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Justin Trudeau’s disastrous passage to India brought to mind Mark Twain’s pilgrimage to Europe and the Holy Land in the Innocents Abroad.

“In Paris, they simply opened their eyes and stared at us when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language,” he wrote.

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At least Twain was lampooning the cultural imperialism of North American tourists.

The Trudeaus looked to be in earnest. One can imagine the prime minister turning up at the Bollywood event in Mumbai in an elaborate sherwani, to be greeted by Bollywood stars in sober black suits, and saying: “Now I don’t want anyone to feel embarrassed …”

Photo by INDRANIL MUKHERJEE / AFP

But the barrage of bad publicity was not just the result of flighty photo ops in costumes designed by a tailor apparently in the grip of the delirium tremens. More seriously, it was the result of systemic negligence in Trudeau’s office that brought embarrassment on Canada.

As the National Post reported Friday, Jaspal Atwal — the man convicted of attempted murder who was invited to a reception at the official residence of the Canadian High Commissioner this week — was taken off a blacklist by the Indian authorities.

The suggestion by senior security officials inside the Canadian government was that India’s intelligence service may have wanted Atwal to be close to Trudeau to embarrass him for being soft on Sikh separatism. But that does not explain how he came to be issued an invitation to the event by B.C. Liberal MP Randeep Sarai. More pertinently, it does not offer any clues why that invitation was not vetted and immediately killed by the Prime Minister’s Office.