Threat from India is worse than we feared
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, likes to think big. He says he can’t help himself. “Modi can never think small,” he told a recent campaign rally, according to Indian broadcaster NDTV. “When God made me he didn’t put the ‘small’ chip, but only the big one.”
The same applies, it seems, to how Modi’s India — what he calls “the New India” — deals with its enemies abroad. The small thinkers who preceded him, says Modi, were feeble. When “terrorists” acted against the country, those weak leaders just handed dossiers filled with information to governments harbouring them, hoping they would deal with the threat.
Now, he says, no more dossiers. India just tracks down “terrorists” wherever they are and terminates them. “Today, even India’s enemies know: This is Modi, this is the New India,” he said. “This New India comes into your home to kill you.”
The very least that can be said about that extraordinary boast is that it sits badly with India’s blustery denials of involvement in the assassination last June of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C.
Modi’s “New India” apparently wants to have it both ways. It wants to proclaim its willingness to reach out and kill its enemies, regardless of national boundaries or simple legality.
But it wants enough plausible deniability so it can continue to bask in the respectability of being “the world’s largest democracy.”
It’s getting a lot tougher to square that circle, especially given the eye-opening revelations in an investigative report in the Washington Post. It provides a lot of new detail about the extent of India’s willingness to engage in targeted assassinations of its perceived enemies abroad — the most extreme form of what’s known as “transnational repression.”
The Post reports on the findings of a “sprawling investigation” carried out by the FBI, CIA and other U.S. security agencies into India’s campaign against those it deems threats to its security, especially Sikh activists based in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.
It says U.S. agencies have identified Vikram Yadav, an official of India’s spy service known as the Research and Analysis Wing or RAW, as the man who authorized the killing of Nijjar in Surrey and was also behind a failed attempt to assassinate another Sikh activist in New York City.
Yadav’s operation, according to American intelligence, was approved by the chief of RAW at the time, one Samant Goel, and “probably” approved by Modi’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval.
That brings the whole mess to the doorstep of India’s prime minister himself. There’s no proof that Modi himself ordered the assassinations, but it’s hard to believe he was unaware when such senior officials were involved. And there he is, out boasting about killing India’s enemies “in their homes.”
India, it should be noted, denies all this. It says Modi was referring only to India’s deadly attacks on Sikh and Kashmiri separatists (or “terrorists,” according to New Delhi) who took refuge in Pakistan.
And it says Canada hasn’t provided any evidence of Indian involvement in the killing of Nijjar; in fact, it turns the tables and accuses Canada of harbouring Sikh extremists who advocate violence against India.
A few points: India is hardly the only country to reach out and target its enemies, national borders be damned. The United States, for one, has done that countless times. But that’s a lousy defence for violating other countries’ sovereignty, legality and basic human rights.
It’s quite likely, however, to be popular in India itself. India’s global role, writes Rohan Mukherjee in Foreign Affairs, “is now a central issue in politics.” Indians are richer, more confident, and proud to see their government assert itself around the world. Modi’s “Hindu nationalist foreign policy,” continues Mukherjee, is typical of how rising powers assert themselves.
It may be typical, but it’s far from acceptable. Canada is at long last pushing back against foreign interference in our politics with a public inquiry and the Liberal government’s long-overdue bill proposing new powers to fight foreign meddling. The latest revelations about the threat from India show the problem is even worse than we had feared.
Modi’s ‘New India’ apparently wants to proclaim its willingness to kill its enemies, regardless of national boundaries or legality, but wants enough plausible deniability to continue to bask in the respectability of being ‘the world’s largest democracy’