How a Strongman Made Himself Look Weak
6 min read
For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, strength is everything. At home, that means repressing minorities and co-opting the press. Abroad, it means responding to any criticism of New Delhi with anger—and even, it seems, with political assassinations on friendly soil.
On September 18, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged that the Indian government had killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia over his useless push for Sikh separatism. Two months later, the United States Department of Justice announced that it had foiled an attempt by India to kill another Sikh nationalist, later identified as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. And last month, Trudeau alleged that India was still harassing and threatening Sikh Canadians. The Indian government has responded by denying the allegations and ridiculing Ottawa.
Modi’s base has largely viewed the prime minister’s spat with America and Canada as a show of courage and evidence that India cannot be intimidated. “We slapped [Trudeau] much harder than he expected,” said Arnab Goswami, a prominent pro-Modi TV anchor, during a news broadcast. The prime minister proved that he was “much smarter” than U.S. leaders, Goswami added: “We sent a message to America that we are not so dependent.”
But India isn’t so independent, either, that it can afford to strain its friendships without reserve. The country’s intelligence agency is now in a standoff with the U.S. Department of Justice. India could lose out on economic investment. Its foreign-policy team is scrambling with damage control. And the very fact that the assassination plots were exposed has undermined the country’s reputation. Posing as a strongman at home turns out to be different from actually being strong overseas.
Modi’s strongman style is fundamental to his appeal. He rose to power by polarizing the country’s Hindu religious majority against its Muslim minority, suggesting that Muslims stand in the way of restoring Hindu greatness. (According to made-up Hindu nationalist mythology, India was a world-leading Hindu nation until Muslim conquerors subjugated it.) When he governed the Indian state of Gujarat, he stood by as a pogrom killed at least 790 Muslims. His party won more seats in elections right after this. By contrast, it lost seats in the most recent vote, where economic concerns were central to the political debate.
Since coming to power, the prime minister’s party has tolerated little dissent, and it has been perfectly comfortable with the use of violence for nationalist aims. Hate crimes have spiked, and Modi has done virtually nothing to control them. Neither Modi nor his officials have themselves been convicted of murder, but media reports have tied them to suspicious deaths. In 2010, Amit Shah, Modi’s longtime deputy, was charged with the kidnapping, extortion, and killing of two people, as well as the killing of a third. Four years later, after Modi became prime minister, a judge dismissed the cases. According to Ottawa, Shah is behind the campaign of intimidation against Canadian Sikhs.
The Modi government’s frustration with Sikhs goes back to at least 2020. That year, the government attempted to deregulate India’s agricultural sector, and Sikh farmers protested the legislation for months, until New Delhi withdrew it. The Modi government—rarely graceful in defeat—responded to this loss by arguing that the protests were the work of Sikh separatists bent on breaking up the state. The claim was patently false: Within India, Sikh separatism has not been a force since the 1990s. But the government could always point to separatists in the diaspora. If New Delhi did order the hits on Nijjar and Pannun, it could have done so either to show that it was serious about this supposed menace or out of anger at the religious minority.
Hindu nationalism, however, has not played well abroad. Rather, it has been an irritant to all kinds of countries. Many Hindu nationalists want to create Akhand Bharat: a greater India encompassing all or parts of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. New Delhi unveiled a mural of this entity on its new Parliament building in May 2023. In response, three states lodged formal complaints. Western officials and human-rights groups have repeatedly criticized the government’s Hindu-first policies. Congressional Democrats and Republicans—including the Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham—protested India’s revocation of the partial autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, in 2019 (it also stripped the entity of statehood altogether).
But few things have irked the West more than the successful hit on Nijjar and the attempted one on Pannun. The fallout prompted Trudeau to expel six Indian diplomats, including India’s high commissioner to Canada. According to The Print, an Indian news outlet, the United Kingdom also kicked out a senior Indian intelligence official. The Print further reported that the United States made an Indian intelligence official leave San Francisco and blocked the country’s spy agency from replacing its Washington station chief. If these reports are accurate, India may face new difficulties in gathering information overseas. Certainly Western countries could start withholding intelligence from India if their trust is strained.
Under Trump, the United States is likely to care less about the extraterritorial assassinations than it did under Joe Biden. The incoming president has praised Modi, and his nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is a Hindu nationalist with ties to India’s governing party. But Trump might not put a stop to the investigations, for several reasons.
Trump is mercurial, and he hates trade deficits. America has one with India. (In April, Trump described India as “very difficult to deal with on trade.”) The Justice Department has already indicted a former Indian operative in the Pannun case—an indictment that an insecure Attorney General Pam Bondi, consumed with silencing Trump’s domestic critics, might let play out. And regardless of what happens in government, the killings could hurt India’s reputation in the private sector. Mihir Sharma, an Indian economist and Bloomberg columnist, recently fretted that the two incidents would make investors “who previously had no real interest in Indian politics” less open to doing business in the state.
Beyond North America and Europe, even countries that care little about the fight between India and the West are unlikely to come away from the incidents impressed with New Delhi. In both the U.S. and Canada, India was caught. The New York plot outright failed. And the details of the operations are hardly inspiring. According to Canadian sources, India contracted with a criminal gang to carry out the Nijjar killing. In America, it allegedly tried to hire a DEA agent. The operation, in other words, was sloppy—not the work of a crack intelligence agency.
Modi should have known that fighting with America and Canada would not help India. The world is full of leaders who pick stupid fights that hurt their countries. Under President Xi Jinping, China has embraced what’s become known as “wolf warrior diplomacy”—or responding aggressively to even small affronts to Beijing. The country, for example, upbraided Australia after it called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Beijing slapped punitive restrictions on many Australian exports. As a result, Australia rerouted those exports and deepened ties with the United States. President-Elect Donald Trump spent his first term repeatedly clashing with friendly countries. Washington’s allies went on to cut economic deals that excluded the United States. At a 2019 NATO summit in London, a video caught then–British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Trudeau, and other leaders mocking Trump. America’s international approval ratings sank.
Of course, states must sometimes upset neutral countries and friends. Multiple U.S. administrations, including Trump’s and Barack Obama’s, have criticized Europe for not spending enough on defense. Washington and Kyiv repeatedly debate the amount and parameters of American military aid. New Delhi has even needed to argue with Ottawa over Sikh separatists before: In the late 20th century, Canada harbored serious terrorists who fueled a violent insurgency in India’s north.
Yet a line divides necessary arguments from wanton confrontation, and New Delhi routinely crosses it. Modi will not destroy his country’s position; India is too important for its partners to simply walk away. But he certainly makes his life harder than is necessary. He limits what would be valuable opportunities for cooperation. And after the quick hit of feeling strong comes the long hangover of humiliation.
