India Made a Very Big Blunder While Allegedly Trying to Pull a Hit Job on U.S. Soil

Just two months after India brushed off the shocking accusation that it had orchestrated the assassination of a Sikh Canadian activist, the subcontinent now faces another, similar allegation—this time from its close ally, the United States, in the form of a formal indictment.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was charging an Indian citizen and alleged spy named Nikhil Gupta for attempting to murder a different Sikh activist in New York City, shortly after Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in British Columbia by two anonymous gunmen. According to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Gupta was hired by an unnamed Indian government employee who coordinated an effort from his country to kill “an attorney and political activist who is a U.S. citizen of lndian origin.” Like Nijjar, this particular U.S. citizen was involved with the Khalistan movement, a decades-old separatist effort to carve out historically Sikh-populated lands in North India and establish an autonomous state.

The DOJ’s filing does not name the U.S. citizen, but the Financial Times, citing anonymous sources, reported last week that the alleged target was the dual U.S.-Canada citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, founder of and counsel to the pro-Khalistan Sikhs for Justice organization. The FT found that after U.S. officials thwarted the assassination attempt, they issued a “diplomatic warning” to the Indian government over its likely involvement, with President Joe Biden himself reportedly confronting Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the plot against Pannun (as well as the shooting of Nijjar) at the September G20 summit in New Delhi. The DOJ then prepared a sealed indictment that it initially planned to open after Canada finished its probe into Nijjar’s murder, which had catalyzed a diplomatic spat between Canada and India. (Over the weekend, India’s ambassador to Canada stated that relations between the two countries were finally on the mend.) It’s likely that Wednesday’s SDNY announcement was spurred by the FT report and its ensuing fallout, which saw India respond to the U.S. in a far less hostile manner than it had to Canada—in this case, mostly expressing “surprise and concern.” The unsealing also represents the most direct statement the U.S. has made over the Indian government’s alleged violence on both Canadian and American soil.

Even before Wednesday’s indictment unveiled further details, the respective sagas in Canada and the U.S. bore some unnerving similarities. Nijjar was also affiliated with Pannun’s Sikhs for Justice, which was established to hold 1980s-era Indian politicians responsible for the genocidal anti-Sikh pogroms of that decade—and was formally banned from India in 2019, after which SFJ began organizing a global Sikh referendum in favor of a Khalistan state. The two SFJ ringleaders were also formally labeled as “terrorists” by India in 2020, with the government requesting that Interpol issue a “red notice” for Pannun’s arrest; the international policing body declined to do so. The U.S. also sent its initial warning to India over the Pannun situation shortly after Modi wrapped up his glamorous stateside visit in late June—barely a week after Nijjar was shot and killed in Canada. And both Canada and the U.S. kept quiet about the alleged crimes until news organizations confronted their respective governments (in Canada’s case, the Globe and Mail newspaper). Even after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared to the Canadian Parliament that there were “credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India” and the murder of Nijjar, the U.S. kept its own concerns muted until last week’s FT article. Pannun himself spoke with Time magazine for an interview published Monday, claiming he’s never sought to replicate the violence that militant Khalistan advocates had carried out in the past (which culminated in the horrific 1985 bombing of an Air India flight from Montreal that killed 329 people) and that his home country was pursuing him and SFJ for “fighting India’s violence with votes.”

With the DOJ’s opened indictment, which pinpoints the existence of a hired assassin, we’ve now learned even more chilling details regarding the attempt on Pannun’s life—and its connections to what went down in Canada. Here’s what the Biden administration has uncovered.

• Beginning in early May, an Indian government employee—self-described as a “senior field officer” involved with “security management” and “intelligence”—reached out to Nikhil Gupta with a quid pro quo. If Gupta could arrange a hit on Pannun in the United States, the government agent would help to dismiss a criminal case that had been lodged against Gupta in the Indian state of Gujarat. Gupta and the official met in person in the capital of New Delhi and traded various encrypted phone messages in English, with Gupta saving the official’s name as a contact under an alias. On May 6, the official informed Gupta that they had targets in both New York and California, both of which Gupta pledged to “hit”; later, the official promised Gupta that he no longer had to worry about his Gujarat case.

• Near the end of May, “at [the official’s] direction,” Gupta contacted a potential accomplice who was actually “a confidential source working with U.S. law enforcement,” reportedly for the Drug Enforcement Administration. When Gupta asked them who could arrange a Pannun murder-for-hire, this source presented an undercover law enforcement officer to Gupta as a hit man; Gupta arranged for the Indian official to pay this “hit man” $100,000 to take Pannun out, with $15,000 paid upfront to the “hit man” in early June.

• Around that time, the Indian official provided Gupta with all the information he’d need to locate and snuff out Pannun, which Gupta passed on to the “hit man,” who was also warned not to kill Pannun too close to Modi’s state visit in the U.S.

• In mid-June, Gupta told both the source and the “hit man” that if Pannun’s murder happened soon and swiftly, Gupta’s associates would provide “additional victims to kill” at the rate of two to three hit jobs a month. Gupta also alluded to a “big target” in Canada, telling the source that “We are doing their New York [and] Canada [job]”—the latter of which, Gupta later confirmed, was referring to Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

• “Just hours after the Nijjar murder” on June 18, the Indian official “sent Gupta a video clip that showed Nijjar’s bloody body slumped in his vehicle,” which Gupta then forwarded to both the source and the “hit man.” A day later, Gupta informed the latter that Nijjar was also ranked highly on his target list, which included “so many” people. Gupta also told the undercover officer not to hold back when going to kill Pannun: If there happened to be multiple people at the site, “put everyone down.”

• One day after Nijjar’s murder, per the Washington Post, a Sacramento-based Sikh named Bobby Singh received an FBI call warning of a threat to his life, making it likely that he was one of the “many” people included in Gupta’s lists, and was perhaps even the aforementioned “California target.”

• On June 20, the Indian official “sent Gupta a news article about [Pannun] and messaged Gupta, ‘It’s priority now.’ ” Gupta then told the source that “we have to finish four jobs” before June 29, including Pannun and three additional Canadian targets.

• On June 30, Gupta traveled to the Czech Republic and was detained there at the request of the U.S. government. Gupta remains there now, but will probably be extradited to the U.S. as the case proceeds.

This indictment is extremely, extremely concerning. It demonstrates that at least one Indian government official had no compunction about pursuing more Canadian Sikhs so soon after Nijjar’s murder, that such conspirators actively attempted to avoid any associations with Modi by scheduling the plot around the time span of his U.S. visit, and that there are far more global Sikhs and Khalistan activists who are in danger, many of whom (like Nijjar and Pannun) have lived in North America for decades and have given their surveillance-happy Western governments no cause for concern. Indeed, the Khalistan movement has not engaged in any terrorism since the 1990s, and many of its most prominent adherents have not stepped foot in India for years. Yet, in tandem with its crackdowns on dissent and activism within subcontinental borders, officials within the Indian government are determined to wipe out Khalistan momentum at all costs—even if that involves assassinating foreign citizens in foreign lands. The increasing Hindu nationalist influence in American politics has already played out on a legislative and diplomatic level; now it’s reached nothing less than bloody. The Washington Post reports that multiple high-level Biden administration officials have confronted their Indian counterparts about the attempted hit against Pannun since August. Yet one wonders what it will actually take for the U.S., which has embraced the Modi government closely, to realize its ally may not be working in America’s best interest.