An ISIS recruit from Central Asia was chosen as the would-be assassin because he was in a position to acquire a Russian passport with greater ease owing to the historic ties of the region with the former Soviet bloc.
It may be inferred from wider concomitant circumstances that the suicide bomber on the way to India through the Russian Federation was tasked to attempt the assassination of India’s elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Only his assassination would merit such an international conspiracy, apparently with the involvement of so many parties abroad. Plans to murder Narendra Modi to avenge the alleged insult to the Prophet by a minor BJP apparatchik, as proclaimed by the would-be assassin, is a singularly unconvincing motive for the conspiracy. PM Modi has ensured swift punishment for those in the BJP who are responsible for irresponsible statements. Given the record of assassinations of foreign leaders by major governments, including the US, the former USSR, Britain and French alone, one cannot exclude the possibility that one of them was involved in the plot discovered by the Russian FSB.
The murder of any other Indian political leader, with the exclusion of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Adityanath Yogi, would not result in the fateful momentous consequences that Narendra’s Modi’s would have precipitated. The person judged the foremost agent behind India’s bid for economic and military power would have been removed and the country plunged into civil war of incalculable proportions. Having a Khalistani terrorist to do the killing, which came close to a possibility in January 2022, would have caused swathes of India to burn, but assassination by an Islamic jihadi guarantees a self-destructive implosion across the length and breadth of India. Nothing could be better designed to cause severe setback to contemporary India’s quickening rise in international rankings on multiple indices.
A 1975 US Senate Report listed five national leaders who had been successfully eliminated by the CIA, including the especially gruesome killing of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961. However, the Committee’s Report did not mention the murder of Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973. Both countries were subsequently plunged into decades of utter chaos and morose desolation. The actual occasions of attempted and successful elimination of national leaders and others by the American CIA number many hundreds and Fidel Castro alone was subjected to 654 assassination attempts. The executions of Saddam Hussain of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya are only the most recent examples in a long list. There is much speculation about the unexpected demise of India’s pioneering physicist Homi Bhabha and Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and the highly suspect circumstances of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She had enraged US President Richard Nixon and, significantly, prompted Henry Kissinger to take very stern note of her refusal to comply with threats and blandishments over the creation of Bangladesh. Far Eastern Economic Review journalist, Lawrence of Lifschultz, who investigated the assassination of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and virtually his entire clan on 15 August 1975, is convinced the CIA was complicit. One Bangladeshi colonel accused of involvement in the Dhaka bloodbath subsequently resurfaced as head of the BBC Bengali language service.
The obvious gainers from such a plot would clearly be Pakistan and China and both have assets roaming free all over India, which provide plentiful local support to make such an attempt. The risk for Pakistan is that it will possibly result in total war with India and a grim journey into the unknown. An assassination in which it was implicated and its role impossible to obscure would constitute a disproportionate casus belli. This is how the Serbian Black hand provoked the calamitous First World War by assassinating the presumptive heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Ferdinand. In its present state of economic and military disarray, Pakistani threats of nuclear retaliation against Indian military retaliation for such an egregious act are likely to be insufficient to deter India from striking hammer blows against it. In China’s case, derailing India is already being attempted at multiple levels with its huge economic and political penetration of India, by, in fact, effectively appropriating political leaders of major Indian political parties. But involvement in assassinating India’s Prime Minister would put paid indefinitely to China managing to reach a favourable accommodation with India by using other means at its disposal that would not incur high political costs. It would also galvanise the growing opposition to its aspirations among countries in the Indo Pacific region and indeed strengthen the hand of the US on Taiwan because of political opportunism.
PM Narendra Modi is proving a difficult customer, as his External Affairs Minister’s somewhat unexpectedly robust commentary on a succession of issues affecting the US is highlighting. India’s studious refusal to join NATO’s military campaign against Russia with an economic boycott surely rankles and it has also evidently needled Washington’s supine London ally, the most vociferous supporter of fighting Russia to the finish over the minor issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership. India has also taken to delivering tart ripostes to Washington’s unwarranted fabrications about religious persecution in India and alleged curbs on its media by invoking the proverbial idiom of the pot calling the kettle black. The recent hyperactivity of the US State Department and US intelligence services in mobilizing the US media and US academia to libel India more vehemently is another indicator of Washington’s annoyance and evidence of its two-faced dealings with India, while protesting good intentions. Nothing would be more gratifying for the US authorities to have a Russian-speaking assassin enter India on a Russian passport to blow up Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It would surely make it extremely difficult for any Indian government to persist with its bonhomie with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which seems to be enduring through thick and thin, including its growing proximity to China. More generally, it might have been correctly surmised by India’s frenemies that Narendra Modi’s recent countermeasures against India’s political opposition, which had appeared to be gaining ground against the BJP, make their success in the 2024 national general elections less and less plausible.
An ISIS recruit from Central Asia was chosen as the would-be assassin because he was in a position to acquire a Russian passport with greater ease owing to the historic ties of the region with the former Soviet bloc and also less likely to be subject to stringent immigration scrutiny at an Indian port. Former US Senator Richard Black, a senior military officer and Vietnam War veteran, has alleged the CIA’s support for the ISIS continued despite full knowledge of its horrendous human rights violations. These flagrant crimes included beheadings of the innocent and subjecting Yezidi women and girls to sex slavery and their public auction en masse.
Turkey’s association in training the ISIS suicide bomber is no surprise and President Recep Tayipp Erdogan’s own son has been implicated with it by Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Bashar Jaafari. He has alleged help in the transfer of arms to ISIS by President Erdogan’s son and the facilitation of its earnings from seized oil assets and thereby profiting himself too. Periodic CIA action against ISIS is simply the routine double game it plays across the world with myriad terrorist organizations, a record substantiated by its relationship with Al Qaeda, which was once useful for ejecting the former USSR from Afghanistan. Only wilful naiveté will prompt anyone to believe that the seamless web of cynical collaboration between Middle Eastern fanatic terrorists and Pakistan, with Turkey as a key venue for deadly conspiracies, has not remained intact. There is copious research available to confirm this deduction.
Dr Gautam Sen taught international political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science for more than two decades.