Should we be organising encounters of terrorists abroad?

Now that India has registered its responses to the allegations that it tried to organise assassinations in Canada and the USA, it is time to look at the issue with less emotion and a little more introspection.

Most Indians are agreed that the allegations levelled by Justin Trudeau are part of a broad strategy to use an anti India position to appeal to his Khalistani voter base.

 

Trudeau has been spoiling for a fight for several years now and 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.

 

   Canada’s allegations are based – as Trudeau himself says – on intelligence rather than hard evidence. This kind of distinction is usually made when countries have access to chatter, phone intercepts passed on by other countries etc. but no hard evidence let alone a smoking gun or 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 Khalistani separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who lives part of the year in the US. Gupta reached out to a drug dealer he knew in America to find a hitman. The dealer asked for money and was paid US dollars 15,000 in crisp hundred dollar bills.

 

   What Gupta did not know was that the drug dealer was a confidential informant for America’s drug enforcement administration (DEA). The dealer went straight to his handlers at the DEA 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 the testimony of the drug dealer and the so-called hitman. They also apparently have details of how the $15,000 was paid and they were able to get into Gupta‘s phone and take control of it allowing them to record calls from Vikash Yadav, an R&AW officer who gave Gupta the kill order.

 

   Gupta then flew to the Czech Republic where he was 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 in which he tells Gupta that the Indian government will quash some criminal cases that he is involved in if the hit goes ahead.

 

   The Indian government has taken the allegations seriously. Vikash 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 that 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?

 

"Our external agencies come across as functioning as some sort of encounter department of the Punjab police."

   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, America is actually protecting him.

 

   But let’s, for a moment stop looking outwards and examine our own role in this case.

 

   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 regarded it as the best way to fight terror then India cannot be denied that option.

 

   Second, even if you believe that assassinations are an acceptable way of fighting terror, do these noisy NRI Khalistanis 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 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 we should be worrying about. 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 any serious terror attack over the last few years. But our external agencies come across as functioning 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 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 who was so stupid that he did not realise that he was dealing with the DEA asset and then with Government undercover agent?

 

   In one of the most perceptive pieces on the subject, Praveen Swami wrote last week in The Print, that the basic problem may be that the senior officers at the helm of R&AW do not know how to conduct covert operations. Many (the vast majority) are policemen 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 and were often seconded to R&AW. In 2003, when Rabindra Singh, an American mole in R&AW was able to escape, the policemen 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 police officers 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 inwards and examine our own failures.

 

   Are these really the best spies that India can find in the 21st century?