Before Biden-Modi talks, US officials meet anti-India pro-Khalistani American Sikhs

New Delhi: A day before President Joe Biden hosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his hometown in Delaware, the officials of his National Security Council met a delegation of American Sikhs in Washington DC and reaffirmed the commitment of the United States government to protect them from any act of transnational repression.

The Biden Administration engaged the American-Sikh organisations, known for supporting secessionist campaigns in favour of carving out Khalistan from India, even as a court in the US has summoned the Government of India and some of its top security officials following a lawsuit filed by Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a leader of the Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), in connection with the allegation of an attempt to assassinate him.

The two developments just before the Modi-Biden meeting at Wilmington, Delaware renewed the focus on the allegations about India’s intelligence agencies plotting to assassinate Khalistani Sikh activists in the US.

Besides, Adam Schiff, a member of the American House of Representatives, early this week introduced the Transnational Repression Reporting Act of 2024, which would require the Attorney General, in coordination with other relevant federal agencies, to report cases of transnational repression against people in the US.

“Thankful to US officials for their vigilance in protecting Sikh Americans. We will hold them to their assurances to do more in safeguarding our community. Freedom and justice must prevail,” Pritpal Singh of the American Sikh Caucus Committee posted on X after the US National Security Council officials met him and the representatives of other organisations, including the Sikh Coalition and Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund (SALDEF).

The organisations invited by the Biden Administration for talks in the White House are all known for championing the cause of Khalistan in the US as well as for running campaigns against India, which was accused of targeting Sikh separatists in the West last year.

Pannun, a Canadian American citizen, filed the civil action lawsuit at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 17, demanding damages for the conspiracy allegedly hatched by some officials of the Government of India to assassinate him.

The court has summoned the Government of India, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, former chief of the Research and Analytical Wing Samant Goel, Vikram Yadav, who was identified as an agent of the intelligence agency, and Nikhil Gupta, a businessman now incarcerated in the US for allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill him in New York. New Delhi dismissed the lawsuit as “completely unwarranted and unsubstantiated imputations” and underlined the SFJ leader’s extremist antecedents.

Gupta had been arrested in the Czech Republic on June 30 following an extradition request by the US. A few weeks later, the US had formally requested the Czech Republic to extradite him. The Municipal Court in Prague had then ruled in favour of his extradition. Czech Justice Minister Pavel Blažek had on June 6 this year approved his extradition after he had exhausted all legal options. He had been extradited to the US on June 15.

The US prosecutors on November 29, 2023, alleged that Gupta had been an associate of an official of an agency of the Government of India and the official had engaged him to hire a hitman to assassinate Pannun, the general counsel of the SFJ.

The allegation by Washington DC against New Delhi had followed a similar claim by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government in Ottawa about the role of India in the June 18, 2023, killing of another Khalistani Sikh extremist Hardeep Singh Nijjar at the parking lot of a gurdwara at Surrey in the British Columbia province of Canada.

Though New Delhi had dismissed the allegation, the Biden Administration had been nudging the Government of India to cooperate in the probe launched by the agencies of the Government of Canada in connection with the murder. It had also been revealed that the US had provided intelligence inputs to help Canada accuse India of the killing of Nijjar.

After Gupta was extradited from the Czech Republic to the US, the Biden Administration said that it would not tolerate the attempts to silence or harm Americans. The US Justice Department went on to say that the murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by an employee of the Government of India was “a brazen attempt to silence a political activist for exercising a quintessential American right: his freedom of speech”. The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stated that it would continue to work with its partners at home and abroad to protect the US citizens and their “sacred rights”.

“With transnational repression on the rise, the American people deserve to know if foreign governments are working to intimidate, harass, harm or kill individuals within the United States whom they view as hostile to their regimes,” Schiff said after introducing the bipartisan Transnational Repression Reporting Act of 2024 in the US House of Representatives.

“The Transnational Repression Reporting Act is a major step forward in protecting the freedom of speech and civil rights of Americans,” a press release issued by Schiff’s office quoted Kiran Kaur Gill, executive director of the SALDEF, saying. “We are deeply grateful to Congressman Schiff for proposing this legislation and taking the continuing threat of all transnational repression, including India’s recent targeting of Sikhs, seriously,” Harman Singh, executive director of the Sikh Coalition, said.

“India must be made accountable for transnational repression of Sikhs and this bill helps combat the oppression and intimidation Sikhs are facing in America,” Swaranjit Singh Khalsa, one of the Directors of Sikh Assembly of America, said.