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In the wake of his latest electoral victory, Modi continues to talk a good game, vowing to turn India into the world’s third-largest economy by 2032. (It’s now seventh.) But the question as he begins his second term is which Modi will show up — the economic reformer, or the populist who will sacrifice liberalization at the altar of political expediency?

A gut check for that question is simply to look at how far Modi’s India has already come in real terms, which often get lost in broad analyses of policy and politics in a country as large and complex as India.

One man with an insider’s perspective on that is Nadir Patel, High Commissioner of Canada in India, who has been stationed in New Delhi since January 2015. As a diplomat, he has helped promote Canada’s economic interests in India throughout Modi’s first term. And he is cautiously optimistic.

“There are challenges in India, but there is also progress,” said Patel during an appearance recently at a conference organized by the Canada India Business Council in Toronto. “Things are moving in the right direction.”

Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

The Canada-India economic relationship has been a beneficiary of that movement, and it provides a small but important illustration of India’s evolution under Modi. Two-way trade in goods between Canada and India last year reached $9.8 billion — a modest sum in the big scheme of things, perhaps, but it represents a billion-dollar increase over 2017, and is 60 per cent higher than five years ago, according to Patel, whose term ends later this year. “India is now our 10th largest trading partner,” he said. “A few years ago, it was our 14th.”