Indian foreign ministry claims ‘security threats’ after Trudeau’s explosive allegation of state-sponsored killing mean it cannot provide visa services safely
India says it is indefinitely suspending visa services in all categories for all Canadian nationals due to “security threats” to its consulates, amid a furious diplomatic row between the two countries.
Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said they have suspended “all categories” of visas, including e-visas and for Canadian citizens applying from third countries.
And India has also moved to downsize the Canadian diplomatic presence in New Delhi, saying that Canada has more embassy workers in its capital than visa versa and that it wants to restore “parity”.
It comes after Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said there were “credible allegations” of the Indian state’s involvement in the murder of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, triggering a furious tit-for-tat row.
India has some of the highest ranked universities in the world. It’s a country famous for putting out doctors. Yes, there are issues with higher ed, but it’s not as simple as “incredibly bad”. And don’t forget that a large number of foreign students is also a product of just having a large population.
Whose capacity is close to nothing for the population. Indian universities fall in two categories: really good ones or absolute shit ones (source: I’m an Indian). There is no middle category. To get into the really good ones, you have to either have an exceptionally good academic performance or have to be extremely rich. Universities outside India fill in the demand of this middle category. Sprinkle in some permanent emigration aspirations and you get a country with a large emigrating student population.
While it is true that this is the perception of India especially in the west, it is categorically untrue. According to the World Health Organization (2023), India ranks very low in the amount of doctors per 10,000 people relative to developed countries (by more than 300%). If you counter this by saying “this is because all Indian doctors emigrate to the said developed countries”, then that would be incorrect again, as around 10% of Indian physicians emigrate and practice in the west.
I believe you are pinning “a large population” as the causal factor behind a high student emigrant population. Had this really been a causal factor, then we would’ve seen European and American students in Indian Universities proportional to their population (which when combined, makes up around half of India’s population). The fact that we do not observe this phenomenon is evidence enough that “a large population” is not the causal factor behind this. Rather, it is the access to good education which plays a much much larger role.