Earlier this week, it was reported by the Financial Times that American authorities had stopped an attempted assassination allegedly conducted by Indian agents against Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. The allegations are serious enough that the National Security Council has raised the issue with New Delhi.
Sikhs are a religious minority within India, and a movement seeking to create a sovereign Sikh state — called Khalistan — out of what is currently Indian territory has existed for decades. According to the Voice of America, Pannun is an activist in the Sikhs for Justice movement, which advocates for just such a state.
The day after the Financial Times first reported the assassination attempt, National Security Council spokesman Adrienne Watson highlighted the importance Washington is giving the issue, telling reporters: “[T]he U.S. government has raised it with the Indian government, including at the senior-most levels. Indian counterparts expressed surprise and concern.”
The FBI has also opened an investigation, and the Indian foreign ministry has said that American officials “shared some inputs pertaining to the nexus between organized criminals, gun runners, terrorists and others.” The statement did not specifically mention the alleged assassination attempt, but as the Voice of America reports, New Delhi has previously seen the Sikh separatists as terrorists.
For his part, Pannun told the Guardian that “[t]he foiled attempt on my life on American soil by the Indian agents is transnational terrorism which is a threat to the US sovereignty, freedom of speech and democracy, so I will let the US government respond to this threat.” Pannun, who is a dual Canadian-American citizen, expressed confidence in the American authorities: “I trust the Biden administration is more than capable to handle any such challenges.”
While details of the alleged plot and its discovery remain unclear, it is not the first time this year that India has been accused of orchestrating assassinations against Sikh separatists in North America.
In June, another Khalistan activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was fatally shot by two gunmen in Vancouver, Canada, while he was in his truck outside a Sikh temple. BBC reports that Canadian intelligence had warned Nijjar that he was a target, and, following the killing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau labeled India as the hand behind the death, accusations that New Delhi calls “absurd.”
Though the members of Nijjar’s local community remember him as a good man, the Indian government saw him differently. They accused him of multiple acts of terrorism, an assassination of a fellow Sikh in 2009, and running a militant group called the Khalistan Tiger Force. Before he died, he had been working for Sikhs for Justice to plan a referendum on Khalistan independence.
The Trudeau government has yet to reveal any details of its sources for the Nijjar assassination. The American ambassador to Canada, however, has shared a few.
David Cohen told the Canadian CTV News that Trudeau’s evidence originates from surveilling Indian diplomats and that a Five Eyes partner — meaning that the U.S. could have been the source.
The Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance between the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand that was created during World War II. Cohen failed to mention which of those four other allies shared the intelligence with Ottawa, but it is common knowledge that the United States is the alliance’s dominant partner.
Whether or not the intelligence came from Washington, the pair of assassination attempts against Sikh separatists — one successful, one failed — is new for North American politics. With the surviving Pannun an American citizen, North American intelligence services will certainly be watching India with a closer eye.
