The UK and the US, which together can be described as the Anglo-American Axis (AAA), publicly expressed support for Canada after Trudeau complained about his diplomats’ expulsion from India amidst those two’s dispute over the killing of a Sikh separatist earlier this summer. They reminded India to abide by international law, particularly the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, after it reportedly threatened to rescind those diplomats’ immunity if they didn’t leave as requested.
Trudeau had hitherto failed to internationalize the Indian-Canadian dispute but it now seems like he finally succeeded after the AAA just gave India a crash course on the hypocritical “rules-based order”. That concept refers to the arbitrary implementation of double standards aimed at advancing Western interests at others’ expense, which in this context concerns their innuendo that India was violating international law even though it had the right to request those diplomats’ expulsion.
Although it was obviously done in response to Trudeau’s accusation that India had a hand in this summer’s killing of that Sikh separatist, the pretext upon which this request was made was that India wanted diplomatic parity with Canada, which had more diplomats in India than India has in Canada. This aligns with international law to a tee, but Trudeau dillydallied and didn’t authorize their removal until after Delhi’s deadline had passed, which was provocative and disrespectful.
Furthermore, upon their refusal to leave as requested, India also had the right to no longer recognize them as diplomats and therefore consider them liable to be prosecuted under its national legislation for any crimes that they might commit during that period while still in the country. No such incident occurred prior to their departure, however, which is why Trudeau’s claims that India violated international law by requesting that they leave has no basis whatsoever.
Had something happened before they left and one of them was detained on suspicion of committing a crime, then Trudeau could have manipulated more people’s perceptions about this latest dispute, but no such incident occurred so there also wasn’t any reason for the AAA to chime in. By doing so, they extended credence to speculation that their own diplomats might also be up to no good, which could be why those two were so concerned about India requesting the expulsion of over 40 Canadian diplomats.
For instance, they might be secretly backing the opposition ahead of next year’s national elections and/or might have a had in some of the information warfare that’s been waged against India after this spring’s unrest in its peripheral Manipur region, in which case they’d be at risk of expulsion as well. To be clear, no evidence has yet to emerge in support of these suspicions, but the point is that the UK and US might have ulterior motives for directing their hypocritical “rules-based order” rhetoric against India.
After all, the UK is reportedly on the brink of clinching a major trade deal with India, while the US relies on it as a counterweight for managing China’s rise but importantly not “containing” it since India retains its strategic autonomy and would never do another country’s bidding at the expense of its own interests. It therefore doesn’t make sense that they’d team up to publicly pressure India on the false pretext that it violated international law and thus humiliate it by implying that it’s becoming a rogue state.
The reality is that it’s those two that are going rogue by backstabbing their strategic partner out of solidarity with fellow “Five Eyes” ally Canada, whose liberal–globalism is so out of control that it nowadays openly harbors separatists and terrorists on the grounds of “protecting their human rights”. The best-case scenario is that the AAA doesn’t go any further than what they’ve already done otherwise they risk ruining their relations with India all for the sake of feeding into Trudeau’s fragile ego.
