Earlier this month, following a report in The Guardian stating that the Indian government had killed about 20 people in Pakistan since 2020 as part of a broader plan to eliminate terrorists on foreign soil, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh responded that India will enter Pakistan to kill terrorists. A few days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, said that under a strong government, “atankwadiyon ko ghar mein ghus ke mare jata hai (terrorists are being killed in their homes)”. Is the Indian government justified in targeting terrorists outside the border? Rakesh Sood and Tara Kartha discuss the question in a conversation moderated by Suhasini Haidar.
Edited excerpts:
Tara Kartha: There are massive double standards. Targeted killings came post-9/11. They [the U.S.] used drone strikes and every kind of attack and not just in Afghanistan. U.S. President George Bush’s call to the world was that we [the U.S.] will attack you [terrorists] wherever you are because it’s self-defence. The underlying criterion for any such attack is self-defence. The UN allows this. Article 51 of the UN Charter speaks of the right of individual self-defence.
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The problem with The Guardian story is that it includes assassinations, targeted killings, and extrajudicial killings all in the same basket in the same article, which is crazy. Each one has a different legal connotation to it. If we are to look at this issue, we have to look at the differences between these three in terms of international law and international humanitarian law.
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Rakesh Sood: Let’s look at the three criteria. They may be in India’s list, but they are not accepted internationally as terrorists. Second, there is no prospect of getting them extradited to come and face judicial proceedings. Now, you [India] could say that you are in a state of conflict with Pakistan. I don’t know if that is legally correct, but politically you could maintain that. But you’re not in a state of conflict, legal or political, with Canada and the U.S. Self-defence and pre-emption implies that there is a continuing and immediate threat. So, did Gurpatwant Singh Pannun constitute an immediate threat? That is an intelligence assessment. How you tick these three boxes would depend on the justification or credibility for a targeted killing.
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Tara Kartha: I think in the case of Canada, it was also a question of domestic politics. And since (Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau brought it up, I think the U.S., which may have preferred to have dealt with it quietly, was forced to come out. But if you notice, even after that the U.S. has not used it in a threatening manner. They’ve said they are unhappy. And yes, there are double standards, but by and large, you don’t carry out attacks in the territories of what you call ‘friendlies’.
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Rakesh Sood: It is purely a reflection of politics and ties with each other. The Defence Minister is speaking to a country that is in the throes of elections. Politicians at the best of times are not necessarily precise with their use of words, and at election times, even less so. India’s responses reflect the status of importance that is attributed to ties with each of these countries and the current state of play in each of the countries.
Tara Kartha: There has been some impact so far because all this was said publicly. But overall, no, our ties won’t get severely affected because of our ties in other areas, especially innovation and defence technology. In the case of Canada, he [Trudeau] made the error of saying this in public. If he had probably said it in private, our reaction may have been quite different.
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We need to pull up our international image and strategic messaging. For some reason we seem to think it’s not necessary and that our economy speaks for itself, and our words speak for themselves. We need to do a major PR exercise not because XYZ has said something but because it makes sense.
Rakesh Sood: India-U.S. ties are at a government to government level. The U.S. NSA is going to visit India. Democracies speak with multiple voices because there are multiple constituencies. A statement by one section of society doesn’t necessarily reflect the totality of the relationship between the two nations. One way to respond to criticisms is to ignore them. But that is difficult in a relationship between two democracies. So, we need to be able to take action that would address this. Whether this is in terms of more effective communication is something that the government has to evolve. In a democracy, we have multiple channels of communication. We need to be able to make better use of these.
Rakesh Sood is a former diplomat who served as Ambassador to Afghanistan, France, and Nepal. He was also Special Envoy of the Prime Minister on Disarmament and Nonproliferation until 2014; Tara Kartha is the director for research at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. She spent 17 years at the National Security Council Secretariat, which sits at the apex of India’s national security architecture