Sikh assassination plots: Why would India risk so much?

The Foreign Affairs journal discusses the alleged involvement of an Indian government official in attempting to assassinate a US citizen, who is an activist advocating for the secession of the Indian state of Punjab to form an independent country. The article explores the motivations behind such actions and delves into the complex relationship between the Indian government, Sikh separatism, and the Hindu nationalist agenda led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

"On November 29, the US Department of Justice made a startling announcement: an Indian government official had tried to assassinate a US citizen on American soil. According to the DOJ, the official offered to pay $100,000 for a hitman to murder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun—an activist who has called for the Indian state of Punjab to secede and form an independent country. He is not the first Sikh separatist Indian that officials have been accused of trying to kill. Just two months earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a separatist gunned down in June outside a Sikh place of worship in British Columbia.

Both the attempted killing of Pannun and the successful killing of Nijjar have prompted outrage from human rights activists around the world, as well as from US and Canadian politicians. But the incidents have also prompted confusion. India is, ostensibly, friends with Canada and the United States. New Delhi has sought closer ties with Washington as both governments look to constrain Beijing’s ambitions. Sikh separatism may have been a threat to the Indian state in the 1980s and 1990s, when separatists waged a bloody insurgency in hopes of turning Punjab into an independent state called Khalistan. But it has since largely faded, with the cause kept alive mostly by zealots in the diaspora. Why, then, would India jeopardize important geopolitical relationships for the sake of murdering two individuals on the political fringe?

In its response to Nijjar’s killing, New Delhi hinted that the answer had to do with India’s security. The government accused Canada of providing 'shelter' to 'terrorists and extremists' who 'threaten India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity', even as it denied responsibility for the attack. Other analysts have suggested the assassinations are designed to bolster Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image as a strong and decisive leader.

But neither hypothesis is compelling. Sikh secessionism has not returned to India. And if the government were looking to bolster Modi’s image as a strong Hindu nationalist leader, posturing that invokes an Islamist threat—with Pakistan as the perfect stand-in—would work much better. After all, New Delhi did just that ahead of elections in 2019; in February of that year, India claimed its aircraft hit targets in Pakistan in retaliation for a militant attack on an Indian army convoy in Kashmir.

Instead, to understand the assassinations, one must understand the ideological project Modi champions—and how Sikhs make it more difficult. The Indian prime minister wants to create a Hindu nation where Christians and Muslims are not equal citizens [or citizens whatsoever], and so he expects opposition from both these communities. But Hindu nationalists believe that Sikhism is a branch of Hinduism, not a separate faith, and so they expect Sikhs will support them. These nationalists are therefore surprised when Sikhs oppose their policies and vote against their candidates. They also find Sikh opposition more difficult to overcome. When Sikhs protest Modi’s policies, the Indian government cannot simply dismiss the demonstrators as foreign agents, as it does with Muslims. It has to listen.

To deal with this cognitive dissonance, New Delhi has invoked the insurgency that once afflicted Punjab, arguing that Indian Sikhs are being duped by separatists active abroad into opposing the government’s policies. But this invocation has had tangible consequences. Once the state declares that separatists abroad are a serious threat, then it must act as if this were really the case. If the US and Canadian allegations are true, the assassination attempts are the result of this process. They suggest that New Delhi has come to believe its own propaganda.

Losing my religion

In India, Hindu nationalism is highly disciplined. The movement is largely overseen by a single organization—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—that was established nearly 100 years ago. The RSS is the parent organization of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, and Modi began his career as a low-level apparatchik for the group. The RSS has a core belief that is seemingly simple: Hindus are the only true Indians. Christianity and Islam are cultural intrusions, and their practitioners are, at best, second-class citizens. At worst, they are dangerous.

The RSS, however, is not as hateful toward India’s other religious groups. That is because it barely recognizes them. According to the organization’s logic, virtually any faith invented on the Indian subcontinent is, in fact, a part of Hinduism. It sees many of India’s tribal groups, for example, as Hindus, despite their diverse animist traditions. It claims India’s Buddhists belong to the Hindu nation, as well. And it sees Sikhism, founded in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent in the late 1400s, as a Hindu faith.

Like all nationalisms, with their call to blood, soil, and motherland, the Hindu nation of the RSS—and hence of Modi—was created by gross simplifications and manipulations of history. The idea that there is any single religion that can subsume India’s historical diversity is patently ridiculous. But Modi has managed to persuade plenty of Indians otherwise [often by invoking the supposed Muslim threat], thereby consolidating many of India’s heterogenous groups into the Hindu faith. As a result, the Bharatiya Janata Party can now win elections in most of the country’s regions, even ones historically hostile to Hindu nationalists. The party and its allies are particularly successful in India’s center and north, which are the country’s most populous places. In the last national elections, for example, the BJP captured most of the seats available in almost every central and northern state.

Punjab is the outlier. There, the party won just two out of 13 districts in the 2019 parliamentary elections. This resistance is largely the product of Sikhs, who make up a majority of Punjab. Despite the RSS’s insistence, Sikhs have repeatedly rejected the idea that they are Hindus by another name. This insistence has a long history, but it has been unequivocally the case since 1897, when Kahan Singh Nabha—a prominent Sikh thinker—wrote a book entitled Hum Hindu Nahin Hai: We Are Not Hindus. No serious Sikh thinker or leader has challenged his work. And as voting patterns make clear, the community has no interest in being part of a Hindu nationalist state.

In theory, Sikh opposition should not be a problem for the Modi government. There are just over 20 million Sikhs in India, making them less than two percent of the country’s population. But the group has an outsize presence in Indian life. Sikhs have a long tradition of service in the Indian Army, where they are hugely overrepresented. Sikh farmers still produce a great part of India’s grain. As a result, the community can complicate Modi’s agenda.

Consider, for instance, New Delhi’s attempt to overhaul the Indian agricultural sector. In 2020, the BJP passed laws that would have allowed private traders to bypass government marketing boards and purchase produce directly from farmers. According to New Delhi, the reforms would cut back on government waste and help modernize the state. But many farmers saw the reforms as an effort to leave them at the mercy of private buyers who would deny them fair prices. They protested the reforms en masse, shutting down roads and railways across north India. Sikh farmers from Punjab formed the backbone of the demonstrations.

The BJP, of course, is no stranger to large protests. Muslims have repeatedly demonstrated against the party’s policies, which threaten to deprive them of citizenship and which have already subjugated the one state where Muslims constituted a majority. The government responded by declaring that the demonstrators were 'antinationals' and, in many cases, using violence to shut them down. But it could not afford to follow the same template with Sikhs. Because the BJP sees Sikhs as Hindus, it instead had to [largely] respect the group’s rights and pay attention to its grievances about the farm laws. Eventually, Modi conceded: the BJP repealed the bills in 2021. It was a major loss of face for a prime minister accustomed to winning. In fact, it may be his biggest-ever defeat in nearly ten years of rule.

Imagined enemies

The BJP, however, did not lose gracefully. Instead, it began looking for a way to delegitimize Sikhs as a political entity. The party still could not turn against the entire community, but it could invoke the history of secession, and so it did. At a critical point during the protests, when the Supreme Court weighed in on the validity of the farm laws, the government told the justices that the protest had been infiltrated by Khalistanis. [The court, contrary to the government’s wishes, went ahead and suspended the legislation.] Not long after the farm bills died, RSS affiliates began claiming their rollback was necessary to stop separatism from growing among Sikhs.

Blaming Khalistanis for the agricultural defeat has not been easy, and for a very simple reason: within India, there is no Sikh separatism to speak of. The secessionism that drove the insurgency in Punjab during the 1980s and 1990s lost traction decades ago. In the previous 20 years, there have been only a handful of Khalistan-related fatalities. [For comparison, there are roughly 400 terror-related deaths in India each year.] And according to a security assessment written by South Asia’s Institute for Conflict Management—based on Indian government data—the seven Sikh separatist murders that did happen between 2019 and 2022 were carried out by petty criminals and gangsters, not ideologues.

But there is still an active separatist movement among Sikhs living abroad, particularly in Canada and the United Kingdom. As a result, the Modi government has trained its focus overseas. It has, for example, fervently decried the vandalism of Indian consulates and Hindu temples by Sikh separatists in Australia, Canada, and the United States [although in at least one instance, local police have said the vandalism may have been committed by Hindus].

The international threat is still a figment of the BJP’s imagination. There are more Khalistanis internationally than in India, but the Sikh diaspora has never actually been dominated by separatists. Yet the more the Modi government has played up their supposed threat, the more visible Sikh secessionists have become. The result is a dynamic that India has experienced before. According to a number of recent books by senior retired officials, including some who worked for the Indian intelligence services, the Khalistani threat was also hyped by the Indian security establishment for narrow, domestic aims in the 1980s. In that era, the goal was to sideline mainstream, moderate Sikh politicians opposed to the central government led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The result was catastrophic. Sikh hard-liners gained strength, and in December 1983, a group of Sikh militants set up inside the complex of the holiest Sikh shrine: the Golden Temple. In response, Gandhi carried out an ill-planned and poorly executed army attack on the site in 1984, causing significant structural damage. She was then assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards. During the following days, Hindu mobs slaughtered Sikhs across north India, including 2,700 in New Delhi alone. The decadelong separatist insurgency began shortly thereafter.

India’s current national security adviser, Ajit Doval, dealt with the Sikh insurgency as an official in the Indian Intelligence Bureau in the 1980s, and he operates with the same worldview today. His vision for national security under the Modi government, often termed the Doval doctrine, states that India will fight not only on its own territory but also on foreign soil when it becomes the source of a security threat. All indications show that that Doval has played a key role in the government hyping up Khalistan. Ever since the end of the farm protests, the Indian government, represented by Doval, has made Khalistan the primary focus in interactions with the security establishments of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The Indian intelligence agencies, that are free from legislative oversight, fall within the ambit of Doval in his role as national security adviser. If the US and Canadian allegations prove to be correct, it is likely that the plans to kill Pannun and Nijar were initiated with the knowledge or clearance of Doval. He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.

Reaping and sowing

India’s alleged involvement in the attempted assassinations is already causing harm. According to The Print, an Indian news outlet, the United Kingdom and the United States asked two senior officials in India’s Research and Analysis Wing—the intelligence agency that deals with external security—to leave their stations in London and San Francisco ahead of the US indictment. The Print also reported that the United States blocked the agency from replacing its station head in Washington, D.C. This seriously impairs India’s intelligence capacity abroad and suggests that, at least in the short term, the country will face difficulty getting information or acting in cooperation with most Western security agencies.

Such an outcome is a significant loss for India. But it still pales in comparison with what the alleged assassination attempts imply within the country. In fact, the potential for long-term trouble is even greater today than it was under Gandhi. At that time, an autocratic central leadership sidelined moderate Sikh voices and hyped up separatists for political gains. But the focus was still on the near term. Today’s Hindu nationalists have long-term aims, and the cleavage between them and India’s Sikh minority seems permanent.

That does not mean violence is imminent. But if Hindu nationalists are left unchecked, the targeting of the Sikh minority for political gains remains an easy option for Hindu nationalists. At the height of the farm protest, an acquaintance of mine came back shaken from a visit to a New Delhi park. He had seen a group of young boys, not even in their teens, playing around when an argument among them became serious. Suddenly, most of them turned into a pack, chasing after the only Sikh boy in their midst. They were shouting: 'Khalistani, Khalistani' ".