Indian prime minister Narendra Modi joined Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a visit to Vancouver’s Ross Street Temple Thursday afternoon. Police kept protesters well away from the event.
Modi is on a high profile visit to Canada to extol Canada’s burgeoning trade with India. On Thursday prior to arriving in Vancouver he and Harper visited a memorial in Toronto to the victims of the 1985 Air India bombing.
Modi is considered a controversial figure at home and abroad for his Hindu nationalism and his handling in 2002 of anti-Muslim riots while chief minister of the state of Gujarat. Hundreds were killed in the three days of violence.
Photographers were not allowed inside the temple during the tightly scripted event. Following the Ross Street temple, the two leaders left for the Laxmi Narayan Hindu temple in Surrey.
