Mark Carney walks a tightrope heading into meeting with India's Narendra Modi

Though Carney has so far avoided addressing the controversy of his visit, it has dogged him nonetheless. After a Canadian official said the government believes India is no longer engaged in transnational repression and political meddling in Canada, Canadian Sikh activists, intelligence experts and some Liberal MPs pushed back.

Now, having arrived in the Indian capital to a red carpet welcome — complete with an honour guard, Bihu dancers and welcome-billboards featuring his image along a main thoroughfare — Carney will try to cement his effort to repair relations with a counterpart who provokes both concern and admiration at home and abroad.

“Mr. Modi generates very strong emotions,” said Harsh V. Pant, vice president of the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi and honorary director of the Delhi School of Transnational Affairs.

“Polarization, certainly… you see that travelling with him.”

Modi’s government stands accused of fanning animosity against religious minorities. He is unabashedly close with Russia, a pariah state in the West since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And his hardline on terrorism, with tough talk about the reach of India’s vengeance, has coincided with allegations from Ottawa and the RCMP that his government was linked to violence and repression of Sikh activists in Canada whom New Delhi deems to be dangerous extremists.

Yet Modi remains a popular figure in much of India, the world’s largest democracy, having won three national elections since 2014. His political focus on economic development, with a recent sprint to strike trade deals with country after country after country, has coincided with a run of rapid growth that has the nation climbing the ranks of the world’s largest economies. And, to some, Modi’s political brand built on the idea that India is destined to rise from its colonial past, and its present as a developing nation, to achieve greatness and power on the world stage.

“I think he taps into the sense of India’s own social, civilizational greatness and how it can be revived and reconfigured to meet 21st century demands,” Pant said.

Those demands, as Carney has explained it, involve striving for “strategic autonomy” in key areas like energy and defence. Echoing his Davos speech, the prime minister argued at a business forum in Mumbai on Saturday that “non-hegemon” countries like India and Canada find areas in which to cooperate and achieve that autonomy and avoid the risks of over-dependence on a single great power.

With the United States imposing punishing tariffs and wielding power and a stated desire to expand its domination over the western hemisphere, Canada can’t afford to have a “purist” foreign policy where it only deals with entirely like-minded countries, said Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

“Canada clearly has disagreements with India,” she said, pointing to “the use of extraterritorial Indian power inside Canada” and human rights concerns in the country, “especially the treatment of the Muslim population by the Modi government.”

Groups like Human Rights Watch have accused Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of inciting “discrimination, hostility, and violence against marginalized groups.” Amnesty International has published concerns about the government demolishing non-Hindu religious sites, recent criminal law reforms, and travel restrictions on journalists, academics and human rights advocates.

Modi has also maintained friendly relations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In December, when Putin visited New Delhi, Modi showed up at the airport tarmac to greet him personally, and praised their relationship as “steadfast like a polestar.”

Some in Canada also have particular concerns about India, in the wake of the federal government’s allegation in 2023 that agents of New Delhi were credibly linked to the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. Further allegations emerged when the RCMP said it was pursuing multiple investigations and alleged India was tied to violent crime in Canada targeting Sikh activists and the South Asian community.

In 2024, during national elections in India, Modi voiced his government’s hardline approach to what it sees as terrorism, promising to “pursue them to the ends of the earth.”

India has denied all the allegations from Canadian authorities, with the country’s top diplomat to Ottawa welcoming the government’s statement this week that it believes the behaviour isn’t happening anymore.

Roland Paris, an international relations professor at the University of Ottawa, said Canada has long had a “structural challenge” in its relationship with India. For years, New Delhi has alleged problematic Sikh extremists and separatist activists who want to create the state of Khalistan out of part of India have operated freely in Canada. The history of those concerns includes the 1985 Air India bombing that killed 329 people.

Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to prime minister Justin Trudeau, said part of the issue from Canada’s perspective is that New Delhi seems to want Ottawa to “clamp down” on activity that is deemed to be constitutionally protected as free speech — a disagreement that further complicates the relationship, he said.

For Anita Anand, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, the country can only address concerns about Indian activity in Canada if it preserves a relationship where the two sides can talk frankly.

“We have to be at the table. We actually have to able to advocate. Diplomacy is not about hiding under a rock and saying, ‘I am not going to deal with you because of the actions of your government,’” Anand said in Mumbai on Saturday.

According to Pant, India’s perspective was that Canada under the Trudeau government dealt with New Delhi through the prism of its own domestic politics, which includes major constituencies of voters from different religious groups with ties to India.

Now that Carney has taken over, Canada’s approach appears more “pragmatic,” with a willingness to work on shared trade interests in a way that hives off more sensitive issues.

“That was the model that India wanted to come back to. So once that possibility arose, India also went ahead with it,” Pant said.

That has proven controversial to some, and promising to others.

In sitting down with Modi on Monday, Carney will find both.