Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: India’s transnational repression factors into its diplomacy in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third term, a U.S. congressional delegation meets the Dalai Lama in India, and Pakistan’s government announces its first budget.
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On Monday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with his Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, in New Delhi. The officials also led the second meeting of the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, a joint project launched in 2022 to strengthen technology collaboration to counter China. A joint fact sheet released after the meeting laid out plans for cooperation on defense innovation, space technology, and telecommunications.
While not mentioned publicly, it’s likely that Sullivan also brought up India’s transnational repression—a tension point that affects New Delhi’s relations with several key Western partners, including Washington, and could even undermine strategic tech collaboration. Navigating this issue will be a notable foreign-policy challenge for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he begins his third term.
Last Friday, Indian national Nikhil Gupta arrived in the United States after being extradited from the Czech Republic. A U.S. indictment unsealed last November accused Gupta of colluding with an Indian intelligence official in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. Pannun, a U.S. citizen, is a prime figure in the pro-Khalistan movement, which advocates for an independent Sikh state.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday that Gupta’s extradition shows that the United States “will not tolerate attempts to silence or harm American citizens.” The same day, Gupta appeared in a federal court in Manhattan and pleaded not guilty. His next court appearance will be on June 28.
Gupta’s arrival in the United States comes on the heels of bombshell reports alleging that India has recently targeted Sikh communities in Australia and Canada, two other key Indian partners. On Sunday, an Australian Broadcasting Corp. investigation alleged that India was spying on Indian Australians, threatening Sikh diaspora members, and engaging in political interference.
A few weeks earlier, Canada’s government issued a report laying out extensive Indian political interference in the country, calling India the second-biggest threat to Canada’s democracy after China. Last year, Canada accused India’s government of involvement in the assassination of another pro-Khalistan activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia last June.
The Khalistan issue presents a delicate diplomatic dilemma for Modi. New Delhi insists that Western governments are ignoring individuals driving the resurgence of a serious security threat to India. (In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Khalistan movement was a full-fledged insurgency.) But both the United States and Canada insist that India has aided illegal acts on their soil against their citizens, who have not broken any local laws. Neither side is budging.
The United States, Australia, and Canada all share India’s strategic goal of countering China. Washington and Canberra are especially close friends of New Delhi. India-Canada ties are more fraught; New Delhi argues that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government goes out of its way to appease Sikh separatists. India may hope its status as a strategically significant state will prevent either the United States or Australia from responding harshly to India’s actions.
On that note, New Delhi may be right. Western governments face their own challenges balancing strategic imperatives with legal and security concerns about Indian transnational repression. However, so far they have deferred to the strategic considerations; even Canada hasn’t taken punitive steps against India and said it doesn’t want an escalation in tensions. Still, India cannot afford to be complacent, especially in the U.S. case.
With the U.S. election season kicking into high gear and five senators urging the Biden administration to hold India accountable for the plot against Pannun, Washington will face growing pressure to show New Delhi that it doesn’t provide unlimited free passes. If India doesn’t carry out a credible probe into the foiled assassination—which Washington has consistently demanded—that would further ratchet up pressure.
Given the shared strategic imperative of countering China, the trend lines of U.S.-India ties remain positive. But the fallout of the plot against Pannun could ultimately affect bilateral trust—particularly among the U.S. policymakers involved in the more sensitive components of cooperation, including tech collaborations, which are already hampered by long-standing disagreements over export controls.
The Khalistan issue is unlikely to inflict serious damage on the U.S.-India partnership itself, but it could still complicate efforts to achieve some of the strategic objects currently driving it.
U.S. congressional delegation meets the Dalai Lama. On Wednesday, a senior U.S. bilateral congressional delegation met with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, in Dharamshala, India. The Dalai Lama has been based in the Indian town since fleeing Tibet in 1959. The Biden administration has said little about the visit—but it will certainly be noticed by Beijing.
The delegation, which includes former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is in India for a series of engagements, including meetings with officials and business leaders. The meeting with the Dalai Lama appeared to be its first major public event; the U.S. officials met with Modi on Thursday.
Some Indian commentators worry that the Dharamshala visit was unnecessarily provocative and argue that U.S. lawmakers are using Indian soil to spite China. Yet New Delhi would have signed off on the meeting with the Dalai Lama and likely views it as a good thing, given the intensity of its competition with Beijing. One risk is that China could retaliate through India, such as by stepping up provocation along their disputed border.
India distances itself from Ukraine peace summit. India was one of around 90 countries to attend a summit on peace in Ukraine last weekend in Switzerland. But unlike most of the other governments present, India sent a relatively junior diplomat as its representative: Shri Pavan Kapoor, a secretary-level official at the External Affairs Ministry.
Like about a dozen other attendees, mostly from the global south, India also declined to sign on to a post-summit communiqué. That New Delhi appeared to afford relatively little importance to the event is notable: Throughout Russia’s war in Ukraine, India’s publicly stated position has focused on the need to pursue diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate the conflict.
However, India’s reluctance to take the summit more seriously can be attributed to its close partnership with Russia, which wasn’t invited, as well as to a few announcements from G-7 countries shortly before the event convened. These include a new U.S. military aid package to Ukraine and a new $50 billion loan to Ukraine from the G-7 that will use frozen Russian central bank assets as collateral. India opposes both moves.
Pakistani government announces first budget. Pakistan’s coalition government, which took office in March after a disputed election, unveiled its first budget last week. It was released with an eye toward ongoing talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from which it hopes to secure a new bailout package after nearly defaulting last year. The IMF has called on Pakistan to impose austerity measures and other steps to rein in debt and inflation.
In that regard, the $68 billion budget amounts to a mixed bag. It calls for generating about $44 billion in tax revenue over Pakistan’s next fiscal year, which begins on July 1. The IMF and other donors have long demanded that Islamabad increase its tax base, but that target—which would mark a 40 percent increase from the previous year—seems overly ambitious. Raising taxes in Pakistan is a politically dicey proposition.
The budget calls for salary increases of up to 25 percent for government employees, which would not advance austerity goals. At the same time, rating agencies believe the budget should do enough to reduce Pakistan’s fiscal deficit. Islamabad’s ongoing efforts to sell off debt-ridden public companies, including its troubled national airliner, should also address IMF concerns.
Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will visit India on Friday and Saturday—her second trip to the country in the last few weeks, after she attended Modi’s swearing-in ceremony on June 9.
The focus of Hasina’s engagements, which include a summit with Modi, will be on defense and connectivity issues, according to Indian reports. She and Modi will likely also discuss the worsening conflict in neighboring Myanmar, which both countries view as a major stability risk on their borders.
Strengthening ties with neighbors will be one of Modi’s initial foreign-policy priorities as he begins his third term. India has faced more of a challenge in its backyard in recent years, with China rapidly expanding its influence and anti-India sentiment growing in the region’s Muslim-majority states—spurred in part by Modi’s Hindu nationalism.
Bangladesh is a relative success story for Modi’s recent regional diplomacy. Bilateral ties are robust and further bolstered by the personal chemistry between Modi and Hasina. But the relationship still needs work, especially given Beijing’s intensifying ties with Dhaka and allegations from some Bangladeshi activists that India interferes in the country’s politics.
Lawyer Adeel Wahid slams the state of Pakistan’s bureaucracy in Dawn. “If there is anything that can expose one’s place in our society … it is the interaction with the country’s smug, complacent and rotten bureaucracy, particularly the police,” he writes. It “does not put itself into motion when it comes to the plight and predicament of the ordinary citizens.”
A Daily Mirror editorial argues that economic stress is a factor prompting former Sri Lankan soldiers to go fight in Ukraine: “Rather than accusing Russia, Ukraine or any other country of recruiting our military personnel to fight in their wars, can we not offer these men and women who served this country a formal education to better themselves in more peaceful occupations?”
In the Daily Star, writer Sarzah Yeasmin discusses the challenges faced by Bangladeshi Americans. They “make up one of the fastest growing low-income communities in cities like New York,” she writes. “This community experiences acute health disparities and neglect, coupled with high rates of discrimination and low social support.”
The post The West Eyes India’s Transnational Repression appeared first on Foreign Policy.
