Already In India for an international summit, former Canadian leader Stephen Harper dropped in on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday for a visit.
Harper gave Modi a copy of his new book, the two strolled around some ceremonial gardens and then discussed “co-operation among democracies,” according to the office of the Indian prime minister.
The warm visit between the two comes only 10 months after a disastrous India visit by the sitting Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
Over nine days, Trudeau received widespread mockery for repeatedly being photographed in formal Indian dress. He was unable to meet Modi until well into the visit and his team accidentally invited a convicted terrorist to a Canadian diplomatic event, fuelling Indian accusations that Canada remains a hotbed of Sikh separatist terrorism.
In the wake of the visit, Public Safety Canada began listing “Sikh extremism” as a Canadian terrorist threat, spawning accusations even from within Trudeau’s own cabinet that the measure was a capitulation to overblown Indian government fears.
Harper was in India to attend the Raisina Dialogue, an annual geopolitical summit sponsored by the Indian minister of external affairs.
With Modi a more conservative Indian leader, he was more drawn to Harper while the latter was still Canadian prime minister. In 2015, Harper hosted Modi as the first sitting Indian prime minister to visit Canada in more than 40 years, signalling an end to decades of frosty Indo-Canadian relations that began in the 1970s after New Delhi clandestinely used Canadian technology to build a nuclear bomb.
In a Twitter message after their Tuesday meeting, Harper called Modi “the most significant leader of India since Independence.”
Harper appears to have made all his recent Indian appearances in the same dark Western-style suit, although he occasionally swapped out a red tie for a blue one.