MUMBAI — Prime Minister Mark Carney landed in India on Friday, where he will continue his government’s ongoing efforts to reset a fractured diplomatic relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Carney and Modi are each looking to decrease their countries’ dependence on trade with the United States under President Donald Trump.
“Both for India and for Canada, the big picture is one of diversification and reducing overreliance on the U.S.,” Asia Pacific Foundation vice-president Vina Nadjibulla said.
“There is definitely sort of a Trump accelerator in play here, because both sides are moving quicker than they have in the past when it comes to forging partnerships and making deals.”
Since becoming prime minister, Carney has been criss-crossing the globe in an effort to strengthen relations with other countries. His speech to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last month — in which he urged middle powers to work together to counter great power coercion — earned headlines around the world.
Modi recently signed one of the largest trade deals in history. India’s trade pact with the European Union covers roughly two billion people.
“The same logic as what is driving Prime Minister Carney is also driving Prime Minister Modi,” said Sushant Singh, a lecturer on South Asian Studies at Yale University.
Carney will spend two days in Mumbai before flying to New Delhi on March 1, where he will meet with Modi.
The two leaders are working to rebuild a diplomatic relationship that came to a screeching halt in recent years.
There have been tensions in the bilateral relationship for decades over the activities of Sikh separatists in Canada who call for the creation of an independent country, to be called Khalistan, out of India’s Punjab region.
India has long accused Canada of not doing enough to quiet the separatist movement, while Canada has defended the freedom of those to express themselves while condemning any violence.
Those tensions clouded then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s first visit to India in 2018.
They erupted into a full-blown diplomatic dispute in September 2023, when Trudeau said Canadian security services were pursuing “credible allegations” that agents of the Indian government were involved in the June 2023 murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Khalistan advocate.
Shortly afterward, India forced Ottawa to send most of its diplomats home.
The conflict escalated in October 2024, when the RCMP accused New Delhi of playing a role in a network of violence linked to domestic homicides and acts of extortion.
Ottawa expelled India’s high commissioner and five other diplomats, saying India had declined to waive diplomatic and consular immunity to allow the RCMP to interview Indian diplomats. India denied the accusations and retaliated by ejecting Canadian diplomats.
The situation thawed when Carney invited Modi to the G7 summit in Alberta in June 2025, where the two agreed to reappoint high commissioners. The two met again at the G20 summit in November, where they agreed to launch formal trade talks to cover a wide range of goods and services, including agriculture and agri-food, digital trade, mobility, and sustainable development.
Some Canadian Sikhs are calling on the government to take a firmer stand on India.
B.C. Sikh activist Moninder Singh, who received a warning from Vancouver police on Sunday about a credible threat to his life, said he suspects that threat is linked to the Indian government.
A government official briefing reporters on Wednesday ahead of Carney’s departure downplayed concerns that Indian government agents are still engaging in such activities in Canada.
He said Carney would not be making this trip if Canada believed that activity was still happening.
However Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree on Thursday would not fully agree with that statement when asked multiple times. Rather, Anandasangaree said there are outstanding issues about the safety and security of Canadians that are being worked out with India.
Nadjibulla said the two countries have been working on the relationship through multiple meetings between their foreign ministers.
“When they met in October in Delhi, they launched a road map for rebuilding and resetting the relationship that has specific areas for co-operation, AI and technology being one of them, energy being another,” she noted.
India’s envoy to Ottawa, High Commissioner Dinesh Patnaik, said in an interview that there has been multiple visits and a lot of interaction among Indian and Canadian parliamentarians, ministers, senior bureaucrats and diplomats.
“This is solidifying what is already present. We have so much good happening,” he said of Carney’s visit.
Carney’s trip to India starts with a large part of the preparatory work already completed, Nadjibulla said. While Beijing and Ottawa launched various talks and agreements after Carney’s trip to China in January, the prime minister is heading to New Delhi with substantial work already underway, she said.
Sushant said while Canada and India could announce some sort of deal on energy following the visit, any announcement is likely to offer only the broad contours, with details to be worked out later.
Expecting concrete things to come out of the trip “might be pitching a bar too high,” he said.
“I think what we should hope (for) is a kind of a direction, a kind road map and kind of a desire to suggest that this is where we want to reach, rather than saying that this the destination,” Sushant said.
There are limits to the relationship, Sushant said. They include the disagreement over the Khalistan issue and freedom of speech, differences in values and visions between the two countries, and what Sushant described as Modi’s “extreme reluctance” to take on Trump.
Canada has ground to make up, Nadjibulla said, noting that during the diplomatic crisis of the past two years, India has signed strategic economic partnership agreements with the other G7 countries.
“We have to now make up for that lost time and really put forward an agenda that will set us up for a 20-year kind of partnership. The time horizon has to be multi-decade,” she said.
But Sushant warned that while Trump has brought the two countries closer together, things could change once the president is no longer in power.
“Unless intrinsically two countries believe that they can align and work together, but instead are being driven only by external factors or one single leader, once that leader is not there or once things change, then this relationship could again go down south,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 27, 2026.
Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press
