India's right-wing nationalist and BJP party members have launched a scathing attack on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for adopting unprecedented steps to crush a protest by truckers against COVID-19 regulations.
It is only the second time in Canada's history that the government has used sweeping emergency police powers, the first time being when Justin's father Pierre Trudeau invoked such steps to contain a separatist movement in Quebec.
People have compared Trudeau's move to use the Emergencies Act with the four-decades-old decision by India's former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to impose the country's sole emergency to suppress rising unpopularity across the country.
"Feeling sad for Canada. I was expecting PM Trudeau to go and meet protestors and try to resolve the issue, but instead of that, he murdered Democracy in Canada. Canadians are good people, but they voted for the wrong person," Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, a spokesman for India's ruling BJP, said.
A prominent Sikh leader of the BJP, Manjinder Singh Sirsa, said that imposing emergency measures in Canada was a "deplorable move".
Indians are reminding Trudeau of the stance he adopted during the year-long farmers' protest, seeking the repeal of three farm laws, which completely choked the capital city of New Delhi last year.
"Let me remind you, Canada will always be there to defend the rights of peaceful protesters. We believe in the process of dialogue," Justin Trudeau had said in December 2020, which was described as "ill-informed" and "unwarranted" by the Indian Foreign Ministry.
Kanwal Sibal, India's former foreign secretary and analyst, has also exposed the hypocrisy of western countries who keep lecturing about people's "right to peaceful protest" in a democracy.
"So much for Trudeau's lessons and of other westerners on the right to peaceful protest in a democracy and blabbering about erosion of democracy and freedoms in India in the wake of farmers' protests. Bunch of hypocrites with Trudeau in the lead," India's former Foreign Secretary Sibal said.
Brahma Chellaney, a strategist and commentator, said that the Canadian Prime Minister failed in the basic test of democracy.
The imposition of the Emergencies Act, which lasts a month, comes to quell a three-week-long protest which was caused by rules that lorry drivers needed to be vaccinated to cross borders.
Trudeau and his family had to move to a secret safe location, after hundreds of people joined the hauliers to protest against vaccine regulations, masks, and lockdowns in the first week of this month.
Organisers reaffirmed their demands, saying protestors would remain until mandates were lifted.