Veteran Indian diplomat Talmiz Ahmad, who is an authority on the Middle East, says Turkey has been bringing up Kashmir for a long time but relations were slowly warming up.

“But it helped Pakistan during its conflict with India” and that was too much for India, he said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

“Turkey is on a high and wants to expand its footprint to South Asia,” he said. “Pakistan brings geopolitical value to Turkey and if they get together, they will form a formidable alliance.”

Even so, Ahmad said, he is a strong believer in diplomacy and he felt that India should continue on the diplomatic path. “Its important also to talk to those who disagree with you,” he said.

Discussing India’s growing ties in the Gulf countries, Ahmad, who was Ambassador to UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia, (twice), said that “our ties go back over a millennia” and “India should be seen to be “as a role player in the security scenario in the region.” “We should be an influencer in the Gulf region.”

With the election of a new prime minister in Canada, there are hopes that relations between India and Canada will improve. Under Justin Trudeau, the previous one, ties had plummeted after he made allegations that India had a role in the killing of a Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

“Trudeau had five Sikhs in his cabinet and was responding to diaspora politics,” says veteran journalist Daniel Lak in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. Lak was with Al Jazeera as the US and Canada correspondent and earlier had served in India, Pakistan and Nepal as a BBC correspondent.

He says Sikhs have been coming to Canada for over a century and most of them are here to make a life for themselves rather than get involved in what he calls ‘diaspora politics’. “They are two percent of the Canadian population and have established themselves in several sectors including transportation."

“I get India’s anger,” he says, at the Indian insistence that supporters of Khalistan be restrained.

The new prime minister will also at some stage have to manage this part of the relationship, but “he is a technocrat” and Canada will want to increase trading links across the world, including with countries like India, especially after the US President Donald Trump threatening to make Canada the 51st state.

The discussion includes issues like the loss of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and immigration and from India.

The killing of 26 tourists in Pahalgam on April 23 came as a ‘shock’, because never before had terrorists targeted tourists, says Anuradha Bhasin, an astute observer of events in the Union Territory.

It's not that terrorism had disappeared after the removal of Article 370 in 2019, as the Modi government constantly claimed, Bhasin said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

The reaction among ordinary Kashmiris was one of grief, she said. “They came out to help, as they have on every occasion earlier – that is Kashmiriyat.”

But, she said, the constant pushing of the “tourism narrative” to show things were normal was creating “alienation” among the locals. It hid the “ugliness of the Kashmiris being economically disempowered—new land laws, allowing outsiders to bid for contracts” were causing resentment, she said. “There was a complete erasure of what is happening in Kashmiris.”