive meeting, but it was basically Putin again going out of his way to say, you know, great friends, we're very good relations. Wangi reciprocates, and the ground is now being prepared for this very important meeting that Putin is going to have

with Xi Jinping in Beijing. So Xi Jinping went to Moscow in March, Putin is going to Beijing in October. Two big meetings between these two leaders. As you correctly say, they to some extent form the core of the bricks. India, though, is becoming increasingly central. They're all working together as a team.

They're working in the General Assembly, and all this pressure that's being exerted on them by the West is pushing them even closer together. I think that the West needs to re-examine its strategy. It needs to think very carefully about what it's doing. It's putting pressure on all of these countries. Instead of working to drive them apart is pulling them even closer together. Unfortunately, they're not going to reassess their strategy. All right, we'll leave it there. The durand.locals.com.

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