India’s death squads

Several reports have quoted US sources as saying that unnamed man was an Indian intelligence officer

The United States has released details of the Indian citizen who attempted to assassinate a Sikh activist in New York, and New Delhi has been uncharacteristically restrained, perhaps reflecting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies do know their place in the global pecking order. US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams, whose office will pursue the case, said that the accused “conspired from India to assassinate, right here in New York City, a US citizen of Indian origin who has publicly advocated for the establishment of a sovereign state for Sikhs, an ethnoreligious minority group in India.”

Court documents reveal that the accused, identified as Nikhil Gupta, lives in India and has been involved in narcotics and weapons trafficking. He was taking orders from “an Indian government employee” who is a “senior field officer” with responsibilities in the “security management” and “intelligence”. Several reports have quoted US sources as saying that the unnamed man was an Indian intelligence officer. Gupta and the intelligence officer plotted to pay a hitman $100,000 to kill the Sikh separatist — unnamed in the indictment but widely reported as being Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual US-Canadian citizen who is a senior figure in the rights group “Sikhs for Justice”. Both have been declared terrorists by India, even though neither has been implicated in violence. Gupta hired a hitman and gave him a downpayment of $15,000, but the would-be “assassin” was actually an undercover agent of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Even though Gupta fled the country after making the first payment, he was arrested in the Czech Republic in June and is being extradited under a bilateral treaty. Top US intelligence officials have also been talking to their opposite numbers in India.

Notably, the indictment mentions that Gupta sent the DEA agent Pannun’s home address a few hours after the Indian spy sent him a video of Hardeep Singh Nijjar dead in his car, implying that the Indian intelligence agency RAW was indeed behind the brazen targeted-killing of the Canadian Sikh separatist on Canadian soil, which has triggered a grueling diplomatic spat between New Delhi and Ottawa. The indictment also says that India was behind one assassination plot in the United States and three in Canada, exposing just how reckless the Indian regime has become.

Growing evidence of India’s involvement in overseas assassinations of Sikh separatists and other dissenters shows that RAW has taken a leaf out of the playbook of Mossad, the infamous intelligence agency of Israel, particularly concerning its decades-old policy of eliminating “state enemies” on foreign soil in blatant violation of the sovereignty of other states. And in pursuit of this reckless policy, India appears to have been emboldened by its outsized role in global politics and by blind Western support for its ambitions to counterbalance China in the regional strategic calculus. However, Western nations should also realise that ignoring India’s “death squads” would undermine their “rules-based world order” by posing major risks to national security.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2023.

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