Will RAW operative Vikash Yadav be the fall guy in thwarted Khalistani Pannun murder plot?

By Mayank Chhaya-
Mayank Chhaya

Vikash Yadav, a former operative of India’s external intelligence service Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), could well be the ultimate fall guy in the murder-for-hire plots of Khalistan separatists based in Canada and the United States as independently alleged by the two countries against India.

A superseding Department of Justice indictment unsealed yesterday, naming Yadav as someone who orchestrated the plot to assassinate the New York-based Khalistan separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, designated a terrorist by India, clearly puts New Delhi on the defensive. The indictment says he enlisted the services of Nikhil Gupta, an alleged narcotics trafficker,  to hire a gunman in New York in 2023. Gupta has been in U.S. custody since last year.
Equally, the indictment significantly weakens India’s so far aggressive rejection of incendiary accusations by Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Indian agents facilitated by top Indian diplomats in Ottawa carried out the killing of another Khalistan separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June last year.
The way the indictment has been crafted makes it obvious that both the plots, the one that succeeded to kill Nijjar and the other that was thwarted by a U.S. undercover agent against Pannun were essentially part of the same strategy. In light of the Yadav indictment, it has become extremely challenging, if not impossible altogether, for the Indian government to cooperate in the investigation of one by the U.S., namely the Pannun plot, and not in the other, namely Nijjar’s killing, by Canada.
Reading the U.S. indictment leaves no doubt that both flowed from the same approach by whoever approved the operations. That being the case the only differentiated response that New Delhi has before it stems from geostrategic considerations where clearly America matters more than Canada. The Indian government will necessarily employ a different standard of cooperation with Washington than it would with Ottawa unless the latter too offered the same caliber of evidence.
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, there is of course the thin veneer of justification of not treating the Trudeau government with the same seriousness of purpose since the latter has not offered specific actionable evidence of the same level as the U.S. has done.
That is where the question of to what extent Ottawa has been building its case on the basis of U.S. intelligence becomes crucial. It is quite conceivable that Canada has had to depend very significantly on U.S. intelligence. That hamstrings its government from publicly sharing it with India. Canada is one of the Five Eyes (FVEY), which is an Anglosphere intelligence alliance. The other four being Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. That complicates its ability to fully share such intelligence which may have been gathered collectively, in this case predominantly by America.
It is quite possible that Yadav, who is now in detention in India, would be the ultimate scapegoat to placate Washington. Whether he will be extradited as being wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is an open question. At this stage it is more likely that he will not be. In this context, New Delhi can easily invoke the case of David Coleman Headley, an American of Pakistani origin who was a key plotter in the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terrorist attacks.
Now serving a 35-year-long life sentence, both Headley’s extradition and death penalty were taken off the table as part of his plea deal to cooperate. An Indian team of investigators was allowed to question him briefly in Chicago. Perhaps India could use the same yardstick for Yadav.
Headley’s activities were reasonably well-known to U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the Mumbai attacks. He was at one point also an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as part of an earlier deal.
Washington has no moral high ground here as far as Yadav is concerned. It has routinely protected its intelligence operatives carrying out many comparable plots across the world.
Perhaps the best outcome would be that India and the U.S. strike a deal to broadly gloss over the Yadav problem in service of the greater strategic good. At the same time though if Yadav operated without any major high-level acquiescence at the very least if not involvement, then New Delhi could choose to let his fate hang in the U.S. justice system’s balance. That seems highly unlikely right now.