Opinion
US can’t build a meaningful strategic partnership if it stays blind to India’s core concerns over the Khalistan issue
Culture of callousness in American diplomacy is evident from the way Biden administration handled the Republic Day invitation
Sreemoy Talukdar December 20, 2023 10:29:36 IST
(File) A man holds the flags of India and the U.S. while people take part in the 35th India Day Parade in New York on 16 August, 2015. Reuters
American exceptionalism dies hard. A messianic belief in own superiority, virtuousness and indispensability — that has remained constant for the last two centuries — shapes its foreign policy outlook and governs its gaze towards other sovereigns. This is and has been a common trait of all great powers. It looks great during unipolar moments, but as middle powers become more influential, power is diffused, balance shifts and unilateralism slowly erodes, the sense of entitlement seems out of place.
Consider the fact that the United States is trying to develop a meaningful strategic partnership with India, a rising middle power with great power aspirations with whom Washington has dramatically transformed its relationship across a range domains, and yet it insists on extracting taxes and paeans from its purported strategic partner while appearing blissfully unaware of issues that are central to India’s security concerns, such as terrorism and separatism.
American insularity, even when unintentional, can be disconcerting. US ambassador to India Eric Garcetti had let slip in September that India has invited Joe Biden as the chief guest for Republic Day, that would have made Biden the second US president to attend the celebration after Barack Obama. After a period of suspense, Washington told New Delhi last week that Biden won’t be able to make it due to “scheduling demands”.
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India wouldn’t have made the invitation official or even public before getting a confirmation from the White House, but Garcetti’s indiscretion puts New Delhi in a tight diplomatic spot. It couldn’t have shortlisted a second option before Biden’s denial, and whoever it approaches now to grace the occasion, a day of immense importance for the Indian Republic, will get an impression of being the second choice.
The fiasco also leaves India seemingly at the receiving end of a nasty snub, at a time when America has levelled a “serious allegation” that a serving Indian government employee is involved in an assassination plot of a designated terrorist, an American citizen, on American soil. The plot was apparently foiled, and an Indian citizen named Nikhil Gupta has been detained by Czech authorities in Prague pending extradition to the US.
The US Justice department unsealed an indictment on November 29 in a New York court, claiming that an Indian spy had ordered a ‘murder-for-hire’ plot through Gupta, an intermediary, to take out a Sikh separatist named Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, chief of the banned outfit Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) whom New Delhi identifies as a terrorist involved in instigating violent secessionism to carve out a Sikh theological state, Khalistan, out of India.
The timing and manner of Biden’s announcement left both sides scrambling to deny any link between the so-called murder plot and its investigation. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Washington Post that Biden “remains personally committed to carrying forward this partnership, which he has often described the most consequential partnership for the United States over the century unfolding”, and that both leaders have “affirmed a vision” of the two countries as “among the closest partners in the world” and that their partnership in emerging technologies, space and defence will continue.
Sullivan also told the Hindustan Times that Biden shares a “close personal bond” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and looks forward to engaging with Modi “in the weeks and months ahead”.
The severity of the protestations, that the US side was forced to make through media outlets to delink the two incidents, point to a culture of callousness in Washington’s public diplomacy that has almost become systemic. As if the US is so convinced of its indispensability that it expects its allies and partners to absorb and adjust to its quirks. It also throws into sharp relief the more measured and calibrated approach to ties that India brings to the table.
Throughout the Pannun episode, the one impression that the US has managed to get across is one of inconsistency and contradiction. The Biden administration has been at pains to sequester the controversy to insulate the relationship. The day after the US DoJ unsealed the charges and the story exploded on public domain, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called for “accountability” while insisting that “India remains a strategic partner, and we’re going to continue to work to improve and strengthen that strategic partnership with India. There have been countless high-level visits from the Biden administration to manage the crisis while sending out a message of stability, commitment, and continuity.
But the signals have been mixed, mercurial, and even paradoxical. While the executive is trying to fix the issue and move on, that can’t be said about the US Department of State, the heavily politicised DoJ, US senators who have their own fat to burn or the security establishment, the perma-bureaucracy of the so-called ‘deep state’. In a previous column, I dwelt at length on the glaring inconsistencies and loopholes in the indictment that gives the impression that we are reading the script of an Austin Powers flick. No doubt some of these aspects would be highlighted in the looming legal battles ahead.
Senators on Capitol Hill are clubbing India with autocracies such as China, Russia and Iran and dropping dark hints that arms sales to India might be affected. At a recent hearing of the US foreign relations committee on ‘transnational repression’, a lawmaker from Maryland, Ben Cardin, a Democrat functioning as the committee chair, called the allegations against India “disturbing”, while senator Tim Kaine, calling the charges “highly, highly disturbing”, said India’s behaviour is not that of a “respectable democracy”.
Who’s to tell Senator Kaine that if there is any merit to US charges of India’s lethal plot, by American gold standards of ‘transnational repression’ that makes India ‘very respectable’ instead?
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an American nonprofit human rights organisation founded in 1920, observes that the US continues to carry out targeted killings in sovereign locations around the world, and that the “US targeted killing program operates without meaningful oversight outside the executive branch, and essential details about the program still remain secret, including what criteria the government uses to put people on CIA and military kill lists as well as how much evidence is required before it does so.”
The very fact that a comparison of such nature — that India, too, reserves the right to go after adversaries that are a threat to its territorial integrity and national security — is considered onerous in western media and analytical community points to the normalisation of American exceptionalism.
According to a report in The Hindu, Congressman Chris Van Hollen, a favourite of the Pakistani-American community, threatened to “activate” clauses in the US “Arms Export Control Act that prohibits arms transfers to any countries that are, quote, engaged in a consistent pattern of acts of intimidation, or harassment directed against individuals in the United States,” hinting at the India-US defence partnership since America do not sell arms to China, Russia or Iran.
“The question is,” writes Seema Sirohi in Economic Times, “whether the messy allegations against India will be raised in the House of Representatives. It’s worth noting that apart from the foreign affairs committee, judiciary, homeland security and the armed services committees have jurisdiction over security/intelligence issues.”
Then there’s the USCIRF, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan body created in 1998, that ostensibly monitors religious freedom around the world and gets to deliver sermons with evangelical zeal. It has “implored” the State Department again to “designate India a Country of Particular Concern (CPC)” and called on the Biden administration “to acknowledge the Indian government’s perpetration of particularly severe religious freedom violations.” The Christian evangelists have been joined in this unholy mission by CAIR, the Islamofascist organization based in the US.
Meanwhile, a group of five Democratic lawmakers of Indian descent, Amy Bera, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Shri Thanedar, have released a statement adding to the narrative of ‘transnational repression’, stating that “it is critical that India fully investigate, hold those responsible, including Indian government officials, accountable, and provide assurances that this will not happen again” or else the relationship may suffer “significant damage.”
The pedagogical attitude is evident not just among American lawmakers but nearly every strata of the bureaucratic machinery that uses media as its preferred tool for setting the discourse.
While we find the Biden White House attempting to sandbox the crisis and continuing with the policy of multifaceted engagement with India, The New York Times quotes unnamed “several US officials” who ostensibly have lost their nights’ sleep worrying about how Biden can balance American relationships with “deeply imperfect allies, while also trying to preserve a commitment to the values of human rights and democracy.” The NYT article quotes anonymous “White House advisers” expressing “private regret” that Biden extended a state visit invitation to Modi, the autocrat overseeing India’s democratic backsliding.
These narrative-setting efforts have gone hand in hand with numerous alleged procedural violations by American authorities in arresting Gupta, who according to a petition filed in Supreme Court of India by his family member, was “illegally detained” on 30 June at the Prague airport by “self-claimed US agents rather than Czech authorities”, subjected to over “100 days of solitary confinement”, “not shown any arrest warrant during the initial detention,” and force-fed beef and pork that is sacrilegious for a devout Hindu and a vegetarian, impinging on his fundamental rights. The petition adds that Gupta was also “denied consular access, the right to contact his family in India, and the freedom to seek legal representation”.
While these are to be proven in a court of law through an exhaustive legal process, the impression that one gets is that of an unequal bilateral partnership where India is expected to be mindful of US red lines and concerns, but the US has no obligation to abide by India’s core concerns, even if these are related to terrorism and territorial integrity.
The fact remains, as Indrani Bagchi points out in The Times of India, that as the case unfolds, the US will be “forced to defend a designated terrorist” who has held illegal ‘referendums’ on Canadian soil on Khalistan, has issued numerous threats against Indian diplomats, Union home minister and even the external affairs minister, and had recently uploaded a video threatening to blow up an Indian airliner and issuing threats against the Indian Parliament.
Pannun may or may not possess the capability or resources to carry out his threats, the very fact that he feels comfortable in displaying such bullying behaviour against the Indian state from American soil ought to be taken seriously by Washington, India’s strategic partner.
Unfortunately, the Khalistan question — linked to a gory, secessionist movement in India causing the assassination of a serving Indian prime minister and a pogrom against followers of Sikh faith — is not even of marginal interest to the US and the five eyes network where the Khalistani diaspora activism remains strong.
As Akhil Ramesh and Samir Kalra write in The Hill, “Khalistan… has been tied to bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and the selective killing and massacres of civilians. This has resulted in nearly 22,000 deaths of Indian Sikhs and Hindus alike, including approximately 12,000 civilians. The violence took on an international angle, when Canada-based Khalistani militants blew up an Air India flight in 1985, killing all 329 people on board.”
And yet, when it comes to taking legal action against Khalistani operatives on their soil, the US and its FVEYE partners take recourse to “free speech” and “peaceful protest” tropes, even though the Khalistanis on more than occasion have tried to bodily harm Indian diplomats discharging their duty or set fire to Indian consulates. Indian consulate in San Francisco witnessed two separate attacks by Khalistanis a couple of months apart. Till now, despite India’s releasing of the pictures of 10 Khalistani activists involved in the attack on San Francisco consulate, the US FBI has so far drawn a blank.
This deliberate inaction goes hand in hand with the demand for a concession that India will refrain from carrying out any operation on US soil. This indicates, on America’s part, a struggle to coopt and process the stakes and modalities required to build a two-way partnership of equals — not the reflexive lens of a global hegemon that interprets the world through the twin binaries of adversaries and alliances.
The US must begin to understand that not all partnerships may follow the hub-and-spoke model where American security guarantees will be made at the cost of submission, subservience and transfer of a degree of sovereignty. That model won’t work with India, and neither can New Delhi be bullied into compliance.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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