Like US, India should get less coy about surgically targeting credible threats to national security
The article goes to great lengths to explain why the central incidents — involving the alleged assassination attempt of a Khalistan advocate in the US and murder of another in Canada — did not lead to public censure of India by the US. That India today is geopolitically and commercially important to the US, and like Saudi Arabia, it got a free pass from the Americans because they are, at least at present, playing on the same team.
Where the article loses me, however, is in its linking the issue of extrajudicial killings with what it sees as the rise of 'deepening authoritarianism' in India. Killing dissidents, activists and journalists on foreign soil is chilling. And jailing them in a constitutionally democratic country is, indeed, a sign of creeping authoritarianism. But surgically targeting those deemed a credible threat to national security is what the US and its allies have been doing for decades.
Take 'Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta' (2012). The case involved the targeted killing of three American citizens by US drones in Yemen in 2011, a fact publicly acknowledged by the Obama administration. The court dismissed the case in 2014. In the words of Hina Shamsi, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) national security project director and one of the attorneys who argued the case, the court, in dismissing the case, treated 'the government's allegations [of terrorism] as proof while refusing to allow those allegations to be tested in court. The court's view [was] that it cannot provide a remedy for extrajudicial killings
