Foreign Policy: Is the U.S.-India Partnership on Shaky Ground

15 December 2023

By Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and a senior fellow at the Centre for
Policy Research in India.

As Biden declines an invitation to New Delhi, Modi’s government has judged that a U.S.-
foiled assassination plot won’t have serious consequences.

After successfully hosting the annual G-20 summit in New Delhi in September, Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was banking on organizing a leaders’ summit for the
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in January. Modi hoped to host U.S. President Joe
Biden as the chief guest for India’s Republic Day celebrations before the meeting,
following in former U.S. President Barack Obama’s footsteps. Australia and Japan
agreed to the proposed date, Jan. 27, but a senior U.S. official said Wednesday that
Biden had declined the invitation.
Reports suggest that scheduling was the problem for Biden—specifically, the timing of
the State of the Union address that the U.S. president delivers to Congress each year.
But the reason for his decision may lie elsewhere: India’s response to U.S. charges that
an Indian government agent plotted to assassinate U.S. citizen Gurpatwant Singh
Pannun, a Sikh separatist leader, in New York. According to a U.S. Justice Department
indictment, the attempt was part of a larger scheme, through which Canadian citizen
Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in Vancouver in June.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India of involvement in Nijjar’s killing
during a speech made to the Canadian House of Commons in September, and Modi’s
government reacted boldly, denying the charges. But New Delhi has so far promised
cooperation with Washington. Pannun and Nijjar both advocated for the cause of an
independent Sikh nation known as Khalistan. Their efforts to organize pro-Khalistan
protests and referendums in Western countries seemed to particularly irk India; New
Delhi designated both leaders as terrorists in 2020. India’s culpability in both cases
remains to be proven in court.
In fact, India’s outraged reaction to Trudeau came after U.S. officials had
privately raised the Pannun case with their Indian counterparts. Perhaps New Delhi
never expected the Biden administration to go public with the charges—having
overlooked India’s recent democratic backsliding and targeting of religious minorities,
not to mention its robust ties with Russia in the wake of the war in Ukraine. Modi’s
Hindu nationalist government has paid little price for many of its actions, especially as it
has become a U.S. partner in countering China. It may have assumed it could get away
with more.
The plot against Pannun and Nijjar resembles a move that might be carried out by an
authoritarian regime such as China, Iran, or Russia. If New Delhi initiated such a
reckless operation, it would reflect how Modi’s India pays lip service to the so-called
rules-based global order while violating other states’ sovereignty. The dispute with the
United States may not result in serious repercussions for India, but it can provide a
glimpse into the kind of great power that India would be under Modi: one that targets
the weak and kowtows to the strong and seeks to stifle dissent, even overseas.
AFTER THE NEWS of the foiled assassination plot against Pannun became public last
month, India announced the formation of a high-level committee to investigate. It
remains unclear whether New Delhi is sincere in this effort, or whether its promise is
intended only to buy time and bury the matter. Senior U.S. officials first raised the issue
with New Delhi in August, and Biden mentioned it to Modi at the G-20 summit, but it
took media reports and a White House statement to push India into announcing an
official inquiry.
The stark difference between that reaction and India’s response to Trudeau’s allegation
is revealing. At the time, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and other
officials dismissed the claim as “absurd and motivated.” But by the time Trudeau spoke,
India was already aware of information from the United States linking the killing of
Nijjar to the attempt against Pannun. New Delhi chose to brazen it out. In November,
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to
New Delhi to meet their Indian counterparts in a two-plus-two format—seeming to
indicate that the Biden administration needed India’s partnership and was willing to
overlook its transgressions.
Modi’s government wasn’t wrong in getting that impression. India has largely gotten
away with avoiding public rebuke from the United States for policies that actively
discriminated against religious minorities and led to democratic backsliding. The United
States chose to look away as India became the biggest importer of Russian crude oil and
violated a price cap imposed by Western countries after the start of Russia’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine. In June, the Biden administration even honored Modi with an
official state visit to Washington, and senior U.S. officials continued to harp on about
“shared values” with New Delhi.
India also recognizes the difference in geopolitical power wielded by the United States
versus Canada, bowing to the former while treating the latter with disdain, despite the
fact that Washington and Ottawa are close allies. “Insofar as Canada is concerned, they
have consistently given space to anti-India extremists and violence,” an Indian foreign
ministry spokesperson said on Nov. 30, blaming Canada for “interference in our internal
affairs.” This approach comes even though Canada is a member of the Five Eyes
intelligence alliance with the United States—an attitude that should bother Washington.
European countries have previously complained about the behavior of Indian
intelligence operatives within their borders, particularly concerning the Sikh diaspora.
India’s security establishment also may have been emboldened by operations in
Pakistan: Islamabad alleges that Indian intelligence agents have orchestrated killings on
its soil for the past few years. Regardless of India’s response now, the audacity to carry
out an operation to kill a U.S. citizen in New York should rankle the Biden
administration. It seems to show that the Indian government was banking on U.S.
restraint because of the need to counter China.
Some of Modi’s supporters say that his government is justified in targeting Sikh
separatist leaders on foreign soil because they undermine Indian security interests.
However, Sikh separatism and the idea of an independent Khalistan pose little threat to
India or Indians. The state of Punjab has not grappled with a violent insurgency since
the 1990s, and Khalistan has little support within India. Pannun and Nijjar’s
propaganda was relatively ineffective until they benefited from the outsized attention of
the Modi government. It would hardly warrant such a risky operation—but state action
would surely help bolster the prime minister’s strongman image ahead of next year’s
national election.
INDIA IS TRANSPARENT about its ambitions to become a global power, and under
Modi, this aspiration has even fueled a delusion that the country has already arrived on
the world stage. Modi has called India the “mother of democracy” and seems to crave
Western adulation as a global leader. In joint statements with Western leaders, he has
urged other countries, such as China, to follow the so-called rules-based global order,
including by respecting sovereignty. But Modi can’t earn global respect by putting India
in the company of rogue authoritarian actors.
India’s smaller neighbors may provide the best evidence of New Delhi’s behavior if it did
become a great power. Alleged Indian interference in democratic processes
in Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka has a long history, but Modi
has expanded India’s remit with a more militarized approach. In 2015, Modi sent
soldiers into Myanmar, supposedly to destroy a camp harboring militants who had
escaped across the border; New Delhi never officially acknowledged it. The next year,
it attempted a trans-border strike in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. But Modi’s
belligerence—with attendant risks and dangers—seems reserved only for countries
perceived to be weaker.
However, India’s intelligence agencies have come under the spotlight in recent years.
The forced return of Dubai’s Sheikha Latifa to the United Arab Emirates after action by
Indian commandos in international waters in 2018 has been criticized by a British court.
Then there was the failed attempt to kidnap the fugitive Indian businessman Mehul
Choksi from Antigua by British nationals who were alleged to have been working for
Indian agencies in 2021. One researcher counted 11 credible allegations of targeted
killings by Indian intelligence agents in the past two years, and a list circulated in Indian
media names operations against purported Khalistan supporters in Britain, Italy, Nepal,
and Thailand.
After the latest U.S. charges, India runs the risk of being grouped in with regimes that go
after dissenters who live abroad—such as the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who
resided in the United States and was killed by Saudi agents in Turkey in 2018. “We have
made clear that we oppose transnational oppression no matter where it occurs or who
might be conducting it,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said on Dec. 4 in
response to a question about the indictment concerning the attempted assassination of
Pannun. “That’s not a comment specific to India. That’s a comment specific to any
country in the world.”
Of course, the United States does not have high moral ground on the issue. During its
so-called war on terror, the United States used special forces, foreign armed groups,
drones, and airstrikes to carry out targeted killings abroad. The killing of Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan is the most prominent among them, but the United States has also
carried out operations in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. After the
allegations regarding Nijjar’s killing, Indian opposition lawmaker Shashi Tharoor
highlighted this hypocrisy: “The two foremost practitioners of extraterritorial
assassinations in the last 25 years have been Israel and the U.S,” he said. “Any mirrors
available in the West?”
India’s alleged involvement in Pannun’s attempted killing may deal a double blow to the
Biden administration. First, the U.S. president has framed current geopolitical
competition as a struggle between democracy and autocracy—with India as the world’s
most populous democracy providing a contrast with China. Relatedly, New Delhi is
Washington’s chosen strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific. In pursuit of this goal, the
White House has treated Modi’s government with kid gloves. India sees itself as
indispensable to U.S. interests, but it is still assessing whether it crossed a line with the
Pannun assassination plot.
After a classified briefing from the Biden administration about the plot, five Indian
American members of Congress said the actions detailed in the U.S. indictment “could,
if not appropriately addressed, cause significant damage” to the partnership between the
two countries.
However, Washington has sent different signals with its treatment of other partners.
Five years after Khashoggi’s killing—and two years since the United States released its
intelligence assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved it—
Biden’s pledge to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah” lies in tatters. Countries such as
China and Turkey continue to enjoy diplomatic and trade relationships with Western
democracies, even as they are charged with targeting dissidents in their diaspora.
India has likely observed that even if the U.S. and Canadian accusations prove to be
true, they wouldn’t amount to serious consequences. Modi’s government presumes that
this is the result of being one half of what the White House has called the “one of the
defining partnerships of the 21st century.”
However, if the convergence of interests between India and the United States turns out
to be narrower and more fleeting than it appears, New Delhi’s aspirations to be a great
power—whatever that looks like—may suffer.
Sushant Singh is a lecturer at Yale University and a senior fellow at the Centre for
Policy Research in India. He was the deputy editor of the Indian Express, reporting on
strategic affairs, national security, and international affairs, and previously served in the
Indian army for two decades.