WASHINGTON:
A brazen murder-for-hire plot against an American citizen that authorities say was directed by an Indian government official looks on the surface like a development that could upend the fragile new US-India partnership.
But the countries – all eager for an ally to counter a rising China – appear poised to try to bypass the assassination attempt detailed in a US indictment released Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said the unnamed Indian official, whose responsibilities include security and intelligence, and Indian national Nikhil Gupta, 52, plotted this summer to kill a New York resident who supported a sovereign state of Sikhs in northern India.
They did so — exchanging messages with an undercover DEA agent about the planned assassination — even as President Joe Biden honored Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a state visit to the White House on June 22.
US officials, after learning of the plan in late July, asked India to investigate, a senior government official said. Biden sent his CIA chief to New Delhi and raised the issue with Modi during a summit in September, describing “the potential implications for our bilateral relationship were similar threats will continue,” the official said.
Reading India to investigate US concerns linking it to thwarted assassination plot
High-level meetings and pledges for closer cooperation continued, with Biden’s secretaries of state and defense visiting Delhi this month. When details of the plot emerged this week, the US released a measured statement.
A senior US administration official called the assassination plot “a serious matter” and said Washington expects India to stop such activities, even as the Biden administration pursues “an ambitious agenda to expand our cooperation” with India.
The U.S. response reflects a desire not to let the issue damage the broader relationship, foreign policy experts said.
“The Biden administration seems to be seeking to separate this issue from the rest of the strategic relationship,” said Lisa Curtis, former senior director for South and Central Asia at the White House National Security Council.
Biden has made maintaining ties with India a priority, hoping to counter China’s ambitions in Asia by distancing India from Russia as the US seeks to isolate Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.
“They need each other”
So far, the New York assassination plot has played out much differently than a similar case in Canada this year.
Reading Indian diplomat leaves New York Gurdwara amid allegations of assassination plot
Canada said in September that there were “credible” allegations linking Indian agents to the June killing of another Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Vancouver suburb.
India angrily rejected Canada’s claim, sparking a diplomatic row that led to the expulsion of diplomats from both sides, and New Delhi threatening to break off trade talks.
Instead, India’s response to the US indictment on Wednesday was conciliatory, saying it was taking the case seriously and was investigating.
“India does not share a strategic partnership with Canada as it does with the US,” said Happymon Jacob, an India foreign policy expert at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “Both the US and India realize they need each other, perhaps the US a little more than India.”
The Biden administration’s approaches to Modi were already controversial, with some arguing that the Indian leader’s Hindu nationalism and authoritarian instincts made him an unreliable partner.
Activists hold Modi responsible for religious riots in his home state of Gujarat in 2002 that killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Modi was denied a US visa in 2005 under a US law barring entry to foreigners who have committed “particularly serious violations of religious freedom”.
read more Indian government official directed plot to kill Sikh separatists in US, DOJ says
The June summit was Modi’s first state visit to the US since taking office in 2014. Sitting next to Modi in the White House, Biden hailed a relationship “built on mutual trust, honesty and respect”.
Richard Rossow, an India expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that from the announced timeline of the alleged plot, the Biden administration would have known about it well in advance of a series of major high-level engagements.
“So on its own merits, this issue is not enough to derail ties, even if it caused some deep level of tension,” he said.
Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that while the Biden administration “has bent over backwards to avoid a public confrontation with Delhi,” the sovereignty issues involved in the attack on a US citizen within the United States would be worried the American officials.
“I think the bilateral relationship will survive this fiasco,” he said. “But it will reinforce the misgivings of many who believe that claims of shared values between the US and India are just mythology.”
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