By Sahil Pandey
New Delhi [India], November 12 : On the diplomatic row between India and Canada, British High Commissioner Lindy Cameron on Tuesday said hope "our friends" can find a way forward, and that the "investigation" will help resolve the issue.
Cameron told ANI that Britain takes "sovereignty and the rule of law seriously."
"We take sovereignty and the rule of law extremely seriously. We hope that our friends and partners, India and Canada, can find a way through this and the investigation will help to resolve it," Cameron told ANI.
The UK High Commissioner also inaugurated a refurbished UK visa application centre as part of a new agreement between UK Visas and Immigration and VFS to expand visa application services across India.
Expressing her thoughts on the launch, Cameron said, "I'm delighted to be here and watching the refurbished Visa Application Center. It's one of the 18 that we have around India which helps us to make sure that we give fantastic service to all the hundreds of thousands of people who want to apply for a UK visa. We issued over 800,000 visas last year, and it's really important to us that we're able to process the vast majority of those within three weeks, and really make sure people get the customer service that they want, shortening the times for applying and the shorter times for picking up their passports as well and that's part of what I'm here today to see."
Cameron also discussed the UK-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and noted that both countries are actively working on it with great potential for mutual growth.
"The Labor government was very clear in their manifesto, they were committed to an FTA. And the Foreign Secretary, when he was here, just three weeks after the government was formed, was really clear about the scale of his ambition to the partnership. We think that there's real potential to get even more for both UK growth and Indian growth for this partnership, and we're working on that at the moment," Cameron said.
Notably, India's ties with Canada have seen sharp deterioration with India repeatedly expressing its deep concern about extremism and the culture of violence and anti-India activities in Canada and has asked Canadian authorities to take action against these activities.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has claimed that he has "credible allegations" of India's hand in the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada last year.
India has denied all the allegations, calling them "absurd" and "motivated" and has accused Canada of giving space to extremist and anti-India elements in their country.
Earlier this month, India recalled six diplomats from Canada after they were declared "persons of interest" by the Canadian government in the investigation into the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.