In late November, the Justice Department announced charges for an alleged murder-for-hire plot in New York.
The man charged was Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national who allegedly collaborated with an unnamed Indian government employee working in "Security Management" and "Intelligence." The target of the apparently foiled plot was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a U.S. citizen and general counsel for the group Sikhs for Justice.
The episode represents a stark escalation by India's increasingly authoritarian government—and the Biden administration's silence is putting American citizens at risk.
The assassination was planned to happen in June 2023—the same month Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist in Canada, was assassinated in a plot the Canadian government claims was carried out by Indian intelligence. Around the same time, the FBI was meeting with Sikh activists in the U.S. to warn them about threats to their lives from an unspecified source.
Was the Indian government a source of those threats? It's entirely possible. This conclusion is supported by a leaked Indian government memo uncovered by The Intercept, which called for "concrete measures" against Sikh activists in the diaspora just two months before Nijjar's murder in Vancouver.
Something else happened that June: The White House rolled out the red carpet for a state visit from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. By that time, there were already many credible reports from respected human rights organizations—including reports by the U.S. government's own Commission on International Religious Freedom—about the sharply deteriorating state of Indian democracy.
The Indigenous Peoples of the Northeastern Indian state of Manipur were suffering a state-backed pogrom, even as Modi was at the White House. India's religious minorities, including Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, have experienced repeated assaults on their safety and basic rights. And the government has targeted journalists, human rights activists, and climate activists for persecution, along with anyone else deemed to a threat to Modi's ethnonationalist agenda.
So far, the administration has brushed these concerns aside. Instead, they've prioritized preserving the Indian market access of U.S. companies—especially tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta—as well as cementing the U.S.-India alliance in their shared geopolitical rivalry with China.
That's bad enough. But the Biden administration's apparent silence about the threat to U.S. citizens is particularly worrisome.
Consider the timeline.
The suspect in the assassination plot was arrested in the Czech Republic on June 30. It's a virtual certainty that an investigation would have started well before Modi's June 22 visit. And it's unlikely that the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York would have pursued an investigation into an assassination plot against a U.S. citizen, instigated by a foreign government, without notifying high officials in the White House and State Department.
So when Biden hosted Modi at the White House, it's quite possible he knew about the Indian government's alleged plot against a U.S. citizen.
If Biden raised concerns in private, there was no mention of them publicly. Instead, the White House's public messaging about the meeting was quite upbeat: "As the world's oldest and largest democracies and as key security providers in the Indo-Pacific, the United States and India are a combined force for global good."
For the growing number of Indian Americans who oppose the Modi regime's assault on democracy, statements like these are nauseating propaganda—especially when any of us now could be targeted for assassination. The silence of the U.S. government on this issue is an affront to us as U.S. citizens and residents. Worse than an affront, it could be deadly.
The U.S. response to the foiled assassination plot must not be limited to criminal charges against disposable mercenaries. Without public pressure from the highest levels of the U.S. government—including public statements of concern from President Biden—the Modi government will only be emboldened to escalate its assassination campaign.
Earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had the political courage to publicly accuse the Indian government of orchestrating the assassination of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. It's time for Biden to show the same courage.
Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies. He also writes about India.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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