Canada PM Mark Carney Reveals Why He Invited PM Modi To G7 Summit
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Hours after extending the invitation, Mark Carney cited India's status as the fifth-largest economy as a reason for the invite.
Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney on Friday (local time) spilled the beans on inviting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to this month's G7 summit in Kananaskis.
Hours after extending the invitation, Carney cited India's status as the fifth-largest economy as a reason for the invite. Carney said that the most populous country in the world, with the fifth largest economy, should be present at this year's G7 summit.
Carney further emphasised that India's presence at the intergovernmental political and economic forum is essential where discussions on important issues, including security and energy would be held.
'As chair of the G7, it is important to invite the most important countries to attend to talk about important issues such as energy, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, and India is really at the very centre of global supply chains," Carney said during a news conference on Parliament Hill, as reported by The Globe and Mail.
Carney said that India and Canada are acting on law enforcement, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has accepted his invitation.
'In addition, bilaterally we have now agreed importantly to continued law enforcement to law enforcement dialogue so there's been some progress on that recognizes issues of accountability I extended the invitation to Prime Minister Modi for in in that context and he has accepted it," he said.
The Canadian PM further declined to say whether he believed India had any involvement in pro-Khalistan activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar's killing. 'There is a legal process that is literally under way and quite advanced in Canada, and it's never appropriate to make comments with respect to those legal processes," Carney said.
PM Modi on Friday confirmed he would attend the upcoming Group of Seven (G7) leaders summit in Canada after an invitation from newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
'Glad to receive a call from Prime Minister Mark J Carney of Canada. Congratulated him on his recent election victory and thanked him for the invitation to the G7 Summit in Kananaskis later this month. As vibrant democracies bound by deep people-to-people ties, India and Canada will work together with renewed vigour, guided by mutual respect and shared interests. Look forward to our meeting at the Summit," he said in a post on X.
Indo-Canadian Souring Ties
Indo-Canadian ties have nosedived in the aftermath of Nijjar's killing as well as Trudeau's allegations.
In September 2023, Trudeau had accused New Delhi of having a 'potential" involvement of Indian agents in Hardeep Singh Nijjar's killing.
India has repeatedly denied these allegations, and has taken a decisive stand against what it perceives as Canada's non-seriousness in dealing with the Khalistan issue.
The ties further strained when Trudeau named Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma as a person of interest in an investigation, without naming the case. A person of interest means a suspect who is not arrested.
Earlier this year, a public inquiry on foreign interference in Canada has found 'no definitive link to a foreign state" in the killing of Nijjar.
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June 07, 2025, 19:52 IST
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For instance, even though UR Ananthamurthy's writings might be criticised as 'self'-indulgent, he is also at his best in that mode. Based on the literature that you have read, what are the selves that were realised in it? Autobiographies and memoirs gave me an entire range of selves on a platter – the genre is a flourishing one in Kannada. They were the first books I read when I started on this project too, and I found them to be invaluable sources of history as much as they formed multitudes of self-hoods – from subaltern histories to activist chronicles to tell-all feminist memoirs. Personally, my favourite discoveries were Gandhi Classu and Monusmriti – the autobiographies of Kum Veerabhadrappa and Bolwar Mahammad Kunhi – which are both hilarious, rollicking, unusual texts. Historiography becomes a kind of self-unravelling in itself, a personal quest to master one's birthland and its history, exemplified by the life of MM Kalburgi, say, whose students remember him as a man 'who devoured entire shelves', and not just individual books (or selves?). The Navya (Modernist) movement of the 50s and 60s was self-professedly a self-investigation project, and it sought to plumb the interiors of the subjective self, which it believed had hitherto been neglected by Kannada writers. These modernists went in pursuit of ruptures and transgressions, like the character Praneshacharya in Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, who experiences something akin to spiritual emancipation after making love to the fisherwoman Chandri. They were also trying to capture a desi earthiness (Gopalakrishna Adiga's famous mannina vasane) that could somehow absorb cosmopolitan modernity into local roots. 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Did you find anything appealing or interesting? The term 'cultural right' might require some unpacking, because culture, it often seems to me, is a realm where ideologies can be stripped of their rigidities and held up for scrutiny. But I see what you're getting at, and I think I have tried to track a trajectory of this sensibility throughout the book, beginning from the early twentieth century, through figures like KV Iyer or Pandit Taranath. That inaugural generation of Kannada literati was hugely animated by Gandhian ideals (austerity, reform, pluralism), and these strains of thought have exercised much influence on social movements thereafter too. Even in the second half of the century, writers like Ananthamurthy and Shankar Mokashi Punekar embodied forms of conservativism (vis-à-vis religion and spiritual traditions) that fell under this broad rubric – it was again a Gandhian attempt to rescue Indian philosophical traditions from the stranglehold of modern fundamentalists. 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But reading the chapter on Saketh Rajan, the Maoist revolutionary who was shot dead in 2005, it seems that in Karnataka at least, they were only a handful of people in self-exile and up in arms. There was a fork in the road that the state ignored in reacting as it did with overwhelming force. As we speak, Maoists in central India are surrounded, vastly outnumbered by troops who seem dead set on a 'final solution'. What might have been a happier ending for Rajan, and what could the nation still do to those who survived? It might also be worthwhile to recall that those were the years when the Salwa Judum was engaged in horrific forms of state-sponsored vigilante violence in Chhattisgarh, recruiting child soldiers for its activities and essentially turning entire communities against each other – the Supreme Court deemed it illegal and unconstitutional in 2011. This has since remained the high watermark of the state's malevolence towards its own people in the war against Naxalism, as well as a spectacular display of its incompetence and immaturity. The situation in Kudremukh during the early 2000s was very different from this theatre of war playing out in the forests of Dandakaranya – a reality that both the Naxals and the state failed to grasp. There was sufficient space for civil-society protests shorn of gun-toting, and the Karnataka government could have initiated genuine efforts towards dialoguing with what was, in reality, an extremely small group of Naxals – I heard there might have been around thirty people in the movement at its height in Karnataka. Disarmament and rehabilitation of guerrillas is the only happy ending really possible – this would also be greatly aided by the emergence of a sensible and discerning media to cover the process. The successful rehabilitation of ex-Naxals Noor Shridhar and Sirimane Nagaraj, who left the movement after Saketh Rajan's killing, is evidence that such things are possible. The two of them have also remained ardent advocates of furthering this model since they believe that there is a broad consensus regarding peaceful capitulation – Maoists mostly see themselves as a spent force and are presently requesting dialogue in Central India too. A truly happy ending would also have to be accompanied by the reining in of mining hegemons who wish to conquer vast tracts of resource-laden landscapes for private enrichment. What do you think of the relationship between liberalism and the state? One may not be in awe of it, but you need the state to enforce rights at the very least. The state might have to lean on its muscular arm to accomplish this. What are your thoughts on the very real practical, and ethical dimensions of exercising power? Increasingly, the role of the state in our country has been reduced to just advancing the interests of Big Business. Those who continue to believe in the benevolence of neoliberalism would like to see the state slim down completely – in America, you now have private prisons and so on. This is nothing less than a wholesale outsourcing of the practical and ethical purposes of the erstwhile state. Back here, I'm amazed to see people like Shekhar Gupta – who understands not an ounce of economics – vigorously endorse the disastrous austerity policies of those like Javier Milei. It is also becoming clear that India is trying to ingratiate itself on the world stage with new imperialist forces that are bent upon perpetuating an extractive oligopoly, in collusion with some of the nastiest demagogues on the planet. These developments must be critiqued fiercely. On the ground, the state's muscle should be directed towards strengthening democratic institutions, and towards investments in health, education, rural community-building, and a politics of care that goes beyond mere sponsorship. This is in addition to its traditional responsibilities in terms of defence and internal security, which goes without saying. Vittal Malekudiya was the first graduate from his tribal community but was arrested arbitrarily, on grounds that he was a Maoist since he had some literature about Bhagat Singh. The campaign for his release which brought in even the national leaders of the Left, was surprising and heartening to me. Today, Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima and others are locked up on equally trumped-up charges. However, there has been little outrage or sustained protest regarding these. You write of the disagreement over '-isms' among activists. Has the fear of even pronouncing these words prevented civil society from banding together? There are actually some highly uncivil elements of our society, which includes the mainstream television media, that work extra hard to discredit individuals and morph public perception of these issues. Outrage and protests have happened on social media and many public figures have consistently highlighted these unlawful imprisonments, but there seems to be a more perverse and intractable crisis in the legal system as well. Vittal Malekudiya's story is really just a wild anomaly in a country where Gauri Lankesh's killers are out on bail, even as Umar Khalid and Gulfisha Fatima have been awaiting trial for five years. The lack of transparency, the nightmare of bureaucracy, the cunning of the incumbent regime – all of these come together, and there seems to be a desperate need for serious judicial reforms. What is the burden of history on modern Karnataka? Reading Prachi Deshpande in Creative Pasts, we understand that the search for a 'Maharashtra dharma' has been present for long, which helps in understanding the figure of Shivaji. How do you interpret society's tryst with the past? This is a really interesting question and connects with your earlier thoughts on the cultural right. If there is one thing that unites the Kannada world (left, right and centre), it might be the unhindered admiration for the treasure trove that is vachana literature, the genre-shattering, king-denouncing, free-spoken body of verses which emerged in the 12th century. Its outsize influence on Kannada cultural history cannot be overstated. The vachanas become nothing less than a primordial ore of ideas when seen through the eyes of all the eminent scholars and translators (from MM Kalburgi to AK Ramanujan to DR Nagaraj) who found in it a desi source of social egalitarianism and universalism – ideas we tend to conflate with the European Enlightenment. While the early 20th century sub-nationalists (like Alur Venkat Rao) looked to the Vijayanagar Empire to inform their sense of glory, the more serious historians of the succeeding generation (Kalburgi in particular) saw encapsulated in the Sharana rebellion and its vachana heritage nothing less than the genius of this land, a kind of 'Karnataka Dharma' perhaps. Also, if you scrutinise the founding historical fiction that went into the creation of the Karnataka statehood movement in the early 20th century, the first thing which might strike you is that this imaginary did not incorporate the many sultanates of the Deccan. Of course, this was more due to ignorance rather than malevolence at that time. In the years leading to his assassination in 2015, MM Kalburgi was leading an ambitious project to translate 16th century Adil Shahi poetry to Kannada (from Persian, Arabic, and Urdu), which was completed a few years ago. The excellent work of scholars like Richard Eaton and Rahamath Tarikere on the history of Sufism in the Deccan must also bear mention here. I was also intrigued to hear from a VHP ideologue that he'd read Manu Pillai's Rebel Sultans with some interest. I think we're seeing a new wave of reckonings with history (however contested they might be), and there is still much work to be done to recover (and chronicle) these pasts in all their complexity and wonder. There is an epigraph in the book from Ibrahim Adil Shah II's 16th century collection of verses Kitab-i-Nauras, which is his explication of the nava rasas, held together by his deep devotion to the Goddess Saraswathi. By all standards, he comes across as an extraordinary figure of aesthetic liberalism – this is reflected in Deccan art from that period too. I heard from an audience member at an event in Mysore that he had lived in Bijapur for years but still never encountered these histories. Might these universalist imaginaries not be valuable landmarks in our current search (the world over) for alternatives to parochial nationalisms?
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Indian-American candidates leading runoff races in Texas' city councils
Two Indian-American candidates are leading in their respective city council runoff elections in Texas , according to early results. The two - Sanjay Singhal and Sukh Kaur - are vying for critical city council positions in Sugar Land and San Antonio. The runoff elections were held on Saturday, with early voting having concluded on June 3. In Sugar Land's District 2, Singhal is ahead with 54% of the vote over challenger Nasir Hussain, who holds 46%. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like How much is your car worth? Take a look here Cars | Value Click Here Undo Singhal, an IIT Delhi alumnus and retired energy executive, campaigned on transparent governance, infrastructure improvements, and community engagement. Kaur, a Stanford and Harvard graduate, leads Patty Gibbons in early results for the San Antonio District 1 runoff, holding 64% of the vote. Live Events Kaur, the first Sikh woman elected to the San Antonio City Council, focused her campaign on affordable housing, public transit expansion, and inclusive urban development. She lives in San Antonio with her husband and two children. Both candidates are expected to solidify Indian-American representation in Texas's civic leadership. Final certification of results and official victory announcements are expected in the coming days.
