 "From election interference to smear campaign, Washington Post hitjob is an exercise in manipulation")
In a now declassified internal memo issued by the CIA in 1987, titled India and the Sikh Challenge, the American spy agency had called the Khalistani movement “an incipient Sikh insurgency”, observing that “the (Khalistani) extremists pose a long-term terrorist threat that will prove impossible for New Delhi to stamp out.” The heavily redacted paper went on to evaluate that “contributions from Sikh temples (sic), profits from narcotics trafficking, and remittances from proextremist overseas Sikhs will probably ensure enough financial support to enable the extremists to continue terrorist activity.”
While some of the CIA assessment has been prophetic, the irony lies elsewhere. It isn’t known who wrote the CIA memo that had assessed Sikh extremism as detrimental to American interests in India but the author, if still around, may struggle to contain a smirk while reading Washington Post’s latest hitjob on India where Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun is referred to as a “Sikh activist” and a Modi “critic”. In the same way, Osama bin Laden was perhaps a “critic” of Barack Obama, or Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar a “critic” of the Jewish state.
When it comes to the Washington Post, one shouldn’t be too surprised, however. It is the same newspaper that had called ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had detonated a suicide vest in Syria during an American raid, “an austere religious scholar at the helm of Islamic State” in a headline that was surreptitiously changed after severe backlash and a meme fest. The text of Post’s obit still describes the notorious terrorist as “an austere religious scholar with wire-frame glasses and no known aptitude for fighting and killing.”
It is difficult to even critique Washington Post in good faith given its mastery over spreading disinformation and insidious narratives to suit political or geopolitical agendas. Along with other international media outlets that have a strong liberal bias, such as the New York Times, Time or The Economist, The Washington Post seems to harbour a particular animus towards the democratically elected government at the Centre in India.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIn its zeal to act as the cat’s paw for vested interests, the Post has taken so many hits on its credibility over the years that it prefers to now brazen it out, having lost all claims to objectivity.
WaPo’s latest report on the Pannun controversy – where the newspaper strategically leaks the name of the mid-ranking Indian intelligence official linked to the assassination attempt on the Sikh extremist leader even as a high-powered probe is under way in India and a US department of justice (DoJ) trial in New York is poised to begin – is an exercise in manipulation and smear campaign. The malignant hitjob has motivations that are far more sinister than the whitewashing of an ISIS figurehead.
The report, which seeks to implicate high-ranking officials within Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inner circle and even casts dark aspersions on the prime minister through unsubstantiated allegations, loaded innuendos and plain disinformation, while admitting that there is no “smoking gun” to establish any of its claims, seems to be the result of an intra-departmental rivalry in Washington DC and the desire of a certain segment within the American intelligence establishment and the entrenched bureaucracy in Foggy Bottom to cut New Delhi to size, a view that is not necessarily shared by the Joe Biden White House.
Note that the “report” itself admits that “even in recent days, the Biden administration has taken steps to contain the fallout from the assassination plot. White House officials warned the Modi government this month that The Post was close to publishing an investigation that would reveal new details about the case. It did so without notifying The Post.”
The impression that the Post hitjob is the result of one-upmanship within the larger American establishment, where various interest groups are often at play instead of a gigantic, monolithic juggernaut with a singleness of purpose, gets further reinforced if we consider a Hindustan Times report from DC which speaks to officials within the system to posit that “the striking feature of this (WaPo) story is not that the US is unhappy. The striking feature is that the White House has been aware of the issue since at least last July, yet the American political leadership maturely decided to compartmentalise the issue from the rest of the relationship.”
Apart from the attempted influence operation, the other startling thing about the so-called report is its timing, coming as it did bang in the middle of India’s general elections when the Modi government is seeking a mandate to stay in power for five more years and is widely tipped to do so. The Post uses a zealous paywall and makes its content available only to bona fide subscribers. Interesting to note that the newspaper took off the paywall and made only this “report” freely accessible for everyone. The modus operandi is clear. The Post wanted as many readers as possible in India, where its subscriber base is negligibly small, to read the “report” while they are lining up to cast their votes.
This amounts to interference in Indian elections by elements of a foreign government, working through a media outlet, to influence the outcome of the polls by shaping the larger political discourse. What better way to float the idea that Modi runs a rogue government at the Centre and is facing international opprobrium for it? It is another matter altogether that even if the impression is one of ‘India’s overreach’, that plays very differently on the ground of a postcolonial society that is rising in stature.
Worth noting that apart from the name of the Indian intelligence officer, ostensibly provided to the newspaper by the shadowy forces in the US (the DoJ indictment has referred to the official only as CC-1) who prefer to stay anonymous, the tone and tenor of the “report” is heavily slanted and liberally sprinkled with rank speculation, specious twaddle and pious sanctimony.
The larger objective is to tarnish the government’s image amid a highly competitive political environment – hallmarks of election season in an open democracy – through an adverse narrative that seeks to incriminate key figures within the government such as former R&AW chief Samant Goel, whose tenure ended on June 30, or national security advisor Ajit Doval, who has been singled out for a vicious smear campaign through a torrent of shady insinuations. The Post makes no pretensions about the authenticity of its contentions and instead relies on whispers, equivocation, and obfuscation.
For instance, WaPo says “In reports that have been closely held within the American government, US intelligence agencies have assessed that the operation targeting Pannun was approved by the RAW (sic) chief at the time, Samant Goel.”
Or, let’s take the sentence which states: “Higher-ranking RAW officials have also been implicated, according to current and former Western security officials, as part of a sprawling investigation by the CIA, FBI and other agencies that has mapped potential links to Modi’s inner circle.”
In both the allegations, we have nothing to go by except WaPo’s assertions quoting unnamed “sources”. The readers are implicitly suggested to place their trust in a media outlet that is not known for inducing trust even among American public (trust in mass media in the US is at a historic low.
The slander campaign against Doval takes altogether different proportions. India’s national security advisor, who enjoys a good working relationship with his American counterpart Jake Sullivan, we are told is under the scanner of American “spy agencies (that) have more tentatively assessed that Modi’s national security adviser… was probably aware of RAW’s plans to kill Sikh activists, but officials emphasized that no smoking gun proof has emerged.”
It is curious that for someone who was involved in a plot that has entire DC in a tizzy, Doval is so chummy with Sullivan that the duo has been instrumental in launching the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), one of the most consequential initiatives to have emerged from the US-India strategic partnership.
It doesn’t add up.
Also worth noting is how the five-eyes partnership (FVEY), the intelligence network of the Anglosphere (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States), has emerged as one of the key shadowy operatives behind the WaPo hitjob. One of the writers of the Post report, Greg Miller, “is an investigative foreign correspondent based in London”. This isn’t a coincidence. It is believed that a major part of the inputs for the Post story was sourced from British intelligence networks.
Similarly, close on the heels of the Post claiming in its “report” that R&AW officers in Australia were “expelled in 2020 after authorities broke up what Mike Burgess, head of the Australian intelligence service, described as a ‘nest of spies’,” came a corroboration from an Australian media outlet. The incident of Australian counterintelligence “expelling” two Indian spies from the country took place four years ago, but the report was resurrected, rehashed, and promptly released on April 30 to act as a force multiplier for the Post’s story on India. This, once again, isn’t coincidence.
Apart from the potshots at the prime minister and his “inner circle” the Post “report” is also guilty of deliberately playing down the Khalistani threat through sanctified terms. The objective is to show that a paranoid Indian state run by a rogue regime is going after “critics” and “dissidents” around the world and trying to silence them through “transnational repression”. Framing the Pannun incident in such terms serves two important purposes for the Post, and those instrumental behind the hitjob.
One, it shows the Modi government as “part of an expanding roster of countries employing tactics previously associated with China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes” who are “fueled by factors ranging from surging strains of nationalism and authoritarianism”, and two, it puts daylight between Indian and American operations, since the latter is a known and expert practitioner of the ‘black ops’ art.
If the Khalistani threat is just a matter of “freedom of expression”, then going after “dissident groups” invites reputational damage for India, and New Delhi’s actions cannot even remotely be compared with America that carries out the ‘noble task’ of taking out dreaded terrorists and sanctifying the world. America’s hands may be bloodstained but its conscience remains clear.
Lest the “report” triggers a pesky Indian pushback, the Post makes it clear that “western officials reject the comparison” between India’s attempts and America’s “counterterrorism operations”. At its core, therefore, the Post’s attempt is to reinforce US exceptionalism and reestablish its hegemony as the world’s sole superpower at a time when middle power upstarts are throwing the rulebook at the US and seeking to reshape the structure of world politics.
The US, as the top dog, seeks to reserve for itself the right to “keep Americans safe” by taking down ‘imminent threats’ wherever they are citing “self defence,” including targeted killings of “militants” or “terrorists” on foreign soil, and is loathe to extend the priviledge to other actors, certainly not upstarts from the Global South.
For example, as Jonathan Masters observes in Council on Foreign Relations, “the White House maintains that the U.S right to self-defense, as laid out in Article 51 of the UN charter, may include the targeted killing of persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks, both in and out of declared theaters of war. The administration’s posture includes the prerogative to unilaterally pursue targets in states without prior consent if that country is unwilling or unable to deal effectively with the threat—exemplified by the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”
Pannun, the Sikh extremist leader based in New York, designated as a terrorist by India, is a self-confessed threat to India, Indian diplomats, Indian nationals, Indian political leaders and even the seat of Indian democracy – its Parliament.
However, despite Pannun’s stated intent to assassinate the prime minister of India, the chief minister of Punjab, NSA Doval and external affairs minister S Jaishankar, despite his chequered history as a vital cog in the Khalistani movement that seeks violent secessionism from India, despite his explicit threats of bombing airplane full of Indian passengers, or warnings to carry out attacks on Indian Parliament Pannun is just a “critic” of the Modi government.
A solemn editorial by the Washington Post vows that India cannot be allowed to get away without imposition of steep costs. The Post’s sanctimonious tone is inconsequential, even amusing, but the larger point remains.
As India rises, seeks to project power, so does its need to secure its interests and the safety and security of its citizens. India will also seek to deal with what New Delhi considers as “imminent threats” and these perceptions may not match with that of the US despite the close strategic partnership. These are inevitable processes linked to the rise of a middle power that harbours great power aspirations, and inherent tensions with the superpower and its collective network will increasingly come to the fore, more so as India sees itself as a legitimate pole in a multipolar world.
The Pannun incident could have been better handled but India will look to develop its capabilities and ensure its broad-based authority while acting on its own threat perception. The West and its media will have to adjust to the new realities.
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
 "Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?")
 "As Russia pushes east, Ukraine faces mounting pressure to defend its heartland")
 "Why Mossad was not on board with Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar")
 "Turkey: Erdogan's police arrest opposition mayor Hasan Mutlu, dozens officials in corruption probe")
