In an extraordinary interview to The Daily Guardian’s sister newspaper, The Sunday Guardian, Nikhil Gupta, the man who is at the centre of the alleged assassination attempt on Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun on American soil, spoke of his innocence and how attempts were being made to frame him in the case. According to the United States, Nikhil Gupta was taking instructions from an Indian government employee to hire a hitman to assassinate Pannun, who is a dual citizen of Canada and the US. The Indian government has denied the claim. It has said that assassinating enemies is not its policy. There is no reason to believe anything otherwise. It’s almost a year since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood up in Parliament and said that he had “credible” evidence that India was involved in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar—another Khalistani terrorist, whom the West describes as an activist. Till date Canada has not provided a shred of “credible” evidence to the Indian government to connect it to Nijjar’s assassination.
It recently arrested three Indian nationals, but from all accounts, it seems that all three were connected with Khalistani gangs that function with impunity in Canada. If this is true, it will validate India’s contention right from the beginning that Nijjar’s assassination resulted from a local gang warfare. It seems the sole “evidence” that Trudeau was relying on is the US investigators’ claim that the Indian government was involved in the so-called murder attempt on Pannun. But Nikhil Gupta has denied this outright and has also made the damning allegation that he was under pressure from US investigating authorities to confess to a crime that he never committed. This was the fear all along, that once Gupta’s trial starts next month, he would have been given a deal for a lenient sentence in return for implicating the Indian government in the supposed assassination that the FBI undercover agents have unearthed. That Gupta has not fallen into the trap and has made public what the US authorities have been up to, is courageous.
The obvious question here is why the US would push to the edge its relations with a strategic partner for a terrorist—Pannun. One of the reasons could be that the US is unhappy with India’s independent stand on Ukraine and seeks compliance. It wants India to toe the Western line on the Russia-Ukraine war and sacrifice its relations with Russia. US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti recently snapped that there was no scope for strategic autonomy—which India practises—in the time of war, implying that India would have to choose a side. But why should India abandon its policy for a war that is taking place continents away? It’s not India’s war. In fact, the Global South as a whole harbours similar views. At a time when the focus should be on economic recovery post Covid, why isn’t the West striving for peace between Russia and Ukraine? Instead it’s arming Volodymyr Zelenskyy to keep him fighting an endless war in an attempt to topple Vladimir Putin.
India is clear that it has nothing to do with either the Nijjar assassination, or with the so-called murder attempt on Pannun. In spite of that India is being accused of committing “transnational oppression”, when that is exactly what the US or Israel does—and proudly so. The US has carried out innumerable transnational killings. Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is being celebrated as a hero by a large section in the West because of the transnational killings that Israel under him has carried out, thus pushing West Asia towards possible war. The hypocrisy involved is astounding. To quote from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
What should also concern Indians is the treatment that Gupta claims is being meted out to him. He has been incarcerated in one of the most unsafe prisons in the US, the MDC Brooklyn. Gupta describes it as a slaughterhouse, where knife attacks are common. He says he was assaulted a few days ago, and that he was tortured when he was in the Czech Republic prior to this. And to think that the West lectures India on prison conditions in this country—an excuse that felons like Vijay Mallya and others use to stop their extradition to India.
The bottom line is that this case is political. Those in the West who pretend that this is about the human rights of a terrorist who threatens India with death and destruction and gets away with it in the name of freedom of speech, should be called out for their double standards. Meanwhile, Nikhil Gupta should not be allowed to fall victim to malign statecraft.