With murder plot allegations by the US, India stands diminished

Telling It Straight

Remember the Eleventh Commandment, “Though shalt not get caught.” That is the one the Indian establishment violated, presuming the US Justice Department indictment is correct. An Indian government official, who has not been named in the indictment but identified by technical intelligence to his official place of work, hired an assassin to murder the Khalistan ideologue Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in Washington DC. In exchange, Nikhil Gupta, who is involved in drug trafficking and gun-running, had criminal cases against him by the Gujarat Police “taken care of”. The man Gupta approached in New York was a source of the US Drugs Enforcement Administration and the supposed hitman hired to kill Pannun was an “undercover US law enforcement official”. They were caught on camera paying him an advance of $15,000 in cash out of the promised contract of $100,000 for doing the job.

The case looks pretty strong, as most Department of Justice cases are. Gupta should be prepared for the worst, and so should the Modi government be. Gupta is a dispensable non-entity. The real issue here is the Modi government, which had mocked and dismissed similar charges of killing levelled by Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. By the time Trudeau spoke in Parliament, Indians knew that the US had a case against them.

As per multiple American publications, US President Joe Biden had personally raised the Pannun assassination plot with Narendra Modi during the G-20 Summit in New Delhi. Even before that, his NSA Jake Sullivan had brought his concerns to Modi’s NSA Ajit Doval, in person during a meeting in another country in the region in early August. Within a week of Sullivan’s meeting, CIA Director Nicholas Burns flew to India to deliver the same message to the head of R&AW, Ravi Sinha. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sullivan raised the issue again when External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar visited Washington in September. Jaishankar continued to dismiss the Canadian allegations in his usual brusque manner from various public platforms during that trip.

The only reason for the Modi government’s bellicose stance against Canada’s charges can be its supreme confidence that the Biden administration will not do anything to embarrass the Indian establishment. The obvious calculation is based on India’s critical value in the American designs to counter China in Asia and the Indo-Pacific. The Modi government must have been emboldened by the free pass it has been getting from the Biden administration on democratic backsliding and ill-treatment of religious minorities in India. If destruction of at least 250 churches in Manipur, denial of basic human rights in Kashmir since 2019, and regular lynching of young Muslims in India can lead to paeans about “shared values” and “world’s oldest and largest democracies” from Biden, Blinken and Sullivan, why would the foiled assassination attempt on a Khalistan leader in New York be treated any differently?

Things have not gone as per the calculations of the Modi government. The US has chosen to go public about it but not in a confrontational manner, as it would have done against China or Russia. Sourced from within the US security establishment, the Financial Timesscoop on the Pannun affair came days before the “superseding indictment” became public on Wednesday. It forced the Modi government to acknowledge in a weird statement that a serious case existed, and the White House said that it expected to hear more from New Delhi in the coming days.

None of this means that the US-India partnership is about to collapse. On countering China, the two countries have convergent interests that will take priority in Washington over any notion of “shared values”. The rhetoric of “shared values” may be a casualty of this episode because it embarrasses the Biden administration and forces it to confront increasingly uncomfortable questions about India, including from within the administration. A lot will depend on the Indian response, which has been of complete acquiescence to US demands. This is very different from the Modi government’s approach vis-a-vis Canada.

The US indictment has made Canada’s case stronger as it clearly links the same Indian government official and Gupta in the Pannun case to Nijjar’s murder in June. The Indian response to Canada now looks like all bluff and bluster, with even the words of India’s External Affairs Minister carrying no credibility. As Trudeau said, “The news coming out of the US further underscores what we’ve been talking about from the very beginning, which is that India needs to take this seriously”. Not only does India not come out of it looking good, but it also reduces the global respect and standing that Modi craves.

This is also a clarifying moment for US-India ties. Let there be no doubt that this is a relationship of unequals. Notwithstanding the phraseology of equal partners and symbolism of bear hugs between leaders, the US has ample power to embarrass and bully India. The more India choses to be aligned completely with the US, as seen recently on the Israel-Palestine issue, the more vulnerable Delhi will be to US pressure and threats. But we should be more concerned about the day Indian and American interests do not converge. Bereft of any shared values and shared vision with the US, will India be discarded like Pakistan was discarded by the US every time it was not needed?

With the unsealing of the indictment, the aborted killing is on the front pages of international publications. The Modi government can no longer hide it. It wanted to project strength and power by eliminating prominent Khalistan supporters in the US and Canada. In its bumbling execution of a sensitive operation, which was neither politically prudent nor strategically sound, it has only ended up revealing India’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses under Modi.