Now that India has responded to allegations that it tried to organise assassinations in Canada and the United States, it is time to look at the issue with less emotion and more introspection.
Most Indians agree that Justin Trudeau’s accusations are part of a broader strategy—he wants to use an anti-India position to appeal to his pro-Khalistan voter base. The Canadian prime minister has been spoiling for a fight for several years now. When he extended his battle to include the Indian High Commissioner and other senior diplomats, it became obvious that he wanted a full-blown international incident.
Well, he’s got one now.
Whether it helps him in the forthcoming elections remains to be seen.
Evidence against Gupta
Canada’s allegations are based—as Trudeau himself has said—on intelligence rather than hard evidence. This kind of distinction is usually made when countries have access to chatter or phone intercepts passed on by other countries, but no hard evidence, let alone a smoking gun, a confession, or strong witness testimony.
In the case of the US allegations, however, there is hard evidence. The Americans say that a businessman with a dodgy background called Nikhil Gupta tried to hire an American hitman to kill pro-Khalistan leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who lives part of the year in the US. Gupta reached out to a drug dealer he knew in the country to find a hitman. The dealer asked for money and was paid $15,000 in crisp $100 bills.
What Gupta did not know was that the drug dealer was a confidential informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The dealer went straight to his handlers, who told him to go ahead and entrap Gupta by directing him to a hitman who was, in reality, an undercover officer.
The Americans have testimonies from the drug dealer and so-called hitman. They apparently obtained details about how the $15,000 was paid and were able to get into Gupta’s phone and take control of it. This allowed them to record calls from Vikash Yadav, a former Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) officer who gave Gupta the kill order.
Gupta then flew to the Czech Republic. He was subsequently arrested and extradited to the US, where he is probably looking at a very long jail sentence unless he confesses. Apparently, the Americans also have recordings of a conversation with Yadav, where he tells Gupta that the Indian government will quash some criminal cases involving him if the hit goes ahead.
The Indian government has taken the allegations seriously. Yadav has been sacked from R&AW and currently faces criminal charges in an unrelated matter. It could be that India is keeping the criminal charges going so it has an excuse to not extradite Yadav to the US, saying that the Indian cases should first be settled.
There is now a campaign on Indian social media and some mainstream media to paint Yadav as a victim. His defenders say that he’s been thrown under the bus for merely doing his job and carrying out orders from his R&AW superiors. There is a longstanding tradition that when covert operations go wrong, agencies protect their deniability and sacrifice the operative in question. Perhaps that is what is happening to Yadav.
So far, our attention in India has focused on the double standards exhibited by the Americans. How can it be right for the US to cheerfully assassinate those it regards as terrorists all over the world while simultaneously telling India that assassinations are bad?
This is a fair point, made all the more relevant by the threats Pannun has issued against Air India flights. It is a safe assumption that if Pannun issued similar threats to say, Delta or American Airlines, he would be in jail right now. And if he was an Arab, he would probably be sent to Guantanamo Bay or some black site. But because he’s only threatening India and Indian passengers, the US is actually protecting him.
But let’s, for a moment, stop looking outwards and examine our own role in this case.
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Looking inward
First of all, should we be organising encounters of terrorists abroad? The broad answer has to be that if the US, Russia, Israel, and other countries regard it as the best way to fight terror, then India cannot be denied that option.
Second, even if one believes that assassinations are an acceptable way of fighting terror, do these noisy NRI pro-Khalistan activists constitute enough of a threat for our agencies to try and kill them?
The Khalistan movement is dead in Punjab despite the best efforts of Pakistan and some non-resident Sikhs. The most publicity it has received has been over the last month, and that’s thanks to the R&AW.
Should we be paying these guys so much attention? Should we be going to the extent of ordering hits on Sikhs living in North America? Whoever ordered these hits clearly has a disproportionate interest in Punjab or is trying to make up for not getting the real terrorists. India has been unable to touch Dawood Ibrahim, the organisers of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, or even the hijackers of flight IC 814.
Third, how inept are our external intelligence services? I am prepared to give the credit that is due to our domestic agencies for protecting India from serious terror attacks over the last few years. But our external agencies seem to function as some sort of encounter department of the Punjab police.
Moreover, we seem to have placed the battle against our external enemies in the hands of the gang that can’t shoot straight. The attempted hit on Pannun seems to have been planned by a semi-educated 12-year-old. How can an R&AW officer give instructions on a compromised phone line to his cut-out? How can he depend on a businessman stupid enough to not realise that he was dealing with a DEA asset and then with an undercover agent?
In one of the most perceptive pieces on the subject, Praveen Swami wrote last week in ThePrint that the basic problem may be that senior officers at the helm of R&AW do not know how to conduct covert operations. Many (the vast majority) are police officers who don’t seem to understand the difference between an encounter and a covert hit.
There is a backstory to all this. When Indira Gandhi set up R&AW in 1968, the idea was to create a spy agency on the lines of the CIA and the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). These agencies were run by people who were often recruited directly and then trained for years in the craft of intelligence. To help R&AW reach this level, a separate cadre called the RAS was set up and sophisticated professionals rose to the top of the department.
All this was resented by the police officers who ran the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and were often seconded to R&AW. When Rabindra Singh, an American mole in R&AW, managed to escape in 2003, police officers cashed in on R&AW’s failure. MK Narayanan, who served as Manmohan Singh’s national security advisor, took the line that R&AW was a mess and began sending cops to clean it up.
Narayanan, like his most famous successor, Ajit Doval, was a policeman with an IB background and under his guidance, control of R&AW passed to the police. The RAS is now forgotten.
Today R&AW is, in effect, a branch of the police force, often relying on officers with little experience of tradecraft or covert operations. As we have seen over the last few months, this has consequences.
So yes, Trudeau is an opportunist playing politics. And yes, the US has double standards. But it is time to look inward and examine our own failures.
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Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)