By Shishir Gupta for Hindustan Times
At an election rally in Himatnagar city of Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district last night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that a decade ago when the country was suffering due to terrorism, the Congress government used to send dossiers to Pakistan despite knowing the origin of the deadly malaise. Today, he said, India doesn’t send dossiers to masters of terrorism, but gives them dose and kills them on their home turf.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made repeated statements that “Bharat Aantankwadiyon Ko Ghar Main Ghus Ke Marta Hai” during the 2024 election campaign and in the face of lengthy so-called investigative news articles in the leftist and even the state-funded media of Five Eyes Intelligence alliance. The recent media reports in Canada, UK, US and Australian media, all countries part of the Five Eye intelligence alliance, have accused the Modi government of involvement in killing of Bhindranwale Tiger Force (BTF) terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, plot to assassinate proscribed terrorist G S Pannun in US, murder of Khalistan Liberation Force terrorist Avtar Singh Khanda in UK and neutralizing anti-India terrorist in Pakistan. The latest is a state-funded Australian broadcaster accusing Indian spies of trying to steal secrets about sensitive defence projects and airport security as well as classified trade information in 2020.
A news report in the West has even named National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and former Secretary (RAW) Samant Goel for being directly involved in the plot to assassinate Pannun albeit without a shred of evidence. Using the US Justice Department indictment of one Nikhil Gupta in the Pannun case as the foundation, effort has been made to tar PM Modi, Indian national security apparatus and accuse the Indian intelligence of running black operations in the Five Eye nations. These UK and US media reports have been summarily dismissed by the Ministry of External Affairs. So what is the game ?
It is quite evident from these reports that Five Eyes intelligence has decided to take on Indian intelligence for getting too big for its boots and are leaking source intelligence to leftist media and their own funded broadcaster to rein in the Modi government. The intelligence leaks to the media are also designed to force the political leadership of the Five Eyes Alliance to take action against India and Narendra Modi, the senior most political leader in the democratic world. The timing of leaks and the so-called investigative reports in these countries substantiate External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s observation that west is not just interested but interfering in 2024 Indian general elections. The naming of Ajit Doval, who former Indian Prime Minister and Congress leader Indira Gandhi described as the best intelligence officer in the world, and that of Samant Goel, who was instrumental in removing black-list of Khalistan activists to facilitate their visit to Harminder Sahib, is to pressurize the west to declare them persona non grata (PNG) and take criminal action against them based on dodgy innuendoes and fishy imputations.
While the Five Eye Alliance is trying to engineer the electoral fall of PM Modi through media reports on Indian intelligence gone rogue, the same media has maintained pin drop silence over CIA’s moles in RAW over the past two decades. RAW’s Rabindra Singh was evacuated out of India in the midst of 2004 election by CIA and taken to US via Nepal as the former Indian Army major was spying for Langley. I should know this because I broke the story along with my then colleague Pranab Samanta in May 2004.
Nothing was written when a retired Brigadier of the Indian Army working in RAW was compromised by the CIA under a diplomatic cover officer in the Delhi mission through a honey trap. The same silence was maintained when another top officer was compromised by US intelligence through his spouse.
Fact is that despite India losing thousands of innocents through Pakistan orchestrated jihadi and Khalistani terrorism in Kashmir and Punjab for the past four decades till 2014, the Five Eyes Alliance wants Indian intelligence not to fly or else they will not share any intelligence in future. The basic idea is to defang the counter-terror apparatus of the Indian intelligence and ensure that it remains dependent on scraps of information from the associates as they are called.
The slanted media reports indicate that after the scrapping of Article 370 in Kashmir, the west does not want to lose the Khalistan lever to pressurize India and is wary of PM Modi returning back to power for the third time in June 2024 as this will take the country into higher economic and national growth trajectory. The political angle in these intelligence leaks is to highlight the Khalistan issue and to ensure that Sikh community in Punjab does not vote for BJP but for those parties who are in touch with western missions in Delhi and abroad.
With the Modi government in no mood of disclosing Indian intelligence operations, there are serious doubts about the veracity of these reports by state funded broadcasters. Fact is that the so-called nest of Indian spies that the Australian intelligence claim to have busted in 2020 had nothing to do with spying on Canberra but elucidate information about the role of Australian Khalistanis and their links with Pakistan via Punjab. The focus was Pakistan and Punjab and not so called trade secrets of Australia.
Since the Five Eye alliance has taken a decision of not taking any action against Khalistani and funding of separatist movement outside India, the Modi government has no options but to monitor the activities of these groups or else India will face a terror attack as these groups are supplicants of Pakistani deep state. The reason why the western media is attacking Doval and Goel is because both of them forcefully raised the Khalistani issue with their western interlocutors and went even to the extent of labelling these terrorists including Pannun, Khanda and Nijjar as intelligence assets of the Five Eye alliance. While these Anglo-Saxon powers were used to grovelling and ready to please Indians in the past, both Doval and Goel are absolutely blunt and brusque in their dealings when it comes to Indian national security interests.
These media reports also have an internal angle as many bureaucrats want 79 year old Doval to vacate the post of NSA and ensure that 64 year old Goel does not get a post-retirement job in Modi 3.0. Hence, media slandering of their reputations has been quietly welcomed by their adversaries, competitors and nasty colleagues.
Although the west, China and Pakistan think that such media reports will damage PM Modi’s electoral prospects in 2024 elections, the result is actually the opposite as the public for long wanted a leader who could take India’s fight into enemy territory. A strong leader who has the ability to take India to its rightful place in the comity of nations. The reaction of the Modi government to these reports was summed up to me by a senior CCS minister who said that he intends to thank these reporters by sending them Indian crafted sweets for acting as force multipliers for PM Modi in the 2024 elections. The majority of the Indian electorate is behind PM Modi and wants terrorists targeting India to be exterminated as it is tired of Indian innocent blood being spilled in the streets. It is for Five Eye intelligence and their media surrogates to come to terms with this reality.
