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The allegation that India was involved in the assassination of a Canadian citizen and Sikh activist on Canadian soil moves the world’s most populous nation onto a dubious list of countries suspected of carrying out targeted killings beyond their borders.
If confirmed, India would join Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other countries credibly accused of plotting lethal attacks overseas against perceived adversaries, including their own citizens, in recent years, according to Western security officials and experts.
Those states are among an even broader group including China that are widely suspected of employing their security services to engage in surveillance operations, intimidation campaigns and even abductions on other countries’ territory.
The United States’ muted response so far to Canada’s allegations against India reflect Washington’s conflicted position on the issue, having launched its own unilateral strikes on terrorist leaders and been widely perceived as taking a harder line against alleged abuses of adversaries such as Russia than countries including India and Israel, which are considered allies.
Biden’s efforts to court India challenged by assassination claim
In a measure of the perceived proliferation of such extrajudicial and extraterritorial operations, international organizations and human rights groups have adopted a term — “transnational repression” — to capture its various forms as well as the intent of governments involved.
Western officials and security experts said the phenomenon is being driven by forces ranging from resurgent authoritarianism in dozens of countries to the spread of technologies that enable repressive governments to track and target dissidents abroad.
“What concerns me is the slide of more and more governments into committing violence extraterritorially,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counterterrorism official who now leads the American Academy in Berlin. “The fraying of the international community,” he said, has contributed to a “rise of states that are prepared to use violence, take chances and violate norms.”
The allegations against India were made public this week by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said his country had obtained intelligence making clear that “agents of the government of India” were complicit in the shooting death of prominent Sikh leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia in June.
Masked gunmen, an ambush, a chase: The execution of Hardeep Singh Nijjar
India has denied involvement and expelled a Canadian diplomat in retaliation, further eroding a relationship already strained by Canada’s accommodation of a large Sikh population, some affiliated with a separatist “Khalistan” movement that the Indian government regards as a terrorist group.
U.S. officials have not publicly endorsed Trudeau’s allegations or disclosed whether U.S. spy agencies furnished any of the intelligence that Canada has alluded to in describing the evidence of Indian complicity in the attack.
But current and former U.S. officials said they consider the case credible, and that such an attack would be consistent with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s view of his country as a rising global power entitled to assert itself in ever-more-aggressive ways.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official said: “This is Modi looking at the world and saying to himself, ‘The United States conducts targeted killings outside of war zones. The Israelis do it. The Saudis do it. The Russians do it. Why not us?’ And none of the [nations] we just mentioned pay much of a price.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.
Few expect India to face meaningful sanctions either from the United Nations or Western governments including the United States. Canada could seek a U.N. resolution condemning India’s actions, a former senior U.S. State Department official said, “but India has more sway with many of the developing countries so [Canada] might not succeed in getting a meaningful majority vote.”
For its part, the Biden administration will have to weigh siding with one of its staunchest allies against its desire to cultivate closer ties with India as an economic partner and potential bulwark against Chinese influence in much of the world. If the United States does confront India over the alleged killing, Benjamin said, “I would assume that the effort will be behind the scenes.”
The United States has made similar calculations in other cases, most notably the 2018 killing of Saudi citizen and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey — an operation that the CIA concluded was authorized by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
As a candidate, President Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are” for Khashoggi’s murder. As president, Biden greeted Mohammed with a polite fist-bump last year and has maintained close ties with the Kingdom, an approach that critics say reflects the prioritization of geopolitics over human rights.
Other countries accused of engaging in targeted killings include North Korea, Ukraine, Rwanda and Iran. Even in recent weeks there has been a new outbreak of violence and threats.
Last month, a private jet carrying Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin and nine other Russian passengers fell from the sky north of Moscow — an attack widely believed to have been ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin after Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny against the state.
Earlier this week, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi used a speech at the United Nations to issue thinly veiled threats against the United States. Calling the U.S. airstrike in 2020 that killed the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Qasem Soleimani, “a terrorist act,” Raisi vowed that Iran would take unspecified revenge.
The Soleimani strike added to a long list of lethal U.S. operations on others’ soil, including the 2010 Pakistan raid to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and a drone strike in Yemen a year later that killed a U.S. citizen and Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of recruiting terrorist operatives and helping to direct plots
U.S. officials have long argued that these and other operations bear little resemblance to the actions of states like Russia, noting that U.S. operations involve extensive legal review, assessments of an imminent threat and determinations that a capture or arrest of the suspect in question are not possible.
These rationales often ring hollow overseas. “We think right is on our side but that is not the way the whole world views it,” the former U.S. intelligence official said. “The Israelis think they’re right. The Saudis think they’re right,” the official said. “The more this happens the more it creates the norm” that such operations are acceptable.
Several experts said that whatever tensions existed between Canada and India over the Sikh diaspora, if India had been able to produce evidence that Nijjar was financing or plotting terrorist attacks against targets in his home country, there is little question that Canadian authorities would have intervened.
But that misses how India perceives itself and Canada, said Christine Fair, an expert on South Asia at Georgetown University. India has for years chafed at Canada’s perceived catering to the Sikh community, and regards supporters of the movement to create a separate Khalistan state in Punjab as fanatics who pose as great a threat as the terrorist networks that Western governments target at will.
“We might view Canada as a mature democracy with reliable law enforcement,” Fair said. “Indians see Canada — and this will sound crazy — as harboring Khalistanis they accuse of supporting terrorism.” Just as importantly, Fair said, “India thinks its rising clout in the international system should let it get away with this.”