Why India Must Stand 100 Per Cent With Vikash Yadav; He Was Doing Our Job

The United States' (US) indictment of Vikash Yadav, a former Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) employee, for allegedly being a prime mover in the assassination plot against Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun should teach India two things:

One, if indeed we were (or still are) planning to target a terrorist on the soil of a country with high-technology and intelligence capabilities, we must be more careful. We must not get caught.

Two, regardless of whether the allegations against Yadav are true or not, we must fully stand by him. We cannot throw him to the wolves just to protect the India-US relationship. If we ever do so, no future R&AW or intelligence agent will be willing to stick his neck out for the country. 

So when TV anchors make the point that Canada has given us no evidence, they are using a dangerous argument. We must stand by our man, evidence or no evidence.

To me and to every nationalist Indian, which obviously should exclude political parties and former journalists who are targeting the government on the US indictment, Yadav is a patriot doing a tough job for his country.

Just because he may have been a bit careless (assuming that is indeed the case, of which I am not sure) and got snared in a US sting operation, it does not make him any less of a patriot. As the late US president Franklin D Roosevelt said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.” India should never forget that.

A third point follows. Even assuming the US is able to prove its case against Yadav, and even assuming Canada’s Justin Trudeau manages to do the same with some Indian agent (criminals residing in Canada do not count), we should not back down. It is our duty to neutralise our country’s enemies if their patrons abroad — whether Pakistan or Canada — are reluctant to do so.

It is quite obvious that the US is behind Trudeau’s belligerence against India, where his agencies actually named our high commissioner as a “person of interest” in the Hardeep Singh Nijjar assassination last year.

We may not be able to poke the US in the eye on this, for there is a huge asymmetry of power between India and the US, but Canada is rapidly becoming a rogue nation under Trudeau, where all kinds of criminals find refuge.

Maybe, just maybe, if we find someone in the Canadian intelligence agencies who turns out to be handlers of Nijjar or Pannun, we should name them as “persons of interest,” not to speak of Jagmeet Singh, head of the New Democratic Party, who is a Khalistan backer and an anti-India, anti-Hindu activist.

If anyone talks about how India must adhere to the rule of law, we must make a simple counter-point: we are willing to abide by any rule of law to which everyone, from the US down to Canada and Israel, is a party to. The US does not have sole interpretation rights to the term “rule of law.”

While India must not push the US relationship to the brink, we must privately draw clear lines in the sand even with Uncle Sam. We must tell them that we also have “options” that they may not like and which we can exercise if pushed to the wall.

India must also stand by Sheikh Hasina, now under Indian government protection, but that is another story.