In our leader on India last week, we explained how the world’s fastest-growing big country was becoming increasingly confident. Indian warships have been battling pirates in the Middle East. The country is buying boatloads of Russian oil and waving away Western criticism. “India’s clout is showing up in new ways,” we wrote. And in some unexpected ones. In recent days more evidence has come to light that India’s Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), its external spy agency, attempted to kill Sikh separatists in America and Canada.
I first wrote about this story in September when Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, accused Indian agents of murdering a Canadian citizen in Vancouver. The victim, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was an advocate of Khalistan, a notional independent Sikh state carved out of India’s state of Punjab and other parts of northern India. Khalistani militants waged a bloody campaign of terrorism in the 1980s, bombing an Air India flight, though the movement is now a shadow of its former self. India dismissed Mr Trudeau’s charge. But in December American prosecutors issued an indictment containing detailed allegations that an unnamed Indian official had directed a plot to assassinate another Khalistani in New York.
On April 29th the Washington Post alleged that the official was Vikram Yadav, a RAW officer, and that other “higher-ranking” spies were involved. According to the Post, American spooks have assessed that Samant Goel, the RAW chief at the time, probably approved the operation, which was ultimately thwarted by American authorities. They also assess, more tentatively, that Ajit Doval, Mr Modi’s veteran national security adviser, and a former spymaster himself, was probably aware. The Post also said that Australia, Britain and Germany were all concerned over Indian surveillance and harassment of Sikh diaspora communities, in some cases expelling RAW officers. In response, India said: “The report in question makes unwarranted and unsubstantiated imputations on a serious matter.”
In 2016, before I joined The Economist, and in the aftermath of an Indian special-forces raid into Pakistan-held Kashmir, I wrote an op-ed for an Indian newspaper in which I described India’s “Israel envy”—the idea that India should be more like Israel in dealing with its enemies, particularly those seen to be terrorists. Mr Modi’s air strikes on Pakistan in 2019, a seminal moment of his first term in office, was a stark example. The assassination plots are another. That RAW would attempt to kill someone in New York is a sign of just how confident Mr Modi feels that India, as a rising power, can flex its muscles without jeopardising its Western partnerships—partnerships it needs to balance Chinese power.
The fact that America has sought to confront India privately, rather than publicly, might vindicate that judgement. But the fallout isn’t yet finished. Canadian officials are likely to go public with more details. America’s Justice Department might yet charge Mr Yadav if India is obstructive. And the fact that details of the case continue to trickle out suggests that some American officials do not want it swept under the carpet.
More broadly, I think the episode has underscored how much India and its partners still talk past one another. Indian nationalists defend these assassinations as being no different to America’s drone strikes during the war on terror. They appear not to understand that peacefully advocating separatism is not illegal in most Western countries—consider Quebec and Scotland. On the other hand, many outside India fail to appreciate how the Khalistani movement—which has feeble support within India today—flirts with violence, which often goes unnoticed or unpunished in the West.
The independent “Bloom report” commissioned by the British government last year summed it up well. “The promotion of Khalistan ideals is not itself subversive,” it concluded, “but the subversive, aggressive and sectarian actions of some pro-Khalistan activists…should not be tolerated.” I say this not to excuse assassinations, which I believe are unjustified. The point is that these differences in how extremism is defined and understood—differences that Indian nationalists often chalk up to mere hypocrisy—and the complexities of diaspora politics will always hang over India’s relationships with Western countries, even as security and defence ties continue to deepen.
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