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Sikh separatist, targeted once for assassination, says India still trying to kill him
Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun stands for a photograph in New York City on Oct. 25.
Jeenah Moon for NPR
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Jeenah Moon for NPR
It is a phone call Gurpatwant Singh Pannun remembers well. It was June 17, 2023. After playing phone tag for a day, he and his close aide in Canada finally managed to connect.
“He told me that he was informed by the Canadian intelligence officials that there is a serious threat to his life and he might be killed,” Pannun recalled.
On that call, his aide, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, said that assassins were coming for Pannun as well. The conversation is seared into Pannun’s memory because of what Nijjar told him — but also because it was the last time the two men spoke.
The following day, gunmen shot Nijjar dead in the parking lot of a Sikh temple outside Vancouver, Canada. Canadian authorities have arrested four Indian nationals in connection with the murder.
Nijjar’s warning for Pannun, a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, also proved prescient. Five months later, the U.S. Justice Department announced it had foiled a plot to assassinate Pannun in New York City. An Indian national was charged in the alleged murder-for-hire scheme, and has pleaded not guilty.
Nijjar’s killing and the purported plan to assassinate Pannun are part of a broader trend around the world in which foreign governments seek to silence critics overseas, including in the United States.
Last week, prosecutors announced charges against a new defendant in Pannun’s case: a former Indian intelligence officer, Vikash Yadav, who allegedly orchestrated the plot.
In the last few years, the Justice Department says it has foiled at least four assassination plots tied to a foreign power. Three of those allegedly link back to Iran, including one targeting Iranian-American activist and journalist Masih Alinejad. The fourth — allegedly targeting Pannun — involves India.
The Indian government denies any involvement in Nijjar’s killing or the purported plot against Pannun.
After the U.S. announced charges in the Pannun case, India set up its own internal inquiry to investigate. Just over a week ago, Indian officials were in Washington for meetings to discuss the case and for both sides to provide an update on their respective investigations.
The State Department called the meetings “productive.” The Indian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
“Well-documented” threats from India
Pannun, who was born in India but moved to the U.S. in 1992, told NPR earlier this year that the threat to his life came as no surprise.
“I have been threatened directly by the Indian parliamentarians while sitting in the Indian parliament,” he said. “They have stated that we are going to kill Pannun, even if we have to do a surgical strike. These are well-documented, the statements of the government officials.”
In particular, he points to remarks Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made several times in recent years, including early this July in India’s parliament.
“Today, post 2014, India enters your home and kills you,” Modi said before lawmakers. “Carries out surgical strikes. Carries out air strikes.”
In Pannun’s view, Modi’s threat about how India deals with its perceived enemies is directed at people like him.
Pannun is a Sikh separatist. He is a leading figure in the Khalistan movement, which wants to create an independent Sikh homeland carved out from northern India. He and his organization, Sikhs for Justice, have been spearheading a global referendum for independence.
Khalistan referendum campaign
Pannun is a practicing attorney. At his law office in Queens, boxes of case files and legal books lined the walls. His legal work pays the bills, but much of his time he dedicates to the Khalistan cause.
Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun stands for a photograph in New York City on Oct. 25.
Jeenah Moon for NPR
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Jeenah Moon for NPR
In his office, he has a green screen set up and camera for the videos he produces and posts online for the campaign.
Behind his desk hung a yellow and blue Khalistan flag. On the wall was a framed picture of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, the holiest site in Sikhism.
Pannun and Nijjar first worked together to document the events surrounding the Indian military’s attack on the temple in 1984, known as Operation Blue Star, and the government’s bloody, nearly decade-long effort to stamp out an armed Sikh insurgency fighting for independence. Thousands were killed.
The two men then shifted their focus to the future and started the Khalistan referendum campaign. The idea is to have Sikhs around the world vote on the question of creating an independent Sikh state. It is an unofficial referendum, and not legally binding.
Pannun has dedicated his life to the campaign. He told his family years ago that his advocacy work would put him at odds with India’s government.
“I have told them very clearly what it would entail and where it can lead,” he said. “That’s why when we are talking about assassination attempts and killings and threats, that doesn’t come as a surprise to us. That doesn’t come as a surprise to the family.”
“Survive to the finish line”
The Modi government in 2020 designated Pannun and Nijjar terrorists for their separatist work.
Pannun rejects the allegation. He said he follows the law, and that his campaign is a peaceful, democratic process.
India’s response, he said, has been to come after him, and that has forced him to look over his shoulder.
“That’s how I’m going to survive to the finish line,” he said.
The alleged assassination plot was not a one-off. He said there are active threats against his life right now. That danger has not forced him to end his separatist work, but it has forced him to take precautions.
At his office, a security team screens visitors with a metal detector. Body guards ferry him to and from work. He had security before the alleged plot, he said, but he’s beefed it up since the case was charged last year.
“Today, what you see is very, very obvious,” he said of his security detail. “This is a message that I’m giving that I’m not out there to do it in suicide mode. I’m going to continue to campaign and I’m going to continue to protect myself.”
Still, the threat on his life has altered, to a degree, how he operates. The interview with NPR was in his office, in part, because it is secure.
“I cannot just abruptly take a car and jump in the car and go anywhere,” he said. “That’s what I have been advised by my security details. That’s where you get killed.”
He’s changed his residence several times since the alleged plot was foiled. He doesn’t go to restaurants much. He said he hasn’t been to the grocery store in years; he gets things delivered instead. And he’s curtailed his on-the-ground campaign appearances.
Boycotting Indian-owned businesses
He remains very active online, though, and regularly posts videos on Instagram. Some of them show pro-Khalistan rallies, while others offer heated challenges against India or Indian officials.
In one from last November, Pannun declares: “Sikhs are facing existential threat under the successive India regimes.”
“We are going to target India,” he adds. “From Air India to made in India, we are going to ground everything.”
Some Indian media outlets interpreted that as a threat in light of the 1985 bombing of an Air India passenger jet flying from Canada to India that killed more than 300 people. A Canadian Sikh was found guilty in 2003 for involvement in the bombing. A Canadian court acquitted two others.
Pannun pushed back, calling that interpretation of his video an “Indian narrative,” and saying he was calling for a Sikh boycott of Indian-owned businesses.
“The objective behind it is that I want the (Sikh) community to stop funding their own genocide,” he said. “I want the community not to spend a dime on Indian-owned businesses.”
Breaking up the Indian state
He’s also come under criticism over posters with the words “Kill India” and the names and photos of Indian officials that the placards claim were involved in Nijjar’s killing. One of the officials pictured was Sanjay Kumar Verma, India’s high commissioner, who was among the six Indian diplomats recently expelled from Canada.
Pannun said his goal is to break up the Indian state.
Gurpatwant Singh Pannun stands for a portrait in New York City.
Jeenah Moon for NPR
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Jeenah Moon for NPR
“I say to kill Modi politics. We are in America. We say ‘kill Biden politics,’ we say ‘kill Trump politics,’” Pannun said. “’Kill India’ means balkanize India. India is not a human being. India is in a union of states. We want to balkanize India.”
Some of his posts on social media are about his late colleague and friend, Nijjar. His assassination, Pannun said, has left a hole.
“You feel the vacuum, but then you also get the strength and the courage: what Nijjar stood for, for what he gave his life, for what he has spent the last 15, 16 years with us,” he said.
But Pannun also said there’s no time to sit back and grieve. There is work to be done, a campaign to run, despite the risks.
“I would rather take a bullet in my head than stop the Khalistan referendum campaign,” he said.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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