From the streets of Pakistan to the suburbs of Canada, allegations of Indian intelligence operations are raising uncomfortable questions about the limits of national security. In the world of Hari Vandra, such operations might be the stuff of fiction. Increasingly, however, the headlines are beginning to resemble the pages of an espionage novel.
By Sanjay Kumar
There was a time when India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), operated almost entirely in the shadows. Its reputation was built upon secrecy, strategic patience, human intelligence and the quiet cultivation of assets across some of the world’s most hostile intelligence environments.
For decades, RAW’s principal adversaries were Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Chinese intelligence networks and the various organisations threatening India’s territorial integrity and national security.
But something appears to have changed.
Over recent years, a succession of killings, attempted assassinations and alleged intelligence operations outside India’s borders has placed RAW under an increasingly uncomfortable international spotlight. From Pakistan to Canada and the United States, allegations have emerged suggesting that elements of the Indian intelligence establishment may have been involved in targeting individuals regarded by New Delhi as threats to its national interests.
The allegations are serious. They are also complicated, politically sensitive and, in several instances, contested by the Indian government.
Nevertheless, they raise an important question: has India entered a new and considerably more aggressive phase of covert intelligence operations?
The geography of a shadow war
The controversy is particularly significant because it extends beyond India’s traditional intelligence battleground with Pakistan.
In April 2024, The Guardian reported allegations from Indian and Pakistani intelligence sources that RAW had been involved in a campaign of assassinations in Pakistan. Pakistani investigators claimed to have uncovered evidence connecting Indian operatives with a series of killings dating from 2020.
A subsequent Washington Post investigation, reported in January 2025, examined alleged Indian intelligence operations involving the deaths of individuals associated with militant organisations operating against India.
These reports described alleged networks involving intermediaries, criminal contractors and individuals recruited to carry out targeted killings.
India has rejected allegations of state-sponsored extraterritorial assassinations, while the available evidence in individual Pakistani cases has not been independently established in every instance.
Yet the allegations cannot simply be dismissed as another episode in the long-running propaganda war between New Delhi and Islamabad.
The more consequential developments have occurred in North America.
On 18 June 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh separatist activist, was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia.
The killing triggered a major diplomatic confrontation after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canadian authorities were investigating credible allegations of a possible connection between agents of the Indian government and the murder.
New Delhi rejected the accusation.
The subsequent investigation exposed a much wider problem involving alleged surveillance, intimidation, criminal networks and threats against members of the Sikh diaspora.
In the United States, the controversy took an even more extraordinary turn.
The New York assassination plot
In November 2023, American prosecutors announced that they had uncovered an alleged murder-for-hire conspiracy targeting Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US-based Sikh separatist activist.
The prosecution alleged that an Indian government employee, identified as Vikash Yadav, had recruited Indian national Nikhil Gupta to arrange Pannun’s assassination in New York.
The intended contract killer was, in fact, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration officer.
The alleged payment was $100,000, with an initial $15,000 payment arranged.
In February 2026, Gupta pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to charges including murder-for-hire conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.
Yadav has been charged by American prosecutors but has not been brought into US custody.
India has consistently denied that the alleged operation represented government policy and has distanced itself from the conduct attributed to the individuals involved.
Gupta’s guilty plea, however, gives the case a significance that goes beyond diplomatic accusations. It establishes his criminal participation in the assassination conspiracy, although it does not, by itself, establish the full extent of institutional responsibility within the Indian state.
As this article goes to press, Gupta’s sentencing is scheduled for 20 November 2026.
The distinction between an individual operative, an intelligence agency and the political leadership that ultimately exercises authority over the intelligence apparatus is crucial.
It is precisely this distinction that investigators, diplomats and historians must continue to examine.
The criminal underworld as an intelligence instrument
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the emerging picture is the alleged use of criminal networks to undertake operations that would otherwise be difficult to conceal.
Professional intelligence services have always employed intermediaries. Intelligence officers rarely conduct every operation themselves. They recruit informants, cultivate assets, exploit criminal relationships and sometimes use individuals who have no formal connection to the intelligence establishment.
Such arrangements provide deniability.
But they also create extraordinary risks.
In July 2026, American authorities announced a major international crackdown on India-based organised crime networks. Among the allegations were charges against Lawrence Bishnoi and his North American associate Goldy Brar relating to the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
This development is particularly important because the American indictment attributes the alleged ordering of Nijjar’s murder to criminal gang leadership. It does not establish that RAW ordered the killing.
The distinction matters.
If criminal organisations can operate across international borders, intimidate diaspora communities and undertake targeted violence, the consequences extend far beyond the original political dispute.
For an intelligence service, using criminal intermediaries may appear attractive in the short term. In the longer term, however, the relationship between intelligence gathering, criminal enterprise and political violence can become extraordinarily difficult to control.
The resulting damage to national reputation may prove more substantial than any tactical intelligence advantage.
Enter Hari Vandra: when fiction begins to resemble reality
It is against this extraordinary geopolitical background that the Hari Vandra espionage novels acquire an additional dimension.
In my novels, Hari Vandra is not simply another fictional secret agent. He is a Brighton-based crime reporter who becomes involved in the clandestine world of Indian intelligence, operating within the strategic universe shaped by India’s national security establishment and its formidable intelligence networks.
His fictional world draws upon the institutional history of RAW, the Intelligence Bureau and India’s wider national security apparatus.
The novels are built around a particular ambition: to produce espionage thrillers that read like history books, and history books that read like espionage thrillers.
That ambition becomes especially relevant when examining the contemporary allegations surrounding RAW.
In Lodhi Road: The Puntland Assignment, Buddha’s Requiem, Gray Mongoose and The Kahuta Protocol, the reader encounters a world in which intelligence operations are rarely isolated events. They are part of a larger strategic contest involving political leadership, military institutions, regional rivalries and the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between national security and individual morality.
The fictional RAW is not a simplistic organisation populated by heroic agents and villainous adversaries. It is an institution operating in a world of competing interests, imperfect intelligence and difficult decisions.
That is what makes the real-world allegations so fascinating from a novelist’s perspective.
The difference, of course, is that fiction permits the author to invent the evidence, determine the chain of command and establish precisely who authorised an operation.
Real intelligence investigations rarely offer such convenient conclusions.
Ajit Doval and the transformation of Indian intelligence
No discussion of contemporary Indian national security would be complete without considering Ajit Doval.
A former Intelligence Bureau officer and one of India’s most influential national security figures, Doval represents a generation of Indian security professionals whose careers were shaped by the country’s experience of terrorism, insurgency and regional confrontation.
His appointment as National Security Adviser in 2014 coincided with a more assertive approach to national security under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
India has increasingly demonstrated its willingness to project power beyond its immediate borders, whether through diplomatic pressure, intelligence cooperation or military action.
The 2016 surgical strikes across the Line of Control and the 2019 Balakot air strikes illustrated a willingness to respond to security threats with greater operational boldness.
But the distinction between overt military action, covert intelligence activity and unlawful extraterritorial assassination must never be blurred.
A democratic government can legitimately pursue individuals involved in terrorism through lawful intelligence and security operations. It cannot simply assume that the label of national security provides unlimited authority to kill people abroad.
Nor should the existence of genuine security threats automatically discredit every allegation made against the state.
For India, the challenge is to demonstrate that its intelligence institutions operate within clearly defined legal and political boundaries.
The question is not whether India should possess an effective foreign intelligence service. Of course it should.
The question is whether effectiveness can be maintained without compromising the principles that distinguish a democratic state from the very organisations it seeks to oppose.
The price of plausible deniability
The fundamental attraction of covert operations is that they allow governments to pursue objectives without publicly accepting responsibility.
But plausible deniability is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in an age of digital surveillance, financial intelligence, international law enforcement cooperation and electronic communications.
The New York case demonstrates how an alleged assassination conspiracy can be reconstructed through communications, financial transactions, surveillance material and cooperating witnesses.
The Canadian investigation illustrates the diplomatic consequences when intelligence assessments and criminal investigations point towards possible foreign involvement in a killing.
And the allegations concerning Pakistan demonstrate how easily covert violence can become entangled with regional rivalries and competing national narratives.
For India, the danger is not merely diplomatic embarrassment.
It is the possibility that its intelligence institutions could lose the international trust necessary to conduct legitimate intelligence cooperation.
India’s strategic interests require strong relationships with the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and other democratic partners. Intelligence cooperation depends upon confidence, accountability and reciprocal respect for national sovereignty.
An intelligence service that becomes associated internationally with extraterritorial violence risks undermining the very partnerships that make it effective.
The novelist’s dilemma
There is an interesting irony in all this.
As a writer of Indian espionage fiction, I have spent considerable time examining the history, personalities and institutional structures of Indian intelligence.
My interest in RAW was never simply about producing another collection of sensational spy adventures.
The Hari Vandra novels attempt to place intelligence operations within their proper historical and geopolitical context. They explore the relationship between intelligence professionals, political decision-makers, national security and the moral consequences of clandestine action.
The real world is now providing material that no novelist could comfortably ignore.
Yet I would resist the temptation to turn every newspaper allegation into a fictional fact or every intelligence controversy into evidence of a grand conspiracy.
The responsibility of an author writing geopolitical fiction is to distinguish between what is established, what is alleged and what remains unknown.
The responsibility of a democratic government is considerably greater.
It must ensure that the institutions operating in its name remain accountable, even when their activities are necessarily conducted in secrecy.
The final question: what kind of intelligence power does India want?
India is a rising global power with legitimate and substantial national security concerns.
It faces terrorism, cross-border militancy, hostile intelligence operations and a complicated strategic relationship with both Pakistan and China.
Its intelligence services must be capable of protecting Indian citizens and national interests.
But there is a difference between possessing the capability to undertake covert operations and possessing the authority to act without legal or political restraint.
That distinction will ultimately determine how history judges the current controversy.
The Hari Vandra novels explore a shadow world in which national interests, political ambition and personal morality frequently collide.
The emerging allegations surrounding RAW suggest that the boundary between that fictional world and contemporary international politics may be becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
But there is one fundamental difference.
In fiction, the author eventually reveals the truth.
In international intelligence, the truth may remain buried for decades.
And sometimes, as the recent controversies demonstrate, the most consequential question is not who pulled the trigger.
It is who gave the order, who knew about it, and who was prepared to accept the consequences.
