With the election of a new prime minister in Canada, there are hopes that relations between India and Canada will improve. Under Justin Trudeau, the previous one, ties had plummeted after he made allegations that India had a role in the killing of a Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

“Trudeau had five Sikhs in his cabinet and was responding to diaspora politics,” says veteran journalist Daniel Lak in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. Lak was with Al Jazeera as the US and Canada correspondent and earlier had served in India, Pakistan and Nepal as a BBC correspondent.

He says Sikhs have been coming to Canada for over a century and most of them are here to make a life for themselves rather than get involved in what he calls ‘diaspora politics’. “They are two percent of the Canadian population and have established themselves in several sectors including transportation."

“I get India’s anger,” he says, at the Indian insistence that supporters of Khalistan be restrained.

The new prime minister will also at some stage have to manage this part of the relationship, but “he is a technocrat” and Canada will want to increase trading links across the world, including with countries like India, especially after the US President Donald Trump threatening to make Canada the 51st state.

The discussion includes issues like the loss of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and immigration and from India.

The killing of 26 tourists in Pahalgam on April 23 came as a ‘shock’, because never before had terrorists targeted tourists, says Anuradha Bhasin, an astute observer of events in the Union Territory.

It's not that terrorism had disappeared after the removal of Article 370 in 2019, as the Modi government constantly claimed, Bhasin said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

The reaction among ordinary Kashmiris was one of grief, she said. “They came out to help, as they have on every occasion earlier – that is Kashmiriyat.”

But, she said, the constant pushing of the “tourism narrative” to show things were normal was creating “alienation” among the locals. It hid the “ugliness of the Kashmiris being economically disempowered—new land laws, allowing outsiders to bid for contracts” were causing resentment, she said. “There was a complete erasure of what is happening in Kashmiris.”

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar went “much beyond his Constitutional Role as the Presiding Officer of the Rajya Sabha” when he spoke against the Supreme Court. “His language was intemperate,” says Supreme Court Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

“The conjecture is that he is auditioning for a higher role,” Hegde said.

Pointing to the unseemly comments of BJP MP Nishikant Dubey against the Chief Justice of India, and also the social media campaign attacking the CJI, Hegde said it all seemed like a “concentrated attack”.

“Indian democracy is not in a healthy position,” he said, and the situation was more like an “elected autocracy”. There were occasions in the 1970s when the judges were criticised by the executive but “the language was never so crass” as now.