Joe Biden has asked CIA Director William Burns to travel to India to discuss the plan to kill a Sikh separatist leader in the US. The US president’s initiative comes a few hours after federal prosecutors in New York charged an Indian government official with executing a plan to eliminate a dissident on American soil. The US Department of Justice announced this yesterday, but did not name the accused official or the target of the failed plot. Only one collaborator was named: Nikhil Gupta, 52, who was involved in the murder of a key supporter of the creation of an independent Sikh state in northern India.
His name had already surfaced last week when a senior Biden administration official announced that they had foiled a plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist guru in the United States. On this occasion, the name of the target also appeared: Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, of Indian origin and dual American and Canadian citizenship.
Now there are new details: The prosecution claims that the Indian official hired Gupta in a $100,000 scheme: $15,000 had already been paid to him on June 9 as an advance for the “assignment”. Gupta, in turn, recruited someone from the mafia who he thought was suitable as a hitman. He was actually an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent. “The defendant conspired from India to murder here in New York a U.S. citizen of Indian origin who publicly supported the creation of a sovereign state for Sikhs,” said Damian Williams, the lead federal prosecutor in Manhattan, reports Portal. The Indian Embassy in Washington has not yet commented on the matter.
The plan was therefore foiled, unlike on June 18 in Canada when Hardeep Singh Nijjar was shot dead in the parking lot of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia.
After Nijjar’s murder, Gupta himself had written to the undercover DEA agent that Nijjar “was also a target” and that “we have many targets.”
Gupta, who was arrested by the Czech Republic authorities in June and is awaiting extradition, also advised the “killer” not to strike during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington on June 21-23: kicked for three days he in action before the meeting at the White House. Biden openly raised the issue with Modi as recently as last September at the G20 summit in Delhi, but has not yet gotten into the diplomatic crisis with India as Canada did, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accusing the Indian government of being complicit in the murder to be involved. In addition, India remains a strategic partner of Washington in the region with an anti-China function.
India has often complained about the presence of Sikh separatist groups outside the country, including in Canada and the United States. These groups have kept alive the Khalistan movement, or the demand for a Sikh state independent of India. Although the movement has lost momentum over the years, it still enjoys some support in Punjab, but also among the large Sikh diaspora in countries such as Canada, Britain and the United States.