Indian Diaspora Relieved With Canadian Admission
By Manu Shrivastava
For the thousands of Indians who now call Canada home—whether as students pacing snow-lined campuses, professionals steering the country’s tech backbone, or families still finding their place between curry leaves and Canadian maple—something quietly monumental happened this week.
Without ceremony or breaking news tickers, Canada finally admitted that Khalistani extremists had used its soil to plan acts of terrorism in India. It wasn’t a grand apology or a political u-turn, but for many, it was the first flicker of a long-awaited acknowledgment—one that rewrote the air between two nations, and more intimately, between people suspended across borders and beliefs.
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| Image for representational purpose only |
That this moment came as Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of the G7 Summit wasn’t just diplomatic choreography. It was heavy with symbolism. For all the tension that had soured the air between Ottawa and New Delhi over the past year, the image of the two leaders speaking again—guardedly, perhaps, but speaking nonetheless—was a sign that the thaw had begun.
A handshake can mean many things. For Indians in Canada, it meant, maybe for the first time in months, that they wouldn’t have to answer for politics they didn’t practise, or extremism they didn’t endorse.
It’s hard to explain what the past year has felt like for many Indian students in Canada. After years of aspiring, applying, saving, and sometimes begging, when they finally landed in the land of red passports and polite small talk, they hoped for stability. But what they got, instead, was a climate of suspicion.
Visa delays. PR bottlenecks. Quiet questions at border checks. Whispers in classrooms. As the Trudeau government lobbed accusations at India following the killing of a Khalistani separatist on Canadian soil, students who had nothing to do with it found themselves caught in a tangle of geopolitics and global headlines. Entire cohorts of young Indians suddenly found their futures paused by politics.
So now, this turn—this modest but meaningful concession from Canada—isn’t just about countries and protocols. It’s about restoring a sense of safety and selfhood to the young people who left behind families and festivals to chase something more. It tells them they are no longer ghosts in a narrative not their own.
For the working Indian, too—the nurse in Nova Scotia, the software engineer in Montreal, the Uber driver in Toronto—it has been a confusing year. So much of Canada’s economy depends on their effort, their endurance. Yet, in the face of diplomatic fallout, their applications slowed, their extensions stalled, and in some cases, their acceptance strained.
The admission that it was indeed fringe extremists misusing Canadian freedoms—and not the Indian community at large—begins to right that wrong. These are not men and women who want to debate sovereignty. They just want to work, live, send their kids to school, and maybe buy a home with a small backyard.
This isn’t to say all is healed. The damage done by Trudeau’s careless posturing won’t disappear with a press release. Trust, when broken between nations, takes years to stitch together. And India, having stood firm in the face of falsehood, won’t forget easily. But even so, this moment feels like a hinge. Something has turned. And in that turning, there is space for something new.
Of course, caution remains. Canada will now likely vet its applicants more stringently, and perhaps rightly so. But the days of broad suspicion—the lazy linking of Indian identity with extremism—may finally be behind us. And for many Indians in Canada, that means something simple and profound: they can go back to being who they came to be. Not proxies in an old argument, not scapegoats for a few radicals. Just people. Living, working, studying, dreaming.
And that, in the end, may be the quiet victory they didn’t even know they needed.
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