Inside India’s secret campaign to threaten and harass Americans

I met Raqib Naik, a journalist who had fled his native India, at a coffee shop in suburban Maryland. We sat at the same metal table where he once discussed the prospect of his assassination with FBI agents.

Naik is a Muslim from Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. In August 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the state’s longstanding self-determination rights and temporarily imposed martial law. Indian officials arbitrarily detained thousands of Kashmiris, including many journalists. Through it all, Naik did his best to convey the reality in Kashmir to the outside world — a firsthand account of what was really going on in what’s often termed “the world’s largest democracy.”

On August 15, 10 days after the crackdown in Kashmir began, Naik received the first of three visits from Indian military intelligence officers who interrogated him about his reporting. The harassment forced him underground; he eventually fled to the United States in the summer of 2020.

But Modi wouldn’t let him go that easily.

In September 2020, an Indian military official sent Naik a message saying “i have invited your father for a cup of tea.” In November 2020, a second intelligence officer said he too had contacted Naik’s father, vowing that he and Naik would “meet in person” even though Naik had moved to America. While traveling in another country in June 2022, Naik received an anonymous text message saying “you are being tracked and will be prosecuted.” He flew back to the US as quickly as possible. 

Naik has also received a torrent of hateful messages and threats on social media. When Naik met with the FBI to discuss his safety in October 2023, they told him that they were taking the situation very seriously. 

Naik, who continues to track human rights abuses in India, received his green card in February. When he called his family to share the good news, his father revealed that, a few months earlier, he had been summoned to a military camp and interrogated about his son’s activities. 

At one point, the officer suggested to Naik’s father that his son should write nicer articles about India. 

India’s plot against America

I have spent the past several months investigating stories like Naik’s: critics of India who say the Indian government has reached across the Pacific Ocean to harass them on American soil. 

Interviews with political figures, experts, and activists revealed a sustained campaign where Narendra Modi’s government threatens American citizens and permanent residents who dare speak out on the declining state of the country’s democracy. This campaign has not been described publicly until now because many people in the community  — even prominent ones — are too afraid to talk about it. (The Indian government did not respond to repeated and detailed requests for comment.) 

India’s efforts include a handful of high-profile incidents, most notably an assassination plot against American and Canadian activists. But more commonly, India engages in subtle forms of harassment that fly under the public radar.

An American charity leader who spoke out on Indian human rights violations saw his Indian employees arrested en masse. An American journalist who worked on a documentary about India was put on a travel blacklist and deported. An American historian who studies 17th-century India received so many death threats that she could no longer speak without security. Even a member of Congress — and vocal critic of the Modi regime — said she was concerned about being banned from visiting her Indian parents.

“I’m always thinking about the impact on my family — for example, if there was some attempt to not allow me back into India,” says Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

In some ways, the Indian campaign is more brazen than Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. While no evidence has emerged that Russia threatened harm against American citizens and their family members, India has been caught doing so repeatedly.

And while Russian involvement in the 2016 election swayed few votes, there’s good reason to believe India’s campaign is working as intended — muting stateside criticism of India’s autocratic turn under Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

An American academic warned me that they couldn’t speak openly about India out of concern for family. An American think tank expert described numerous examples of censorship and self-censorship at prominent US institutions. These two sources, and many others, would only share their personal stories with me anonymously. All were concerned about the consequences for their careers, their loved ones, or even themselves — and they weren’t alone.

“Indian Americans who are against the BJP, or oppose the BJP, have been intimidated and as a result routinely engage in self-censorship. I have heard them say as much to me,” says John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “There are prominent Indian American intellectuals, writers, [and] celebrities who simply will not speak out against Modi because they are afraid that by doing so they will subject themselves to a torrent of online abuse and even death threats.”

As a result, one of the most important developments of our time — Modi pushing the world’s largest democracy toward an authoritarian future — is receiving far less scrutiny in the United States than it should, especially at a time when Modi is running for a historic third term. 

India’s willingness to go after critics outside its borders — a practice political scientists call “transnational repression” — is a symptom of this democratic decline.

Most sources told me that Indian harassment of Americans began in earnest after Modi took office in 2014, with most reported incidents happening in the past several years (when the prime minister became more aggressively authoritarian at home). Modi, a member of a prominent Hindu supremacist group since he was 8 years old, seems to believe he can act on the world stage in the same way he behaves at home.

Despite the brazenness of India’s campaign — attacking Americans at home in a way that only the world’s worst authoritarian governments would dare — the Biden administration is putting little pressure on Modi to change his ways. Judging New Delhi too important in the fight against China, the US government has adopted its own unstated policy of avoiding fights with India over human rights and democracy.

India has concluded it has a green light to threaten American citizens and conduct violent influence operations on American soil with impunity. And Modi is all but openly bragging about it.

“Today, even India’s enemies know: This is Modi, this is the new India,” the prime minister said at an April rally. “This new India comes into your home to kill you.”

Modi’s “new India”

India was founded in 1947 as a secular democracy, with formal equality of all citizens enshrined in its constitution. But even before then, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had begun laying the groundwork for an alternative Hindu nationalist state. Narendra Modi has been a part of this fight since 1958, when he first got involved in his town’s RSS branch.

The RSS’s ideology, called Hindutva, holds that India must be a state principally for Hindus. It treats non-Hindus, especially Muslims, as foreign imports at best and invading forces at worst. The BJP is the RSS’s political wing, and it has worked extensively to bring the Indian state in line with Hindutva principles. 

Making this dream into reality has been the purpose of Modi’s political career. Since becoming prime minister, he’s proven remarkably adept at it. The revocation of Kashmir’s autonomous status, and the subsequent crackdown that swept up Raqib Naik, is just one of many Hindutva victories during his tenure. 

His government recently inaugurated a major new Hindu temple in the city of Ayodhya, on the site of a mosque that was torn down by an RSS-aligned mob in 1992. It passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, a law that, among other things, set up discriminatory immigration rules for Muslims. In states across the country, local BJP governments have passed laws restricting interfaith marriage between Hindus and Muslims.

Transforming India into a Hindu state is not easy. Many of the mechanisms of Indian politics, including its protections for political dissent and independent judiciary, gum up the works of Modi’s ideological revolution. For this reason, the Hindutva push has been accompanied by a multi-pronged assault on Indian democracy designed to ensure that the BJP will be able to wield power unmolested.

Two leading critics — Rahul Gandhi, head of the opposition Congress party, and Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of the capital region — have been indicted on questionable criminal charges. The Congress party accused the BJP of abusing tax and campaign finance policy to handicap the opposition. The BJP even attempts to corral foreign companies operating in India into supporting its rule, successfully strong-arming US social media giants into acting as agents of censorship.

Modi’s crackdown on the free press and other critics has been especially harsh. Indian police have arrested journalists on charges ranging from terrorism to tax fraud. Foreign journalists are not immune; in February 2023, authorities searched two of the BBC’s India offices after the network aired a documentary critical of Modi (authorities claimed the search was part of an income tax investigation). The government also corrals free speech in more subtle ways, like using state power to consolidate media control in the hands of friendly billionaires.

These policies have placed India’s election on decidedly uneven terrain. While Modi will likely stop short of stuffing the ballot box, the BJP’s undemocratic advantages, paired with the prime minister’s deep popularity among the Hindu majority, leaves little doubt that he will win reelection when all the votes are counted next month.

This is the context for India’s turn toward global repression: A government successfully silencing domestic critics is revealing its authoritarian ambitions extend well beyond India’s borders. 

“Most transnational repression is carried out by authoritarian states,” says Tom Carothers, the co-director of the Carnegie Endowment’s program on democracy, conflict, and governance. “If you’re engaging in this kind of systematic repression, where you’re going after families of independent civic or political actors, you’re no longer a government that respects freedom.” 

The deported American

In 2022, Angad Singh was finally returning to India. Or so he thought.

An American member of the Sikh religious community, Singh grew up frequently visiting his grandparents in India. As an adult, he began a career reporting on the country; he was in India working on a documentary for Vice in February 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic forced him to return to America indefinitely. Once travel became safe and legal, he tried to return to visit his grandmother, a cancer patient who had nearly died after contracting the coronavirus.

In theory, Singh should have had no trouble entering India. He held a special legal status called Overseas Citizen of India (OCI), which meant that he had a right to visit India on personal business.

But when Singh landed in New Delhi, he was stopped at customs. A security guard escorted him into a room marked “deportation cell,” where border police interrogated Singh — assuring him that if he cooperated, he’d be able to get through. 

This was a lie. Within four hours, Singh was back on a plane to New York. At no point during his ordeal did Indian officials ever explain why he was being deported.

So Singh did what any reporter would do: he started digging. He made phone calls, sent right-to-information requests, filed a lawsuit — anything to try to understand why he couldn’t see his sick grandmother. In an affidavit filed as part of his court case, an Indian official revealed the truth. Singh had been banned at the request of the Indian consulate in New York, which (falsely) accused him of lying about his reasons for entry to India and of producing “blatant anti national propaganda to defame the country.”

This could only be a reference to the Vice documentary he was working on back in 2020. Titled India Burning, the 15-minute feature reported on the dangerous rise of Hindu nationalism in Modi’s India. Singh had only played a minor role in its production: his name isn’t in the film’s onscreen credits or listed on its IMDB page. The New York consulate decided that even this small fish needed frying, and effectively stripped his OCI status without notification or any semblance of due process. 

How India terrifies its American critics

Angad Singh is hardly the only American citizen to experience this kind of targeted repression. In fact, there is an entire playbook — ranging in severity from travel bans to outright murder plots — that the Indian government uses against its American critics. The sheer breadth of India’s efforts amount to strong evidence of a policy: that the BJP government is engaging in a coordinated top-down effort to silence criticism in the States.

“We believe this is systematic,” says David Curry, a former leader of the US government’s nonpartisan Commission on International Religious Freedom. “These are the actions not simply of [an aspiring] dictator, but of a political system that is being used to harass and perhaps harm citizens in another country,” 

One plank is an extensive global online network, including both official BJP entities and aligned non-governmental organizations, that engage in persistent and vicious cruelty against Modi’s critics abroad.

In December, the Washington Post published an investigation into an American group called Disinfo Lab, an allegedly independent organization that “was set up and is run by an Indian intelligence officer to research and discredit foreign critics of the Modi government.” (Disinfo Lab denied any government ties). Disinfo Lab conducts extensive research on its American targets, spinning conspiracy theories that paint them as secret agents of Pakistan or billionaire George Soros. Its posts are amplified by BJP officials and US-based Hindu nationalist advocacy groups, like HinduPACT, that bill themselves as more benign organizing groups for American Hindus.

Falling into this network’s crosshairs can be terrifying.

Audrey Truschke, a historian of South Asia at Rutgers University, came under fire in 2016. Her “offense” was publishing a manuscript on Aurangzeb, a 17th-century Muslim king of India, whom the BJP claims was a vicious persecutor of Hindus. Truschke’s research suggested that Aurangzeb did not target Hindus on the basis of religion, but rather killed people of all religions equally. Such a dispute might seem academic. But it cuts to the core of the BJP’s argument that Muslims in India were historically hostile to Hindus and, as such, deserve to be repressed today.

Since then, she has received death and rape threats — including one sent from a Rutgers phone number. When we spoke, she told me that she has stopped advertising talks she gives on India for fear of “the Hindu right showing up.” More than once, she has required armed security at her public events.

Travel bans are another powerful tool, as losing the ability to visit India can be both personally and professionally devastating to those living abroad.

In February, Indian journalist Vijayta Lalwani found that Angad Singh’s case was one of many where foreigners were blacklisted — documenting over 100 instances of the Modi government revoking OCI status. Her reporting suggested “a pattern of punitive action for criticising Modi, his government or its policies,” one in which “Indian embassies and consulates are increasingly tasked with monitoring and stopping those who criticise or even tweet against Modi.”

American critics without OCI status can simply be denied entry visas. In a March report, Human Rights Watch documented seven cases of foreign critics being denied entrance — some of whom had regularly traveled to India for years.

A third kind of repression involves the type of threats against family members and loved ones in India directed against Raqib Naik. 

Stateside members of religious minorities the BJP marginalizes at home, including Muslims like Naik or Sikhs like Singh, are some of the most frequent targets. The Sikh Coalition, an American civil rights advocacy group, told me that they had “confirmed” numerous cases of targeted harassment in India directed against family members of American Sikhs. The Indian government is especially concerned about foreigners who support creating an independent Sikh nation, called Khalistan, in what’s currently the Indian state of Punjab.

According to Harman Singh, the coalition’s executive director, this harassment tends to follow political engagement, like involvement in organizations and protests that criticize the Indian government. Targets were not only journalists and activists, but also ordinary people who had posted something critical of India on Facebook or Twitter/X. None of the victims would agree to speak on the record, for fear that they’d be painting a bullseye on their backs.

“There’s a level of concern that [American Sikhs] have — that, if anything about me comes out in terms of concerns about this, it’s going to lead to ramifications for my family,” Singh told me.

Several years ago, an American leader of a charity who operated in India made some critical comments about India’s human rights record at a public forum in the US. The next day, the leader said, a number of his organization’s Indian employees were arrested on dubious kidnapping charges. 

The charity’s leader did not offer direct proof that the arrests were politically motivated, other than the suspicious timing and lack of evidence substantiating the charges. Like many others I spoke with, they insisted on anonymity — fearing more retaliation from the Indian government. 

“I don’t really want to draw attention to my organization,” they said, “because we still have a lot of work we do there.”

The final tactic, one even more severe than arresting employees and families, is assassination of critics abroad.

Prior to last year, the idea of India killing American citizens on American soil might have sounded absurd. But in the fall of 2023, both the Canadian government and a US Justice Department indictment alleged that Indian government agents had attempted to assassinate Sikhs living in North America. While federal agents disrupted the American plot, a Canadian citizen was killed by (alleged) Indian agents. The Modi government has denied involvement in both cases, but evidence — including reporting from the Washington Post and the Intercept —suggests they were deeply involved. 

Since then, the level of fear has only risen. Several sources said fears of assassination have increased in the Indian diaspora, especially among Sikhs. Both the Canadian and American targets were pro-Khalistan activists; the Justice Department indictment suggested that there may have been more Sikh Americans in India’s crosshairs.

“If Sikhs are not safe on American soil, where are we actually safe to express our views?” Harman Singh asks, summarizing fears in his community.

When you put all of these stories together, a clear picture emerges. The Indian government has developed a repertoire of tactics for repressing criticism abroad, and is currently deploying all of them as part of a campaign of intimidation in the United States. Human rights activists, experts, and Indian American community organizers are aware of India’s efforts and speak of its campaign as an everyday concern for themselves and people they know.

Which means it’s probably working.

“Everyone is absolutely terrified”

Measuring self-censorship is a difficult thing. But there is no doubt that it is happening.

During previous reporting on India, I spoke to a US-based academic who cautioned that they couldn’t be fully open during our conversation. This person, who studies India professionally, was afraid to speak candidly about Modi’s record on human rights and democracy for fear of government retaliation.

“While I am keen to chat, my entire family lives in India. So there might be some questions that will be trickier for me to answer,” the professor told me.

Among the people who shape the American debate on India — like academics and think-tank experts — India’s transnational repression has created a general and widespread climate of fear. This dread shapes the conversation in the media and in Congress, meaning that neither Americans nor their representatives are hearing the full and unvarnished truth about what’s happening in an increasingly important alliance.

Some of this is visible from the outside. Major think tanks, including ones with staff or projects dedicated to India, do strikingly little work on Indian human rights and democracy, focusing instead on Indian foreign policy and economic issues. Even major events like Modi’s crackdown in Kashmir get relatively scant attention in Washington. 

It might make sense for US-based think tanks to focus more on India’s foreign policy, which has more direct effects on the United States. But when you talk to people involved, those willing to speak openly say that priorities are determined at least in part by fear of Indian government retaliation.

“I certainly know colleagues who study India who have told me they have become very careful about how they discuss it,” says Jason Klocek, a senior researcher at the US Institute of Peace who writes about religious freedom in India. “It’s self-policing, and that’s the ultimate aim of [Modi’s] repression.”

Irfan Nooruddin, an economist at Georgetown University, experienced this firsthand.

From 2019 to 2023, he ran the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a prominent DC think tank. His concern about India’s direction under Modi led him to repeatedly organize events drawing attention to its record on democracy and human rights. These events mostly failed to get traction, which Nooruddin blames on fear.

“Anything that was on the record — very, very hard to get people to participate, and very, very hard to get people even to attend,” he tells me. 

The situation in academia is better, but not much. Truschke, the Rutgers professor targeted by Hindu nationalists, is one of only a few raising the alarm about what India is doing. Her thinking is that it can’t get much worse for her.

“I speak with a lot of academics, a lot of graduate students thinking about their careers. Everyone is absolutely terrified,” she tells me.

For researchers, the threat of travel bans has an especially powerful chilling effect. “Scholarship requires access. And that access being denied can be devastating for somebody’s career,” Nooruddin says.

Angad Singh’s case is a cautionary tale. When we spoke, he told me that his inability to enter India has destroyed his longstanding ambition to make documentaries about the country. “I put so many eggs in one basket. I guess that’s a lesson learned,” he says. No American who aspires to a career studying India wants to end up in a similar situation.

Singh is now trying to salvage something from the wreckage by compiling other stories like his: filming interviews with Indian Americans who have been harassed by the Indian government. It’s been a frustrating climb, because many of the people he’s interviewed are too afraid to talk about it publicly.

“I ask a question and they say, ‘Brother, turn off the camera.’ And then they tell me everything,” Singh says. “Some of the people I’ve talked to, their stories are insane. [But] they cannot speak because of the safety of their own family back home. That is essentially what keeps the truth from coming out.”

The US needs to say no

On March 13, a nonprofit called the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum hosted an off-the-record meeting with officials from the State and Defense departments handling South Asia. The topic was US-India defense cooperation.

During the Q&A, an attendee asked about the connection between this cooperation and India’s declining democracy: Doesn’t Modi’s autocratic behavior call his reliability as a strategic partner into question?

The State Department official took the question, and answered bluntly. “We don’t talk about India’s democracy,” he said, per another attendee’s paraphrase. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

This private admission confirms what has long been obvious: The administration has a policy of letting India get away with anti-democratic behavior. It has decided that American leverage on the issue is limited, and that securing India’s help against China is more important than condemning Modi.

For years, David Curry and other leaders of the government’s Commission on Religious Freedom pushed for India to be named a “country of particular concern” —  meaning a government that has “engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The designation opens the door to punitive actions, including sanctions and suspensions of military cooperation (though these can be waived).

There’s little doubt that India under Modi meets that definition. But Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has ultimate authority on designation, has refused to list India.

When Curry pushes State Department officials, he says they tend to deflect — saying things like (in his summary) “conversation and dialogue needs to be kept open on the topic.” The real reason is that India is too important to America’s plan for containing China.

“[A contact said] the top three priorities for the US government at the moment [were] ‘China, China, China.’ You hear these things all the time,” says Klocek. India’s human rights record “is not going to trump security concerns with China.” 

There is a realpolitik case for this approach. Modi’s repression of Muslims and antidemocratic drift is at the heart of his party’s political identity, and even the harshest economic sanctions rarely succeed at changing something so fundamental. Given that India is an essential player in any regional anti-China effort, the administration is making a cold-blooded choice to push democracy and human rights down on the priorities list.

But there’s a middle ground between severing ties with Modi and the current Biden policy of letting him get away with murder (both in a metaphorical and allegedly literal sense). The US can push on some specific issues — such as insisting that US citizens, permanent residents, and their family members are off-limits — without risking a complete collapse of cooperation on China. Making progress on these issues, which directly involve US sovereignty and interests, is a lot easier than changing India’s domestic trajectory wholesale.

Any new policy should start with a series of unconditional demands. No more hauling elderly parents of US residents in for military interrogations. No more intelligence-organized trolling that directs death threats at American citizens. No more politically motivated restrictions on the activity of US scholars, experts, and journalists. And absolutely, without question, no more assassination plots on the North American continent.

“It should be a red line,” says Carothers, the comparative democracy expert.

At present, little is being done on these issues. Even the attempted assassination of an American citizen on American soil did not trigger any kind of punitive measures against India or officials in its intelligence wing. In fact, the Biden administration has even worked to shield India from the PR fallout — leaking information to New Delhi about a Washington Post investigation into the murder plot without the Post reporters’ knowledge or consent.

The White House’s silence helps strengthen the taboo on criticizing India’s human rights record in Washington. Much in the way that Chinese human rights concerns got less attention in Washington when policy toward Beijing was more conciliatory, the Biden administration’s strategic alignment with India sets the tone for many others in DC policy circles.

To change things, the US needs to back up its private pleas with concrete threats. It can start with relatively symbolic moves, like threatening to list India as a “country of particular concern” on religious freedom if it doesn’t leave American Sikhs and Muslims alone.

The US can and should waive the accompanying punitive measures at first. But if India continues to target US citizens and residents, the pressure can be ratcheted up. Such moderate pressure would surely anger India, but likely not enough to give up on strategic coordination against China. 

There’s no way to be sure how well this more confrontational approach will work until the United States tries it. But one thing is for sure: The White House’s current India strategy is a double betrayal. It betrays American citizens, who have both a right to speak freely and a right to an honest policy discussion about a major issue of public concern. It also betrays something more fundamental: the idea of America itself.

“The first reason for me moving here … was because of the safety that this country would give to the critics, the journalists, the dissidents,” Raqib Naik told me. “That promise feels completely broken.”

Source link