Joly’s India trip nothing like Canadian trade missions of the past

OTTAWA—Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly is in India trying to generate momentum for a stronger bilateral partnership. At least, that's what the news release says. It is also peppered with words like "regional peace" and "the rules-based international order." A cynic might read that to mean Joly's trip is less about India, and more about China and Russia. For sure, Canada does a lot of business with India. But it ranks 13th as our merchandise trading partner. According to Statistics Canada, our direct investment in India was only $2.9-billion in 2021. We did more business with Sweden, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Italy than with India. Moreover, merchandise trade is only one aspect of the international balance of payments. When trade in services, investment income, and capital flows are in the mix, India slides much further down the ladder. If Joly were on a sincere trade mission, she would have done it like the old Team Canada trips that former prime ministers made with the Bay Street business community in tow, signing deals and showcasing economic agreements. Joly's two-day trip does not look like it's about strengthening trade. Joly's excursion this week follows on the heels of a major international incident: the Chinese spy balloon. The inept Chinese, who have satellites capable of spotting the frozen nasal hairs of someone stuck outdoors in bone-chilling Canadian weather, decided to send a balloon to spy on us. Thank god the Americans shot it down. The balloon gave the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken the excuse he was waiting for: outraged, he cancelled his anticipated trip to China, which was seen by many as a key to the much-needed rapprochement to bring the fractured U.S.-China relationship back on track. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general from the federal public service. Photograph courtesy of Bhagwant Sandhu If the trip's not about bilateral trade, what is it about? It could be about semiconductors. Last October, the U.S. put a semiconductors embargo on China. The aim was to stymie China's advances in employing artificial intelligence in advanced weapons. The noise about the Chinese social media platform TikTok also spying on unsuspecting Canadians is part of the storyline. Immediately after the semiconductor ban on China, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, met with the Indians to announce a partnership in areas including the use of quantum computing in defence technologies. This context is important to understand the real reason for Joly's pit stop to India. She is, in all likelihood, doing a follow-up mission for Sullivan. In other words, she is going to help turn India away from Russia, weaken China, and strengthen the Quad (the Indo-Pacific Quadrilateral Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the United States). Remember, the Quad? It was very popular a couple of years ago. Britain, the United States, and Canada cooked up the strategy to crank up the anglosphere and start an Asian version of NATO by arming Australia, Japan, and by expanding military bases in the Philippines and the South China Sea. If you can get India on side, that's all you need to set up for the next big adventure: to take on China in the Indo-Pacific. India is an ancient civilization. It has seen empires come and go, from the Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Mughals, British, French, and Portuguese. Despite its hard-right-wing president, Narendra Modi, and his penchant for the likes of former U.S. president Donald Trump, India has pretty much pursued an independent foreign policy since its inception as a country in 1947. India is nobody's fool. Its foreign policy boils down to non-alignment on the one hand and economic self-interest on the other. On Russia-Ukraine, India has adamantly refused to get recruited in the NATO camp. It has instead availed itself of cheap Russian oil. Russia is now India's largest supplier of oil. India is an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the world's largest international security and defence organization, led by China. And while India bad-mouths China for domestic political purposes, in 2022 India's bilateral trade with China broke a record, at US$135.98-billion. China has been India's largest trading partner since 2008, growing at an annual average rate of 12.55 per cent since 2015. Then there is the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It used to be just an acronym coined by Wall Street bankers, but now it is a full-blown international political bloc. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace predicts that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will strengthen the BRICS “for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.” This means that countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa will assert their independence in multilateral institutions while taking whatever cash and carrots the likes of Joly and Blinken put on the table. They will not get themselves roped into Western ideological war games, not even with the spying balloons story. Joly should be careful and clear-headed in what she wants out of India. There is a good chance the Indians will play her for their self-interests and send her home with empty promises. Hopefully, she keeps in mind Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's trip to India in 2018. For all the full-blown “namaste” hands clasp, the Indians had him running for cover the minute he landed in New Delhi. Bhagwant Sandhu is a Canadian foreign policy commentator and author. He retired as director general from the federal public service. The Hill Times