By aiding Canada, is US trying to block India’s ‘Five Eyes’ entry?

By aiding Canada, is US trying to block India’s ‘Five Eyes’ entry?

By aiding Canada, is US trying to block India’s ‘Five Eyes’ entry?

In recent years, there has been an ongoing effort to include India in the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing network. But that has now suffered a huge setback with Canada accusing India of being involved in the June 18 killing of a Canadian citizen who espoused the cause for Khalistan or the carving out of an independent homeland for Sikhs.

Set up in 1941, ‘Five Eyes’ is an exclusive and secretive club of spy rings of five governments—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US—that collaborate to intercept information within other countries to be used for diplomatic, security, military and economic benefits and gains.

But how did Canada gather the ‘evidence’ and information about India’s involvement? One, it would have investigated on its own. Two, it could have gotten the information from others.

International media has widely reported Canadian official sources as saying that the allegation of India's involvement in the killing was based on human intelligence (HUMINT) and surveillance and information passed on by a major ‘Five Eyes’ ally.

With Canadian officials freely admitting that amid reports by a US-headquartered investigative news portal reporting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had met and warned several prominent Sikh separatist leaders propagating the cause of Khalistan of possible attempts to eliminate them, the needle of suspicion automatically points to the US.

A premier US intelligence agency, the FBI employs about 35,000 people who are engaged in protecting the US from terrorist attacks, foreign intelligence, espionage, and cyber operations and to combat public corruption at all levels.

The investigative portal—the Intercept—it its article quoted Pritpal Singh, an American citizen who is actively involved with the American Sikh Caucus Committee, that he and two other Sikh Americans involved in political organizing in California received calls and visits from the FBI after Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed.

On June 18, Nijjar, 45, a leading proponent for creating Khalistan, was shot dead by unidentified assailants outside a gurdwara in Surrey, in the suburbs of Canada’s Vancouver. Nijjar headed the gurdwara.

The question is why did the US pass on information of an ‘Indian hand’ in the Nijjar killing especially in the backdrop of very close and growing India-US bilateral ties with India being looked upon as US’ counterweight in the Indo-Pacific to check on China’s spreading influence?

Is it because the US wants to maintain the ‘Five Eyes’ as a purely Anglo-Saxon preserve?

The US’ Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations had drafted a bill for the National Defense Authorization bill for fiscal year 2022. The draft sought a view on whether India and three other countries—Japan, Germany and South Korea—can be included in ‘Five Eyes’.

The draft bill says: “The committee acknowledges that the threat landscape has vastly changed since the inception of the Five Eyes arrangement, with primary threats now emanating from China and Russia. The committee believes that, in confronting great power competition, the Five Eye countries must work closer together, as well as expand the circle of trust to other like-minded democracies.”

Interestingly, on October 11, 2020, India had joined a meeting with ‘Five Eyes’ and Japan and together issued a joint statement in asking giant technology companies to provide solutions so that end-to-end encrypted communications including WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger etc can be accessed.

Before that, in December, 2019, US Congressman Adam Schiff, who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in a report had sought expanding the ‘Five Eyes’ by including India, Japan and South Korea so as to counter an increasingly powerful China.