Speak softly, carry a big stick

Theodore Roosevelt, the former President of the United States, often said, quoting a West African proverb, “Speak softly, and carry a big stick; you will go far.” 

Instead, is India sending out a loud message to the world, even as it denies Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s charge alleging India’s role in the killing of a Canadian Sikh, a Khalistani separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on its soil?

On the other hand, can Prime Minister Trudeau’s self-serving policy of providing Khalistani separatists a safe haven in Canada, with an eye on the Sikh community vote-bank in his country and the fact that his continuance in power is dependent on a Sikh coalition partner, go unpunished? Should not the US be asked if it would allow ISIS to operate out of Canada? 

The razor sharp and feisty Foreign Minister S Jaishankar, while calling the charges of murder by India ‘absurd’, said forcefully in his address to United Nations General Assembly, “Nor must we countenance that political convenience determines responses to terrorism, extremism and violence…respect for territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs cannot be exercises in cherry picking.” While addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he noted that “There has been interference in India’s politics and attacks on Indian consulates justified in the name of freedom and democracy.”  

Some analysts are of the opinion that when the most powerful leaders of the West are courting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and want to build up India as a counterweight to China, shouldn’t there have been a more measured and discreet response to rein in Trudeau? Since the Khalistan movement has no real sympathy or support from Sikhs in India, and is now a figleaf among only a fringe operating from foreign shores, are we not needlessly drawing international attention to a non-existent threat? Would it not have been wiser to isolate and shine the harsh spotlight only on Trudeau and Canada, rather than making our response look like it is aimed at broadly the whole West? After all, with Russia caught in its own Ukraine trap and moving into China’s orbit for sustenance, India needs the US and the West as much as they need India to counter China. Should we not therefore pick our enemies and battles wisely? 

The right-wing social and mainstream media has gone overboard, lampooning Trudeau and celebrating that Modi had given him a bloody nose.

Though Jaishankar said that India’s policy does not allow ‘hit jobs’ on foreign soil, the western press and diplomatic community will have noted that at a press conference in New Delhi in June, around the time Nijjar was shot dead in Surrey, British Columbia, Jaishankar had said, “If anybody has a complaint, we have a complaint about Canada…the space they are giving to Khalistanis and violent extremists.” A few days later, he added that New Delhi had made
it clear that if activities in Canada threatened India’s national security, “We
will respond.”

Aside from Nijjar, three other prominent Sikh separatist activists have died under mysterious circumstances abroad this year. Sikh separatist groups allege that Indian intelligence operatives were responsible for their deaths, too. The mixed messages
from Jaishankar seem deliberate, perhaps rightly so. 

Journalist Rajdeep Sardesai has suggested that National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, now India’s best-known spook, may have had a role in the Nijjar affair, basing it on the fact that Doval, before he was appointed NSA, had
often lamented why India fights shy of taking out terrorists operating from foreign countries, taking cue from
Israel’s Mossad. 

There is an aura, a myth that surrounds Doval -- part lore, part fact -- from the days of Operation Blue Star when it is believed that he entered
the Golden Temple complex disguised as a Sikh auto-driver to gather intelligence on Sikh militant leader Bhindranwale and his heavily armed followers, who were holed up in the temple before the Indian Army attacked and cleared the temple. 

Some ask, could India have bumped off Nijjar on its own or did it have help, perhaps from Israel’s Mossad, assuming that Indian intelligence lacks the capability to conduct such operations on foreign soil. But one can ask, what exactly was the proficiency required in a hit job against a not-so-guarded fellow as Nijjar. Could India have survived all these hostile decades without such capability? Some say Indian intelligence has had the capability for ‘Black Ops’ for decades, even if not demonstrated on western soil. Others say India has acquired such capabilities only now. No one knows the truth. Even if India has sophisticated capabilities to conduct targeted assassinations abroad – acquired under Doval or under the ‘Kao-boys’ of earlier decades – it is imprudent to crow about them.

After all, the Nijjar episode could also be the work of a RAW lone wolf acting without the knowledge of Delhi. Nor can one rule out the possibility that rival gangs who are into drug deals and illegal immigration bumped off Nijjar. 

Neither Trudeau nor any of his Five Eyes allies have produced any evidence to back up his allegation against India. We may never get to see any. “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil,” said Alfred North Whitehead, the renowned mathematician and philosopher. It holds truest in spycraft.

Prime Minister Modi might have found himself in a piquant situation over the Nijjar affair. When India
has emerged as a beacon of hope for uniting a polarised world, and Modi sees himself rising as a world leader, his sycophants, in government and outside, have unwittingly painted him as another Vladimir Putin, ruthlessly taking out enemies abroad.

While a ‘Putin Jr’ image could help boost him domestically, especially among his Hindutva hordes, his carefully crafted status as a statesman of the emerging world order – one in which he wishes for ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future -- may lose lustre.  

Adding to the international effects of the domestic Hindu-Muslim polarisation, the Nijjar affair and the Khalistan bogey too are seen to be polarising the Indian diaspora overseas on communal lines and tarnishing the image of India. 

It is well to remember that discretion is always the better part of valour. The strong do not boast. It is time to
quietly strengthen our intelligence
and military capabilities and focus on the China front. 

(The writer is a farmer, soldier and entrepreneur)