Despite President Joe Biden’s conscious efforts to build bridges with India, many in his party oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government.
CHICAGO
Barely had the dust settled from the storm created by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “credible allegations“ about the Indian government’s “involvement” in the killing of an alleged Canadian Khalistani separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, bombshell media reports citing anonymous sources revealed that “US authorities thwarted” the murder conspiracy and “issued a warning to India’s government over concerns it was involved in the plot.”
Soon, the US Department of Justice followed up by filing “murder-for-hire” charges against an “Indian National Nikhil Gupta,” also known as “Nick,” in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York.
THE PLOT
The 15-page charge sheet, which reads like a “sloppy spycraft,” claims that Nikhil Gupta “directed a plot to assassinate, on US soil, an attorney and political activist, who is a US citizen of Indian origin.” The court document identifies this person as “a vocal critic of the Indian government… [who] has publicly called for some or all of Punjab [a state in the Republic of India] to secede from India to establish a Sikh sovereign state called Khalistan.” The charge sheet does not name the target man of this alleged assassination plot, but he is identified as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
The charge-sheet against Nikhil Gupta is damning. Both charges—murder-to-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-to-hire—carry a maximum of 10 years in prison each. Even more damning, however, is the allegation that an Indian government employee—a “Senior Field Officer” with “Security Management” and “Intelligence” responsibilities—identified in the indictment as CC-1, the co-conspirator, recruited Nikhil Gupta to “orchestrate” the said assassination.
The charge-sheet also alleges that upon CC-1’s direction, Nikhil Gupta contacted CS, a Confidential Source working for the US government’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), for hiring a hitman for murder. CS, in turn, introduced Gupta to UC, an undercover DEA office. Gupta offered to pay UC $100,000 for the murder, of which $15,000 was paid in cash in advance. The indictment papers present pictorial evidence of the money exchange inside the undercover officers’ car. Nikhil Gupta allegedly had underworld contacts in foreign countries trafficking in drugs and arms.
During the investigation, “on or about June 19,” the undercover source of the US government found out about the murder of a Canadian, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who, Gupta claimed, “was also on the target.” This murder, as we know, has been at the centre of the diplomatic spat between India and Canada since mid-September, details of which were not available in public until now.
PANNUN’S WORLD
As the legal case against Nikhil Gupta moves through the American judicial system, it is noteworthy that all this while, Pannun has been inciting violence and issuing threats against Indians, Hindus, and Indian officials. In a video message seen on many social media sites, Pannun said he would hold “Sandhu-Verma-Doraiswamy-Malhotra-Vora, the Indian diplomats in the US, Canada, UK, Italy, and Australia responsible“ for the murder of Canadian Khalistani Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
Pannun heads the notorious separatist group Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) that supports the creation of Khalistan. The group is active in the US, the UK, Canada, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Khalistani elements, including those belonging to the SFJ in the US, have vandalized several Hindu places of worship and attacked Indian consulates in the US. They have also desecrated Mahatma Gandhi’s statues more than once and issued threats of violence against ordinary Indian Americans. They have also organized several non-government-sanctioned referendums for the creation of Khalistan.
A New York resident, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun was designated a terrorist by Government of India in 2020 on the grounds of sedition and secessionism. The fact that Pannun and other Khalistani elements in the US are allowed to roam scot-free makes Indians, Indian Americans included, extremely uncomfortable. Indians are still bitter that the US refused to extradite David Headly, the deadly Mumbai attack convict.
As the US seeks to counterbalance the growing clout of China, it sees India as a significant ally. American involvement with India in the Indo-Pacific, Quad, and growing defence and space partnership signal a solid growing relationship between the two democracies. The Indian American Congressman Ro Khanna called India a “critical ally to ensure that China does not become a hegemon in Asia and to help move some of the supply chain hubs from China to India to supply the Asian markets.”
THE INDIAN REACTION
Despite President Joe Biden’s conscious efforts to build bridges with India, many in his party oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government. Several members of the progressive wing of the President’s party boycotted PM Modi’s speech to Congress. The Biden administration also tried to stiff-arm India into supporting the US in the conflict in Ukraine.
The partnership between the US and Indian government is a “Track 1 success story, but not Track 2,” said Akhil Ramesh, a Senior Fellow at the US-based think tank Pacific Forum. “While Track 1 wants to ride the moment, Track 2 wants to sabotage the relationship.” Generations of US leaders, administrators, public intellectuals, and media persons have grown up with a Pakistan focus. “Those prioritizing US-Pakistan relations have a hard time switching to US-India relations,” writes Ramesh.
In this background, some see the Pannun saga as a way for the US to interfere in India’s internal politics by tying PM Modi’s hands in controversies. The regime change elements of the US intelligence community have a storied history of such indulgences. “For those following the Biden State Dept’s intrigues to unseat the Modi gov’t in India,” posted Mike Benz, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department under President Trump, on his X timeline, “clear pick Rahul Gandhi is doing a US tour calling for the US to intervene in India’s democracy.”
Benz also claimed that Stanford University, one of the stops for Rahul Gandhi during his US visit, “works closely with US national security state to engineer censorship to silence influential populist voices.”
Indians frown at the idea that the US, in their opinion, has become a haven for anti-India elements. What would the US do, many ask, if a supposedly “friendly” country was harboring a terrorist who was sworn to the destruction of the American republic? They are quick to remind the US of the killing of the 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan.
“The Biden administration has taken no action against a US-based Sikh militant for making terrorist threats against Indian targets, Air India, and New Delhi airport,” wrote analyst Brahma Chellaney on his X timeline. “They nurtured a terrorist,” added Vikram Sood, former head of India’s spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), to the thread, “and pretending to defend an American citizen.”
Chellaney also talks about the recent weaponization of the US Department of Justice by the Democrats against their political opponents. “A weaponized justice system has also come [in] handy for pursuing foreign-policy objectives, as the ‘Russiagate’ hoax showed.”
In the same context, many analysts mention entrapment stories of America’s investigative agencies. On his X timeline, political analyst, counterterrorism, and security expert Chris Blackburn with the Global Friend of Afghanistan found it “too coincidental that Nick and the handler found a hitman that was a US informant.”
India, on its part, announced a high-level inquiry to investigate the matter. The US charges against the Indian government and the subsequent indictment of Nikhil Gupta are serious. It could derail the diplomatic momentum of the past several years between the US and India. It is also a significant distraction from President Biden’s strategic partnership agenda with India.
Avatans Kumar is a recipient of the San Francisco Press Club’s Journalistic Excellence Award.