“Everyone is Absolutely Terrified”: Inside a Us Ally’s Secret War on Its American Critics
(photo: Christian Blaza/Vox)
A foreign government is trying to silence US critics of its authoritarian turn — and it's succeeding.
I met Raqib Naik, a journalist who had fled his native India, at a coffee shop in suburban Maryland. We sat at the same metal table where he once discussed the prospect of his assassination with FBI agents.
Naik is a Muslim from Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. In August 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the state’s longstanding self-determination rights and temporarily imposed martial law. Indian officials arbitrarily detained thousands of Kashmiris, including many journalists. Through it all, Naik did his best to convey the reality in Kashmir to the outside world — a firsthand account of what was really going on in what’s often termed “the world’s largest democracy.”
On August 15, 10 days after the crackdown in Kashmir began, Naik received the first of three visits from Indian military intelligence officers who interrogated him about his reporting. The harassment forced him underground; he eventually fled to the United States in the summer of 2020.
But Modi wouldn’t let him go that easily.
In September 2020, an Indian military official sent Naik a message saying “i have invited your father for a cup of tea.” In November 2020, a second intelligence officer said he too had contacted Naik’s father, vowing that he and Naik would “meet in person” even though Naik had moved to America. While traveling in another country in June 2022, Naik received an anonymous text message saying “you are being tracked and will be prosecuted.” He flew back to the US as quickly as possible.
Naik has also received a torrent of hateful messages and threats on social media. When Naik met with the FBI to discuss his safety in October 2023, they told him that they were taking the situation very seriously.
Naik, who continues to track human rights abuses in India, received his green card in February. When he called his family to share the good news, his father revealed that, a few months earlier, he had been summoned to a military camp and interrogated about his son’s activities.
At one point, the officer suggested to Naik’s father that his son should write nicer articles about India.
India’s plot against America
I have spent the past several months investigating stories like Naik’s: critics of India who say the Indian government has reached across the Pacific Ocean to harass them on American soil.
Interviews with political figures, experts, and activists revealed a sustained campaign where Narendra Modi’s government threatens American citizens and permanent residents who dare speak out on the declining state of the country’s democracy. This campaign has not been described publicly until now because many people in the community — even prominent ones — are too afraid to talk about it. (The Indian government did not respond to repeated and detailed requests for comment.)
India’s efforts include a handful of high-profile incidents, most notably an assassination plot against American and Canadian activists. But more commonly, India engages in subtle forms of harassment that fly under the public radar.
An American charity leader who spoke out on Indian human rights violations saw his Indian employees arrested en masse. An American journalist who worked on a documentary about India was put on a travel blacklist and deported. An American historian who studies 17th-century India received so many death threats that she could no longer speak without security. Even a member of Congress — and vocal critic of the Modi regime — said she was concerned about being banned from visiting her Indian parents.
“I’m always thinking about the impact on my family — for example, if there was some attempt to not allow me back into India,” says Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).
In some ways, the Indian campaign is more brazen than Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. While no evidence has emerged that Russia threatened harm against American citizens and their family members, India has been caught doing so repeatedly.
And while Russian involvement in the 2016 election swayed few votes, there’s good reason to believe India’s campaign is working as intended — muting stateside criticism of India’s autocratic turn under Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
An American academic warned me that they couldn’t speak openly about India out of concern for family. An American think tank expert described numerous examples of censorship and self-censorship at prominent US institutions. These two sources, and many others, would only share their personal stories with me anonymously. All were concerned about the consequences for their careers, their loved ones, or even themselves — and they weren’t alone.
“Indian Americans who are against the BJP, or oppose the BJP, have been intimidated and as a result routinely engage in self-censorship. I have heard them say as much to me,” says John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “There are prominent Indian American intellectuals, writers, [and] celebrities who simply will not speak out against Modi because they are afraid that by doing so they will subject themselves to a torrent of online abuse and even death threats.”
As a result, one of the most important developments of our time — Modi pushing the world’s largest democracy toward an authoritarian future — is receiving far less scrutiny in the United States than it should, especially at a time when Modi is running for a historic third term.
India’s willingness to go after critics outside its borders — a practice political scientists call “transnational repression” — is a symptom of this democratic decline.
Most sources told me that Indian harassment of Americans began in earnest after Modi took office in 2014, with most reported incidents happening in the past several years (when the prime minister became more aggressively authoritarian at home). Modi, a member of a prominent Hindu supremacist group since he was 8 years old, seems to believe he can act on the world stage in the same way he behaves at home.
Despite the brazenness of India’s campaign — attacking Americans at home in a way that only the world’s worst authoritarian governments would dare — the Biden administration is putting little pressure on Modi to change his ways. Judging New Delhi too important in the fight against China, the US government has adopted its own unstated policy of avoiding fights with India over human rights and democracy.
India has concluded it has a green light to threaten American citizens and conduct violent influence operations on American soil with impunity. And Modi is all but openly bragging about it.
“Today, even India’s enemies know: This is Modi, this is the new India,” the prime minister said at an April rally. “This new India comes into your home to kill you.”
Modi’s “new India”
India was founded in 1947 as a secular democracy, with formal equality of all citizens enshrined in its constitution. But even before then, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had begun laying the groundwork for an alternative Hindu nationalist state. Narendra Modi has been a part of this fight since 1958, when he first got involved in his town’s RSS branch.