When The Guardian published its April 2024 investigation alleging that India’s government had been carrying out targeted assassinations of suspected terrorists inside Pakistan, the story landed in a geopolitical environment already primed for discomfort. Canada had accused New Delhi of orchestrating the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil months earlier. The United States Department of Justice had unsealed an indictment naming an Indian national in a foiled plot to assassinate another Sikh activist in New York. Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi had held a press conference in January 2024 claiming credible evidence of Indian involvement in assassinations on Pakistani territory. The allegations were no longer whispers from Islamabad. They were front-page accusations from Five Eyes capitals, backed by federal indictments and parliamentary statements. And yet, the international response that followed was neither uniform nor proportionate. It was, instead, a masterclass in selective attention, calibrated silence, and strategic calculus disguised as diplomatic prudence.

This pattern of differentiated response is the subject of the analysis that follows. Mapping how each major country and multilateral body reacted to allegations of Indian extraterritorial operations reveals less about the allegations themselves and more about the architecture of contemporary geopolitics. Canada condemned loudly. Washington expressed concern through legal channels while preserving the broader partnership. London offered careful diplomatic language. Brussels stayed largely quiet. Tokyo said nothing. Canberra acknowledged the issue existed. Jerusalem endorsed India’s right to self-defense without qualification. Beijing and Moscow issued statements calibrated to their own strategic interests. Each response was shaped not by a universal standard of sovereignty and international law but by the responding country’s specific relationship with New Delhi, its own history of extraterritorial operations, and its assessment of whether the targets’ status as designated terrorists created a moral exception.

The spectrum from condemnation to endorsement tells a story that goes well beyond the two countries. It exposes the fundamental inconsistency in how the international community applies norms against state-sponsored assassination, an inconsistency that benefits powerful states with large economies and strategic value while punishing smaller or more isolated actors. Russia poisoned a former spy in Salisbury using a nerve agent and faced coordinated diplomatic expulsions from over two dozen countries. Saudi Arabia murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside a consulate in Istanbul and faced congressional sanctions, arms deal freezes, and global opprobrium. India allegedly ran a years-long campaign of targeted killings against individuals on its own designated-terrorist lists and faced one serious diplomatic crisis with Ottawa, one federal indictment in New York, and otherwise remarkably little consequence. The question this article asks is not whether the allegations are true. It is why the international system responded so differently to cases that share the same legal category of extraterritorial state-sponsored killing but differ in the identity of the perpetrator and the status of the victim.

Background and Triggers

The international response to India’s alleged targeted killings did not emerge from a single event. It accumulated through a sequence of allegations, investigations, and diplomatic confrontations spread across three years and at least four countries. Understanding the response requires understanding the sequence, because each new allegation built on the credibility established by the previous one, creating a cumulative evidentiary weight that individual allegations could not have achieved alone.

Pakistan was the first country to raise the alarm. As early as June 2021, when a car bomb in Lahore killed three people including Zia Mustafa, a mid-level Jaish-e-Mohammed operative, Pakistani security officials began tracking a pattern of killings that they attributed to a “hostile intelligence agency.” By the time Pakistani Foreign Secretary Qazi held his January 2024 press conference, Islamabad’s position had evolved from quiet suspicion to formal public accusation. Qazi specifically named the September 2023 killing of Muhammad Riaz in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the October 2023 assassination of Shahid Latif, the alleged mastermind of the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, as cases where Pakistan possessed what he called credible evidence of Indian involvement. He described the killings as “sophisticated international set-ups spread over multiple jurisdictions,” language that implied organized state activity rather than freelance criminality.

Pakistan’s allegations alone might have remained a bilateral dispute that the wider world could ignore. Two factors prevented that outcome. The first was the Nijjar killing in Canada. On June 18, 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the head of the Khalistan Tiger Force and a Canadian citizen designated as a terrorist by India, was shot dead in the parking lot of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia. Three months later, on September 18, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood in the House of Commons and told Parliament that Canada had credible allegations linking agents of the Indian government to the killing. The accusation was extraordinary. A Five Eyes prime minister, standing in his own parliament, publicly accusing a fellow democracy and strategic partner of assassinating a citizen on Canadian soil.

The second factor was the Pannun plot. In November 2023, the United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, with conspiring to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual US-Canadian citizen who leads the Sikhs for Justice organization. The indictment alleged that Gupta had been recruited by an employee of the Indian government, identified in court documents only as CC-1, to hire a hitman to carry out the killing in New York City. The hitman turned out to be an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The plot was foiled, but the indictment named a specific Indian government official as the directing intelligence, making it far more difficult for New Delhi to dismiss as fabrication. India’s Ministry of External Affairs confirmed in October 2024 that the individual identified in the indictment was no longer employed by the government of India, an acknowledgment that stopped short of confirming the allegations but implicitly conceded that the named person had indeed been a government employee.

These three streams of allegation, from Pakistan, Canada, and the United States, converged in a way that made it impossible for the international community to avoid the question entirely. Each stream independently might have been dismissed or deferred. Together, they created a pattern that demanded some form of response from every major capital. The responses that followed revealed the vast gulf between how the international system treats different perpetrators of the same type of act.

The convergence was reinforced by The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, which published the most comprehensive media report on the alleged operations in Pakistan. The newspaper cited unnamed Indian and Pakistani intelligence officials who described a sustained campaign of targeted assassinations directed by Indian intelligence agencies. The Guardian’s report provided names, dates, locations, and operational details that gave the allegations a specificity they had previously lacked in international media coverage. India’s Ministry of External Affairs dismissed the investigation as “false and malicious,” but the report’s publication in a major Western newspaper with a strong reputation for investigative journalism elevated the allegations from a bilateral dispute to an international media story. The combination of Pakistani official allegations, Canadian diplomatic accusations, an American federal indictment, and a Western investigative report created an evidentiary ecosystem that was more than the sum of its parts. Each element corroborated the others, and the pattern of convergence made it increasingly difficult for any country to plausibly claim ignorance of the allegations.

The timing of these revelations also mattered. The Nijjar killing occurred in June 2023. Trudeau’s parliamentary accusation came in September 2023. The Pannun indictment was unsealed in November 2023. Pakistan’s formal press conference was held in January 2024. The Guardian investigation was published in April 2024. Canada expelled Indian diplomats in October 2024. Gupta pleaded guilty in February 2026. The steady drumbeat of allegations across eighteen months created a cumulative narrative that gained momentum with each new revelation. Countries that could have dismissed a single allegation as isolated or unverified found it progressively harder to maintain that position as the evidence accumulated from multiple independent sources across multiple jurisdictions.

Canada’s Condemnation and the Diplomatic Crisis

Canada’s response was the most forceful of any country, and it produced the most severe diplomatic consequences. Trudeau’s September 2023 parliamentary accusation was followed by a cascade of escalating confrontations that reduced the India-Canada bilateral relationship to its lowest point in modern history.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police opened a formal investigation into the Nijjar killing and, according to Canadian officials, gathered what Foreign Minister Melanie Joly described as “ample, clear and concrete evidence” linking six Indian diplomats to the case. On October 14, 2024, Canada expelled Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma along with five other diplomats after India refused to waive their diplomatic immunity to cooperate with the investigation. India responded with a tit-for-tat expulsion of six Canadian diplomats, including Acting High Commissioner Stewart Wheeler and Deputy High Commissioner Patrick Hebert, giving them until October 19, 2024, to leave the country.

The RCMP went further than merely investigating the Nijjar killing. Commissioner Mike Duheme publicly stated that police had evidence tying Indian government agents to other homicides and violent acts in Canada, suggesting a broader campaign of what Ottawa characterized as “transnational repression.” Four Indian nationals living in Canada were charged with Nijjar’s murder. The investigation expanded to encompass allegations of Indian involvement in drive-by shootings, home invasions, arson, and at least one other homicide, that of Sukhdool Singh, shot in Winnipeg on September 20, 2023.

India’s response to Canada’s accusations was categorical denial combined with aggressive counter-messaging. The Ministry of External Affairs accused Trudeau of “smearing India for political gains” and characterized Nijjar as a designated terrorist whom Canada had been harboring despite Indian extradition requests. New Delhi accused Ottawa of providing space to “violent extremists and terrorists” who had harassed and threatened Indian diplomats and community leaders. India withdrew its High Commissioner and other diplomats, citing safety concerns in what it described as an atmosphere of extremism and violence fostered by the Trudeau government. The diplomatic staff on both sides was reduced to minimal levels, consulates were closed, and the bilateral relationship entered a deep freeze that showed no signs of thawing.

Canada’s willingness to pursue the case so aggressively distinguished it from every other country that faced similar allegations. Several factors explain Ottawa’s approach. Nijjar was a Canadian citizen, killed on Canadian soil, in a city with one of the largest Sikh populations outside South Asia. The political pressure on Trudeau from the Sikh community, which constitutes nearly two percent of Canada’s population and holds significant political influence in several key electoral districts, was substantial. Canada’s intelligence services, embedded in the Five Eyes network, had access to signals intelligence and partner assessments that reportedly corroborated the initial allegations. And the Pannun plot in the United States, which emerged publicly just weeks after Trudeau’s accusation, provided external validation that made it harder to dismiss the Canadian case as politically motivated.

The diplomatic cost to India was real but bounded. Trade between the two countries, while not negligible at approximately 8 billion Canadian dollars annually, was not of the scale that would create economic pain for New Delhi. India’s strategic importance to the broader Western alliance, particularly as a counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific, meant that Ottawa’s allies were reluctant to amplify Canada’s accusations or take coordinated action. Canada found itself largely alone in its confrontation with New Delhi, a solitude that itself became part of the story about selective international response.

Canada’s isolation deserves particular attention because it illuminates the structural dynamics of alliance solidarity on controversial issues. Ottawa expected, or at least hoped, that its Five Eyes partners would close ranks behind its accusations the way they had closed ranks behind London after the Salisbury attack. That solidarity did not materialize. Washington expressed concern but continued its defense partnership with India. London urged cooperation without endorsing the allegations. Canberra issued bland statements about sovereignty and rule of law. Wellington, the fifth eye, said almost nothing. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which had shared the signals intelligence underlying the Nijjar allegations, proved willing to share information but unwilling to share diplomatic risk.

The Indian diaspora factor added another layer of complexity. India’s diaspora in Canada is large, influential, and internally divided. The Sikh community, concentrated in British Columbia and Ontario, includes supporters of the Khalistan movement alongside those who oppose it. Hindu and other Indian diaspora communities generally supported New Delhi’s position and viewed Trudeau’s accusations as politically motivated. The domestic political dynamics created cross-pressures that complicated Canada’s diplomatic posture and provided ammunition for India’s counter-narrative that the accusations were driven by electoral calculations rather than evidence.

David Morrison, Canada’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, testified before Parliament that he had shared Indian Home Minister Amit Shah’s name with the Washington Post as the alleged senior official connected to the campaign. The disclosure represented an extraordinary escalation, naming a sitting cabinet minister of a G20 nation in connection with an assassination campaign on foreign soil. India’s reaction was furious. The Ministry of External Affairs called the allegation outrageous and politically motivated. The naming of Shah added a personal dimension to the diplomatic crisis that made resolution even more difficult, transforming what had been an institutional dispute into a conflict involving specific, named individuals at the highest levels of Indian government.

Washington’s Careful Calibration

The United States response to the allegations against India was a case study in diplomatic bifurcation, pursuing legal accountability through one channel while preserving the strategic partnership through another. The two tracks operated simultaneously but in apparent tension, and the resolution of that tension revealed Washington’s priorities with unmistakable clarity.

On the legal track, the approach was aggressive. The Department of Justice indictment of Nikhil Gupta was detailed, specific, and named a serving Indian government employee as the directing intelligence behind the assassination plot. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York presented evidence of recorded conversations, financial transactions, and the operational planning of a murder-for-hire scheme targeting a United States citizen exercising constitutionally protected speech. In February 2026, Gupta pleaded guilty and received a sentence of up to 24 years in prison. FBI Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky stated that the case demonstrated the Bureau’s commitment to protecting American citizens from transnational repression regardless of the perpetrator’s identity. The legal system treated the case with the seriousness it warranted. No diplomatic considerations moderated the prosecution.

The diplomatic track, however, told a different story. When Canada expelled Indian diplomats in October 2024, the State Department’s response was measured to the point of understatement. Spokesperson Matthew Miller said the United States had “urged the Indian government not to insist upon a reduction in Canada’s diplomatic presence and to cooperate in the ongoing Canadian investigation.” That formulation was notable for what it did not say. Washington did not endorse Canada’s allegations. It did not call for a multilateral investigation. It did not impose any diplomatic or economic consequences on India. It did not recall its own ambassador or reduce diplomatic engagement. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, monitoring the situation during the India-Pakistan crisis in May 2025, framed American involvement primarily through the lens of regional stability rather than accountability for extraterritorial operations.

That gap between the legal and diplomatic responses was not accidental. It reflected a deliberate policy choice rooted in the architecture of the US-India strategic partnership, a relationship that Washington considers essential to its Indo-Pacific strategy, its technology competition with China, its defense industrial base, and its economic interests. the world’s most populous country, a nuclear power, a major defense customer, and the anchor of Washington’s strategy to build a democratic counterweight to Beijing’s influence across Asia. The Quad partnership, the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, and billions of dollars in defense contracts create structural incentives for Washington to manage the allegations without rupturing the relationship.

Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution has written extensively about the double standard in Western responses to state-sponsored assassination. His analysis suggests that the variable is not the severity of the act but the strategic importance of the perpetrator. When Russia poisoned Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018, the coordinated response was swift and severe because Russia was already an adversary. When Saudi Arabia murdered Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October 2018, the response was significant because the victim was a journalist with connections to Western media and because congressional pressure forced the executive branch’s hand. When New Delhi was accused of similar operations, the response was muted because it occupied a position in the Western alliance structure that made confrontation strategically costly. The principle being applied was not sovereignty or international law. It was strategic calculus.

The institutional architecture of the US-India partnership reinforced this calculus. The Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, launched during Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to Washington in June 2023, represented a major investment in technology cooperation that neither side wanted to jeopardize. The General Electric engine deal for India’s Tejas fighter aircraft, worth billions of dollars, was moving through regulatory approval. The defense relationship had expanded to include foundational agreements on geospatial intelligence, logistics sharing, and communications compatibility that took decades to negotiate. The Quad, bringing together the US, India, Japan, and Australia, had become a cornerstone of Washington’s Indo-Pacific architecture. Each of these institutional investments created bureaucratic constituencies within the US government that would resist any diplomatic confrontation that might put them at risk.

S. Paul Kapur of the Naval Postgraduate School has argued that India’s strategic importance creates what he calls an “accountability shield” that protects New Delhi from the consequences that less important countries would face. Kapur’s framework holds that the shield operates not through explicit decisions to ignore wrongdoing but through a thousand small choices: which intelligence to share, which investigations to publicize, which diplomatic channels to use, and which conversations to have in private rather than public. The cumulative effect of these choices is a system that processes allegations against strategically important partners differently from identical allegations against adversaries or strategically marginal states, not because anyone decides to apply a double standard but because the institutional incentives naturally produce one.

The United Kingdom’s Diplomatic Tightrope

London’s response to the allegations against India exemplified the cautious middle ground that most Western capitals chose to occupy. The United Kingdom acknowledged the allegations without endorsing them, expressed concern without taking action, and maintained its relationship with New Delhi while gently encouraging cooperation with investigations.

When Canada expelled Indian diplomats, a spokesperson for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office stated that the UK “does not agree with the decisions taken by the Indian government that have resulted in a number of Canadian diplomats departing India.” The statement added that Britain “continues to encourage India to engage with Canada on its independent investigation into the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.” The language was carefully calibrated. London did not accuse India. It did not validate Canada’s evidence. It simply said it disagreed with India’s retaliatory expulsions and encouraged cooperation. The formulation allowed Britain to maintain its position as a responsible member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, where the Nijjar intelligence had been shared, while avoiding any direct confrontation with New Delhi.

Britain’s caution had deep roots. The UK-India relationship, while occasionally strained by historical legacy, had become increasingly important in the post-Brexit era. London was actively courting New Delhi for a free trade agreement, defense cooperation, and technology partnerships. India was the UK’s second-largest source of international students. The Indian diaspora in Britain, numbering approximately 1.8 million people, constituted a politically significant community. Confronting India over the targeted killing allegations would have jeopardized multiple strategic priorities simultaneously.

There was also a domestic dimension. The UK had its own history of dealing with extraterritorial assassinations on British soil, most notably the Salisbury Novichok attack on Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March 2018 and the earlier polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Both cases involved Russia, and Britain had responded with diplomatic expulsions, sanctions, and sustained public pressure. The contrast between London’s response to Russian assassinations on British soil and its response to allegations of Indian assassinations on Canadian and Pakistani soil was stark. The difference was not the severity of the act but the identity of the perpetrator and the strategic context of the relationship.

London’s position was further complicated by the fact that the UK has its own significant Sikh population, numbering approximately 524,000 according to the 2021 census, and has faced periodic allegations of Khalistan-linked extremism on British soil. India had repeatedly pressed Britain to take action against individuals Delhi considered terrorists or separatists operating from British territory, including figures associated with the banned Babbar Khalsa International and various Khalistan advocacy groups. For London to aggressively pursue allegations against New Delhi for targeting such individuals would have complicated its own domestic security dynamics and its bilateral cooperation with New Delhi on counter-terrorism. The UK’s position was, in effect, a product of competing imperatives: the normative obligation to uphold sovereignty and rule of law, the strategic interest in maintaining the India partnership, the domestic political sensitivity of the Sikh community, and the intelligence-sharing obligations of the Five Eyes alliance. The result was a posture of studied ambiguity that satisfied none of these imperatives fully but avoided the diplomatic cost of committing to any one of them.

Comparing London’s response to the India allegations and its handling of the Litvinenko and Skripal cases on British soil was impossible to ignore for observers tracking the inconsistency. When Russia poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, the UK launched a public inquiry, issued an arrest warrant for the suspects, and spent years pursuing diplomatic accountability. When the Salisbury attack occurred in 2018, Britain orchestrated the largest coordinated diplomatic expulsion since the Cold War. The difference in treatment was not lost on Pakistan, which cited the comparison explicitly in its diplomatic communications, nor on international law scholars who used the cases as evidence that sovereignty norms are applied according to the identity of the violator rather than the gravity of the violation.

The European Union’s Institutional Silence

The European Union’s response to the targeted killing allegations was characterized by a silence that was louder than any statement could have been. Brussels issued no formal statement on the allegations against India for operations in Pakistan or the Nijjar killing in Canada. The European Parliament adopted a resolution on EU-India relations in January 2025 that raised human rights concerns including “violence, increasing nationalistic rhetoric and divisive policies” against minorities, but the resolution did not specifically address the targeted killing allegations. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch pressed the EU to raise the issue during the EU-India Human Rights Dialogue scheduled for August 2024, noting what they called “increasing allegations of transnational repression” by India. The EU’s response was to encourage dialogue rather than demand accountability.

Institutional silence reflected the EU’s strategic priorities. The European Union had been actively pursuing a free trade agreement with India for over a decade. The EU-India Trade and Technology Council, launched in 2023, represented a significant investment in the bilateral relationship. India was a key partner in the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy. European defense companies were competing for major Indian procurement contracts. The collective weight of these interests created a structural incentive to avoid confrontation that individual member states could not have generated alone.

Individual EU member states exhibited varying degrees of engagement. France, which had signed the Rafale fighter jet deal with India and maintained significant defense ties including submarine technology cooperation, said nothing publicly about the allegations. President Macron’s government treated the India relationship as a cornerstone of France’s Indo-Pacific strategy and had no interest in jeopardizing it over allegations that did not directly affect French interests. Germany, which had been building economic ties with India as part of its diversification strategy away from China and hosting regular Indo-German consultations on strategic issues, remained similarly quiet. Chancellor Scholz’s government prioritized the economic relationship and the broader geopolitical alignment against authoritarian powers. The Netherlands, which houses the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court and has traditionally been vocal on rule-of-law issues, made no public statement. Italy, Spain, and the Nordic countries followed suit. The only EU-level engagement came through the broader human rights framework, where the allegations were folded into a longer list of concerns that included media freedom, minority rights, and civil liberties, diluting the specific gravity of the assassination charges.

Australia’s Measured Acknowledgment

Australia’s response fell between the UK’s careful tightrope-walking and the EU’s silence. When Canada expelled Indian diplomats, Canberra issued a statement saying that “Australia believes all countries should respect sovereignty and the rule of law.” Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong raised the allegations with her Indian counterpart, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, during his visit to Australia in November 2024. The exchange was private, and its substance was not publicly disclosed.

Australia’s position was shaped by its membership in the Quad alongside India, the United States, and Japan. The Quad had become a cornerstone of Australia’s Indo-Pacific strategy, and any serious diplomatic confrontation with New Delhi would have undermined a partnership that Canberra viewed as essential to its security architecture. Australia also had a growing Indian diaspora and expanding trade ties with New Delhi. The cost-benefit calculation was clear: acknowledging the allegations to satisfy normative expectations while avoiding any action that might damage the strategic partnership.

The Australian response was notable for its comparison with Canberra’s reaction to other cases of extraterritorial assassination. When Russia conducted the Salisbury attack, Australia expelled two Russian diplomats in solidarity with London. When China was accused of operating covert police stations on Australian territory, Canberra took aggressive counter-intelligence action and publicly confronted Beijing. The differential treatment of India reflected the same strategic calculus visible in every other Western capital: the response was calibrated not to the severity of the alleged act but to the importance of the bilateral relationship.

Israel’s Unqualified Endorsement

Israel’s response to India’s operations stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from Canada’s condemnation. Where Ottawa saw a violation of sovereignty and international law, Jerusalem saw a legitimate exercise of self-defense against designated terrorists. The Israeli position was articulated publicly, repeatedly, and without qualification.

When New Delhi launched Operation Sindoor in May 2025, striking nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir in response to the Pahalgam terror attack, Israeli Ambassador to India Reuven Azar posted on social media that Israel supported India’s right to self-defense. He added that terrorists should know there is no place to hide from their heinous crimes against the innocent. The statement was notable for what it included and what it omitted. It included an explicit endorsement of India’s right to use force across borders against terrorist targets. It omitted any call for restraint, de-escalation, or respect for Pakistani sovereignty, language that appeared in virtually every other international statement. On the first anniversary of Operation Sindoor in May 2026, Azar reiterated the endorsement, stating that terrorists now know there is no place to hide.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar drew explicit parallels between the Pahalgam attack and the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel, framing both as acts of terrorism that demanded a decisive military response. The Israeli Defence Attache spoke directly with Indian Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh to commend the success of Operation Sindoor and discuss deepening bilateral defense cooperation. Israel’s position was not merely diplomatic signaling. It reflected a genuine ideological alignment between two countries that share a common approach to counter-terrorism: the willingness to use lethal force across borders against individuals and organizations they designate as terrorists, combined with a refusal to accept that sovereignty norms should shield states that harbor those terrorists.

Israel’s endorsement was also commercially significant. New Delhi imports more weaponry from Israel than from any other country, accounting for over a third of all Israeli arms exports according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data. The defense relationship includes advanced missile systems, drone technology, surveillance equipment, and intelligence-sharing arrangements. Israel’s unqualified support for India’s operations was consistent with its own long history of extraterritorial targeted killings, from the post-Munich Operation Wrath of God campaign to the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. For Israel, endorsing India’s operations was also endorsing the legitimacy of its own decades-long doctrine of sovereign revenge.

The Israel-India alignment on counter-terrorism goes deeper than commercial interest. Both countries share a strategic worldview in which terrorism from across hostile borders is an existential rather than a manageable threat, and in which the state sheltering the terrorists bears responsibility for the consequences of their inaction. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar explicitly drew parallels between the April 2025 Pahalgam attack and the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel, framing both as instances of religiously motivated terrorism that demanded decisive military response. Ambassador Azar’s statement that “terrorism knows no borders” was not merely diplomatic rhetoric; it was an articulation of a shared doctrine that both Israel and India apply in practice: the border of a state that harbors terrorists does not constitute a legal or moral barrier to self-defense.

The ideological convergence has practical consequences. Israel and India reportedly share intelligence on terrorist organizations, conduct joint counter-terrorism training, and exchange operational methodologies. Israeli technology, including the Heron drones and surveillance systems used by Indian military and intelligence agencies, provides capabilities that may facilitate the kinds of operations alleged in Pakistan. The partnership is symbiotic: Israel provides technology and operational experience; India provides a massive market and diplomatic support at international forums. The alignment on targeted killing is a natural extension of this broader convergence, and Israel’s unqualified endorsement of India’s operations serves both countries’ interests by normalizing extraterritorial counter-terrorism as legitimate state practice.

Japan’s silence deserves mention as the most conspicuous absence among major democracies. As a Quad partner and a country with growing defense ties to India, Japan made no public statement on the targeted killing allegations. Tokyo’s foreign policy establishment, traditionally cautious and consensus-driven, treated the allegations as a bilateral issue between New Delhi and the countries directly affected. Japan’s silence was neither surprising nor accidental: it reflected a strategic calculation that the Quad partnership and the broader Indo-Pacific alignment were too important to risk over allegations that did not directly affect Japanese interests. The silence was also consistent with Japan’s historical reluctance to comment on the internal affairs or extraterritorial operations of partner states, a position rooted in its own post-war foreign policy identity.

China and Russia: Strategic Positioning

China and Russia responded to the allegations against India and the broader India-Pakistan tensions with positions calibrated to their own strategic interests rather than any normative framework.

China, Pakistan’s closest strategic ally and a country that had repeatedly vetoed United Nations Security Council attempts to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar as a terrorist, walked a careful line. Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged de-escalation between the two countries during the 2025 crisis but avoided directly addressing the targeted killing allegations. Beijing’s position was complicated by its own extensive use of transnational repression, including the operation of covert police stations in multiple countries and the targeting of Uyghur and Tibetan dissidents abroad. Any principled condemnation of India’s extraterritorial operations would have invited uncomfortable scrutiny of China’s own activities. The result was a response that nominally supported sovereignty and non-interference while avoiding specific condemnation that might boomerang.

Russia’s response was similarly shaped by self-interest. Moscow maintained its traditional relationship with New Delhi, one of its largest arms customers and a key diplomatic partner that had abstained from condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia had no incentive to alienate New Delhi over allegations that, if pressed too aggressively, would invite comparisons to Russia’s own history of extraterritorial assassination, from Litvinenko to Skripal to the numerous cases of Russian opposition figures dying in suspicious circumstances abroad. Moscow’s silence on the India allegations was the mirror image of the West’s silence: both reflected strategic partnerships that trumped normative consistency.

Pakistan’s Diplomatic Campaign and Its Limitations

Pakistan mounted its own diplomatic campaign to draw international attention to the targeted killing allegations, but the campaign’s effectiveness was constrained by Islamabad’s credibility deficit on counter-terrorism issues and by the structural dynamics of international attention.

Pakistan’s formal engagement began with Foreign Secretary Qazi’s January 2024 press conference, where he presented what he called credible evidence of Indian involvement in assassinations on Pakistani soil. Qazi named specific cases, described the operational pattern, and framed the killings as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty that demanded an international response. The press conference was carefully staged, with professional media briefing materials and a diplomatic tone designed to appeal to international audiences. Pakistan followed up by raising the issue at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, at bilateral meetings with Chinese and Turkish officials, and through its diplomatic missions in Western capitals.

The campaign achieved limited results for reasons rooted in Pakistan’s own history. For decades, Pakistan had been the country that Western intelligence agencies most frequently identified as the state sponsor of terrorism in South Asia. Islamabad had hosted Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad for years before the 2011 US raid. It had sheltered Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, allowing him to operate openly in Lahore despite a United Nations Security Council bounty. It had protected Masood Azhar, the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, in Bahawalpur despite multiple Indian and American requests for his prosecution. It had maintained an elaborate infrastructure of training camps, safe houses, and charitable fronts that sustained cross-border terrorism against India for decades. When Pakistan complained that its sovereignty was being violated by unknown gunmen targeting the very individuals it had been sheltering, the international community’s sympathy was understandably limited.

The credibility gap was compounded by Pakistan’s failure to present specific evidence publicly. Qazi mentioned “credible evidence” but did not produce forensic reports, intercepted communications, or documentary proof that would have allowed independent verification. The phrase “hostile intelligence agency” that Pakistani officials used to describe the alleged perpetrator was understood by every diplomat as a reference to India’s Research and Analysis Wing, but the refusal to name RAW explicitly suggested either that the evidence was not strong enough to support a direct accusation or that Pakistan was leaving diplomatic space for a resolution it did not actually want. Either way, the ambiguity weakened the campaign.

Pakistan found more receptive audiences in Beijing and Ankara, where strategic alignments created incentives to support Islamabad’s position. China, as a provider of nuclear technology and a major investor through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, had structural reasons to support Pakistan’s sovereignty claims. Turkey, under President Erdogan’s leadership, had positioned itself as an advocate for Muslim-majority countries and had its own tensions with India over Kashmir policy. But neither China nor Turkey was willing to translate verbal support into concrete diplomatic action against India. The gap between rhetorical solidarity and operational support was itself a measure of New Delhi’s diplomatic strength and Islamabad’s relative weakness in the international system.

The most effective element of Pakistan’s campaign was not anything Islamabad did but the independent investigations that emerged from Canada and the United States. Pakistan’s own allegations might have been dismissed as self-serving. The convergence of Pakistani, Canadian, and American allegations created a triangulation that was much harder to ignore. Ironically, the countries that did the most to validate Pakistan’s claims were not Pakistan’s allies but India’s strategic partners, and they did so not to help Pakistan but because their own citizens and sovereignty were affected.

The Comparison That Exposes the Double Standard

The starkest evidence of selective international response comes from comparing the world’s reaction to the alleged operations with its reactions to two other high-profile cases of extraterritorial state-sponsored killing: the Salisbury Novichok attack and the Khashoggi murder.

On March 4, 2018, former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, England. The attack was attributed to Russian military intelligence officers identified by British investigators and the open-source investigative group Bellingcat. The international response was coordinated and severe. Over two dozen countries expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats. The EU imposed sanctions. NATO issued a formal condemnation. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the use of a military-grade nerve agent. The Salisbury attack became a reference case for how the international community could respond to extraterritorial state violence when it chose to.

On October 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and never emerged. Turkish authorities produced audio and forensic evidence indicating that Khashoggi had been murdered and dismembered by a team of Saudi operatives. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, concluded that the killing was deliberate and premeditated. The international response was significant, though less coordinated than the Salisbury response. The United States Senate passed a resolution holding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally responsible. Several countries suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The killing dominated international news coverage for months and permanently damaged Saudi Arabia’s international reputation.

The contrast with the response to the alleged operations is instructive on multiple levels. First, the targets. Skripal was a former intelligence officer who had defected to the West, a figure who elicited sympathy as someone who had chosen to cooperate with Western intelligence agencies. Khashoggi was a journalist with a column in the Washington Post, a figure embedded in Western media circles whose murder struck at values that Western governments consider foundational. The individuals allegedly targeted by India’s operations in Pakistan were, by contrast, designated terrorists on Indian government lists, NIA charge sheets, and in several cases United Nations Security Council sanctions lists. They were individuals linked to attacks that had killed hundreds of Indian civilians. The difference in target identity fundamentally shaped the international response. Killing a defector or a journalist triggered revulsion because it struck at individuals the international community recognized as having legitimate standing. Killing designated terrorists triggered a more ambiguous reaction because many countries, including those expressing concern, privately regarded the targets as legitimate enemies of a democratic state.

Second, the method. Russia used a chemical weapon of mass destruction in a public setting, exposing a British police officer and two civilians to collateral contamination, one of whom died. Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi inside a diplomatic facility, weaponizing the consular protection that every government depends on for its diplomats’ safety. the alleged operations in Pakistan, by contrast, predominantly involved motorcycle-borne gunmen using small arms in targeted shootings. The method was precise, collateral damage was minimal, and no diplomatic norms were violated. The operational restraint, if indeed these operations were Indian-directed, actually reduced the international community’s incentive to respond, because the operations did not threaten the systemic norms that protect every country’s interests.

Third, the perpetrator’s strategic position. Russia was already an adversary of the West at the time of the Salisbury attack, engaged in a hybrid war against Western democracies through election interference, disinformation campaigns, and military aggression in Ukraine. Punishing Russia served existing Western strategic objectives. Saudi Arabia, while a significant energy partner, was increasingly controversial in Western democracies due to its human rights record and the Yemen war. The political cost of criticizing Riyadh was manageable. New Delhi occupied a fundamentally different position, serving as a strategic partner, a democratic counterweight to China, a massive market, a growing defense customer, and a source of skilled immigration. Confronting India carried strategic costs that confronting Russia and Saudi Arabia did not.

Fourth, and perhaps most subtly, the forensic transparency differed dramatically across the three cases. In Salisbury, British investigators identified the specific chemical agent, traced it to Russian military stockpiles, identified the GRU officers who applied it through CCTV footage and travel records, and published their findings in collaboration with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The evidentiary chain was comprehensive and publicly available. In the Khashoggi case, Turkish authorities produced audio recordings from inside the consulate, identified the Saudi kill team through passport and travel records, and cooperated with the UN Special Rapporteur’s investigation. In India’s case, the evidentiary picture was fragmented across multiple jurisdictions. The Pannun plot had specific evidence because it was interdicted by an undercover operation. The Nijjar case had RCMP evidence that was largely sealed for prosecution purposes. The Pakistan killings relied on Pakistani allegations that were not independently verified. The diffused evidentiary landscape made it easier for countries to justify inaction by pointing to uncertainty, even as the cumulative weight of the allegations made innocence increasingly implausible.

The comparative analysis reveals a hierarchy of international norms that is rarely stated explicitly but operates with considerable force. At the top of the hierarchy is the prohibition against using weapons of mass destruction on foreign soil, violated by Russia in Salisbury, which produces the maximum international response. Below that is the prohibition against targeting journalists and dissidents, violated by Saudi Arabia in Istanbul, which produces a significant but less coordinated response. At the bottom, in practice if not in formal international law, is the targeting of designated terrorists by democratic states, which produces concern from some quarters, endorsement from others, and collective inaction from the international system as a whole. The hierarchy is not codified in any treaty or resolution. It exists as a pattern of state practice that tells countries precisely how much they can get away with, depending on who they are and whom they target.

Why India’s Strategic Importance Creates Selective Silence

The selective silence surrounding India’s alleged targeted killing campaign is not a failure of the international system. It is the international system functioning exactly as designed, with power, economic interest, and strategic alignment determining which norms are enforced and against whom.

India’s strategic value to the Western alliance operates on multiple levels simultaneously. At the geopolitical level, it serves as the anchor of the Quad, the democratic counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific, and a country whose alignment with the West on issues from technology governance to maritime security is considered essential to the emerging world order. The United States has invested heavily in building the US-India partnership, signing foundational defense agreements, providing access to advanced technology, and including India in sensitive intelligence-sharing arrangements. Any serious diplomatic confrontation over the targeted killing allegations would jeopardize these investments.

At the economic level, India’s growing economy, its massive consumer market, and its technology sector make it an indispensable partner for Western corporations and governments alike. The EU’s pursuit of a free trade agreement with India, the UK’s post-Brexit trade strategy, and Australia’s economic diversification plans all depend on maintaining productive relations with New Delhi. Economic interdependence creates constituencies within each Western country that lobby against confrontation, regardless of the normative merits of the case.

At the defense level, New Delhi is among the world’s largest arms importers. French Rafale fighters, American military technology, Israeli surveillance systems, and British defense equipment all depend on sustained Indian procurement. Defense companies in each of these countries exert influence on their governments’ foreign policy positions. A diplomatic crisis with India over the targeted killing allegations would threaten contracts worth billions of dollars.

The convergence of these interests creates what S. Paul Kapur of the Naval Postgraduate School describes as a structural shield that protects India from the consequences that less strategically valuable countries would face for similar actions. The shield is not impenetrable, as the Canada case demonstrates, but it is thick enough to absorb most of the normative pressure that the allegations generate. The result is a de facto two-tier system of international accountability: one tier for strategically valuable democracies, where extraterritorial operations produce concern but not consequences, and another tier for adversaries or isolated states, where similar operations produce coordinated punishment.

Does the Targets’ Terrorist Status Create a Different Moral Category?

The most sophisticated defense of the international community’s differential response is not strategic calculus but moral distinction. The argument holds that the Salisbury and Khashoggi cases are not genuinely comparable to the alleged operations because the victims occupied fundamentally different moral categories. Skripal was a defector who posed no security threat. Khashoggi was a journalist engaged in protected speech. The individuals allegedly targeted by India in Pakistan were designated terrorists linked to attacks that killed hundreds of Indian civilians. If a state has the right to defend itself against terrorism, and if the state harboring the terrorists is unwilling or unable to address the threat, then targeted killing may constitute a legitimate exercise of that right rather than a violation of sovereignty.

This argument has significant force. The individuals targeted in Pakistan were not dissidents, journalists, or political opponents. They were, by multiple designations including those of the Indian government, the United Nations Security Council, and the United States Treasury, individuals directly connected to organizations responsible for mass-casualty terrorism. Shahid Latif, killed in October 2023, was the alleged mastermind of the Pathankot airbase attack that killed seven Indian security personnel. The mid-level operatives targeted in Karachi, Lahore, and Punjab were connected to organizations including Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed that had planned and executed attacks killing thousands of civilians over decades. Pakistan had demonstrated, through decades of inaction, that it was either unwilling or unable to address the threat these individuals posed.

The “unwilling or unable” doctrine has been invoked by multiple countries to justify extraterritorial use of force against terrorists. Israel has used it to justify operations in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and numerous other countries over decades. The United States used it to justify the drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, and operations across Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. Turkey has used it to justify cross-border operations against the PKK in Iraq and Syria. The doctrine is contested in international law, with most scholars arguing that it stretches the self-defense provisions of Article 51 of the UN Charter beyond their intended scope. But in state practice, it has been applied frequently enough to constitute a de facto norm, even if not a de jure one.

The counter-argument is equally forceful. If the targets’ terrorist status creates a moral exception for extraterritorial killing, the exception has no clear boundary. Who determines which individuals qualify as terrorists? By India’s designation, Nijjar was a terrorist. By Canada’s assessment, he was a community leader and citizen. The divergence in classification exposes the subjectivity inherent in the terrorist label and the danger of allowing any single government’s designation to serve as a license for extraterritorial lethal action. If India can target individuals it designates as terrorists on foreign soil, can Turkey target Kurdish activists in European capitals? Can China target Uyghur dissidents in Southeast Asia? Can Iran target opposition figures in Washington? The principle, once established, has no natural limiting mechanism.

This is the tension that the international community has chosen not to resolve. Rather than articulate a clear standard for when extraterritorial targeted killing is permissible and when it is not, the international system has defaulted to case-by-case assessment driven by strategic interest. The result is a norm that is enforced selectively, applied to adversaries but not to allies, and shaped by power rather than principle. Whether this represents pragmatic stability or corrosive hypocrisy depends entirely on where one sits in the international hierarchy.

The ambiguity has consequences beyond the immediate cases. International lawyers who study the evolution of customary international law note that state practice, the accumulated behavior of states over time, is one of the primary sources of international law. If multiple states conduct extraterritorial targeted killings against designated terrorists and face no international consequences, that practice gradually shifts the legal landscape. What was once clearly prohibited becomes contested, and what was contested becomes arguably permitted. The trajectory of the “unwilling or unable” doctrine illustrates this dynamic: first asserted by Israel, then adopted by the United States for its drone campaign, then implicitly invoked by India, each successive application normalized the practice further. The international community’s selective silence on India’s alleged operations is not merely a diplomatic choice. It is a contribution to the evolution of international law, whether the silent states intend it or not.

George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued that New Delhi’s total-deniability approach creates a particularly dangerous legal vacuum because it prevents any examination of whether the operations meet even the minimal standards that other countries have articulated. Israel’s Supreme Court issued a 2006 ruling establishing proportionality, necessity, and distinction requirements for targeted killings. The United States developed Office of Legal Counsel memoranda establishing criteria for drone strikes, including imminence of threat and infeasibility of capture. New Delhi has neither a public legal framework, nor a judicial review mechanism, nor an after-action accountability process. The operations exist, if they exist at all, in a space of complete deniability where no standard applies because no government acknowledges that any action has been taken. Perkovich argues that this vacuum is more dangerous than even the contested frameworks of Israel and the United States, because it provides no basis for normative evaluation and no mechanism for correction when operations go wrong.

The Nijjar and Pannun Cases as Inflection Points

The killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey and the foiled plot against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York represented a qualitative shift in the international response to India’s alleged operations, not because the operations themselves were more severe than those alleged in Pakistan, but because they occurred in Five Eyes countries where the political and legal infrastructure to investigate and respond existed at a level that Pakistan’s institutions could not match.

Pakistan’s allegations, however credible, were made by a country with limited international standing on counter-terrorism issues, given its own history of harboring and supporting terrorist organizations. When Islamabad claimed that Indian intelligence was assassinating people on Pakistani soil, the international community could plausibly respond with a shrug: Pakistan had hosted Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, protected Hafiz Saeed in Lahore, and sheltered Masood Azhar in Bahawalpur. The implicit, if unstated, response was that Pakistan’s complaints about sovereignty violations rang hollow given its own decades-long record of supporting cross-border terrorism against India.

The Nijjar and Pannun cases changed the calculus because the victims were citizens of Five Eyes countries, the investigations were conducted by credible law enforcement agencies with forensic capabilities, and the political consequences fell on governments that could not be dismissed as unreliable accusers. When the RCMP gathered evidence and the Canadian prime minister made a parliamentary statement, the allegation carried an entirely different weight than when Pakistan’s foreign secretary held a press conference. When the US Department of Justice filed an indictment naming a specific Indian government employee, the allegation entered a legal framework where evidence standards, due process, and judicial oversight applied.

The Pannun case was particularly damaging to New Delhi’s position because it involved operational details that were difficult to explain away. The indictment described recorded conversations between Gupta and the undercover agent, financial arrangements, and specific references to coordination with an Indian government official. When Gupta pleaded guilty in February 2026 and received a sentence of up to 24 years, the case moved from allegation to established fact: an Indian national, working at the direction of a government employee, had attempted to arrange the assassination of an American citizen on American soil.

New Delhi’s response to both cases was defensive and, critics argued, inadequate. The Ministry of External Affairs rejected the Canadian allegations as “absurd” and “motivated by political considerations,” suggesting that Trudeau was pandering to the Sikh vote. New Delhi acknowledged the Pannun case by stating that the named individual was no longer a government employee, a formulation that acknowledged the person’s previous employment without accepting responsibility for his actions. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar stated that it was not India’s policy to carry out targeted killings overseas, a blanket denial that became harder to sustain as the evidentiary record grew.

The Western cases created a paradox for India’s diplomatic position. New Delhi could not simultaneously deny all operations abroad while credibly deterring future terrorist attacks by demonstrating the capacity to reach terrorists anywhere. The covert nature of the alleged campaign required deniability, but deniability became increasingly difficult to maintain as cases accumulated across multiple jurisdictions with independent investigations reaching similar conclusions.

How Pahalgam Shifted the Narrative

The Pahalgam terror attack of April 22, 2025, which killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, fundamentally altered the international narrative surrounding counter-terrorism operations from New Delhi. Before Pahalgam, the discussion centered on whether India had violated sovereignty norms by targeting individuals abroad. After Pahalgam, the discussion shifted to whether New Delhi had the right to defend its citizens against cross-border terrorism, and the answer from most international capitals was some version of yes.

Attackers chose their victims with chilling precision. Gunmen affiliated with The Resistance Front, an organization India described as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, opened fire on tourists at the Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam. According to eyewitness accounts, the attackers asked potential victims about their religious identity before shooting, specifically targeting non-Muslims. Twenty-five tourists and one local guide were killed. Several victims were newlyweds. The religious targeting of civilians, reminiscent of the sectarian nature of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel, generated widespread international sympathy for India and hardened the perception that Pakistan’s soil continued to serve as the staging ground for terrorism against Indian civilians despite decades of Pakistani denials.

India’s response to Pahalgam escalated from diplomatic measures, including the expulsion of Pakistani diplomats, the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, and the closure of border crossings, to military action. Operation Sindoor, launched on May 7, 2025, struck nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir that India identified as terrorist infrastructure. The Indian Ministry of Defence described the operation as “focused, measured, and non-escalatory,” emphasizing that it targeted terrorist camps and avoided Pakistani military or civilian facilities. India briefed diplomats from G20 countries and other major partners before the strikes, a move that the Atlantic Council described as upholding India’s reputation for predictability in military operations. The operation lasted 23 minutes and used precision missiles delivered by Rafale fighter jets armed with SCALP missiles and Hammer bombs, according to defense analysts.

Pakistan disputed India’s characterization of the targets. Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations media wing, stated that 31 civilians had been killed across six targeted cities, including women and children. He claimed that mosques and residential areas had been hit, citing damage to the Masjid Ummul Qura near Muridke. New Delhi maintained that the strikes exclusively targeted terrorist infrastructure, pointing to the destruction of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Markaz Taiba camp in Muridke and Jaish-e-Mohammed facilities in Bahawalpur. The competing narratives were never independently verified, and the information war that accompanied the military conflict, including Pakistani government accounts sharing footage from a video game and fabricated newspaper front pages, made objective assessment of the strikes’ impact nearly impossible.

The international response to Sindoor drew clear lines. The European Union condemned the Pahalgam attack and affirmed every state’s right to protect its citizens from terrorism while calling for restraint and de-escalation. The United States monitored the situation closely, with Secretary Rubio and the broader US diplomatic apparatus working to prevent full-scale war, and ultimately played a role in brokering the ceasefire announced on May 10. Israel offered unqualified support, with Ambassador Azar’s statement conspicuously omitting any call for restraint. China called for de-escalation without assigning blame. The UN Security Council held emergency consultations but issued no formal resolution. The Belfer Center at Harvard described the crisis as “escalation gone meta,” where each retaliatory move responded not just to the last strike but to an entire historical narrative of mistrust between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

Pahalgam’s significance lay in how it reframed the targeted killing allegations within a context of ongoing terrorist violence against Indian civilians. Before Pahalgam, the allegations existed in isolation, as questions about whether India was violating international norms. After Pahalgam, they existed within a narrative of sustained provocation: India had been attacked repeatedly by organizations based in Pakistan, Pakistan had failed to dismantle those organizations despite decades of international pressure, and India had eventually responded with both covert and overt force. The narrative reframing did not make the legal or ethical questions disappear, but it made them politically less urgent for governments that needed to maintain relations with New Delhi.

The Pattern of Selective Enforcement

The international response spectrum, from Canada’s condemnation through the West’s calibrated concern to Israel’s endorsement, reveals a pattern of selective enforcement that has implications far beyond the India-Pakistan relationship.

What emerges suggests that the international norm against state-sponsored extraterritorial killing is not a fixed rule but a flexible instrument applied differently depending on four variables: the strategic importance of the perpetrating state, the moral standing of the target, the relationship between the perpetrator and the country where the operation occurs, and the method used. When all four variables align unfavorably, as in the Salisbury case, where the perpetrator was an adversary using a chemical weapon against a sympathetic victim in an ally’s territory, the response is maximal. When the variables align favorably, as in most of the alleged operations in Pakistan, where the perpetrator was a strategic partner using precise conventional methods against designated terrorists in a country with limited international credibility on counter-terrorism, the response is minimal.

This pattern has profound implications for international order. It means that the sovereignty norm, the prohibition against one state conducting lethal operations on another’s territory, is in practice a weak norm that yields to strategic interest. It means that smaller or less strategically valuable states cannot count on international protection against powerful neighbors’ extraterritorial operations. It means that the distinction between “rule-based international order” and “power-based international order” is less clear than Western governments typically claim.

The pattern also creates incentives that may prove destabilizing over time. If New Delhi can conduct alleged targeted killings in Pakistan with minimal international consequence, other states may conclude that they too can conduct extraterritorial operations against their security threats, provided they maintain sufficient strategic value to their major-power patrons. Turkey’s cross-border operations against the PKK in Iraq and Syria already follow this logic. Israel’s operations across the Middle East have long operated under a similar framework. The question is whether the normative infrastructure of international law can survive the proliferation of this practice without collapsing into a free-for-all where every state with the capability conducts extraterritorial operations against whoever it designates as a threat.

Proliferation risk is not hypothetical. Iran has conducted assassinations of opposition figures and dissidents across the Middle East and Europe. Russia has targeted defectors and critics in the United Kingdom and across the continent. Saudi Arabia targeted Khashoggi in Turkey. The United Arab Emirates has been accused of surveillance operations against journalists and activists. Each of these cases was treated as scandalous precisely because the norm against extraterritorial operations retained some force. If the India case establishes that a sufficiently important country can conduct such operations without consequence, the restraining effect of the norm diminishes for everyone. The paradox is that the countries most likely to benefit from the weakening of the norm in the short term, New Delhi and its strategic partners, are also the countries most likely to be harmed by the norm’s collapse in the long term, when adversaries and competitors invoke the same precedent to justify their own extraterritorial operations.

Divergent theories of sovereignty also emerge from the response spectrum, operating simultaneously of sovereignty operating simultaneously in the international system. The traditional Westphalian theory holds that sovereignty is an absolute right: no state may conduct operations on another state’s territory without consent, regardless of the justification. The counter-terrorism theory, advanced most forcefully by Israel and the United States, holds that sovereignty is conditional: a state that harbors terrorists and refuses to address the threat forfeits its right to complain when the targeted state takes matters into its own hands. The hybrid theory, which appears to guide most Western responses to India’s alleged operations, holds that sovereignty violations are judged not by a universal standard but by a matrix of factors including the perpetrator’s identity, the target’s status, the method used, and the strategic context. This hybrid approach is pragmatic but normatively incoherent, and its incoherence is precisely what makes it unsustainable as a long-term framework for international order.

The UN’s Conspicuous Absence

The United Nations, the institution most directly responsible for maintaining international norms against the use of force between states, was conspicuously absent from the targeted killing debate. The UN Security Council did not address the allegations against New Delhi for operations in Pakistan or Canada. No resolution was proposed. No presidential statement was issued. No investigation was mandated.

Structural dynamics ensured the Security Council’s silence was predetermined. Any resolution addressing India’s alleged operations would have faced opposition from multiple permanent members. The United States, India’s strategic partner, would have been reluctant to support action that could damage the bilateral relationship. Russia, India’s traditional defense partner, had no interest in establishing precedents that could be applied to its own extraterritorial operations. China, while sympathetic to Pakistan, had its own transnational repression concerns that would be highlighted by any principled debate on extraterritorial operations. France and the United Kingdom, both India’s defense partners and both countries with their own histories of extraterritorial intelligence operations, had limited incentive to push the issue. The result was a structural deadlock in which no permanent member had sufficient motivation to force the issue onto the Council’s agenda.

The UN Human Rights Council was slightly more engaged but equally ineffective. Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial killing and on human rights while countering terrorism could, in principle, have investigated the allegations. In practice, their capacity to investigate sovereign states with India’s diplomatic weight was limited, and their findings, even if produced, would have had no enforcement mechanism. The institutional architecture of the United Nations, designed for an era of interstate warfare between clearly defined adversaries, proved inadequate for addressing the gray-zone reality of extraterritorial targeted killing by a democratic state against designated terrorist targets.

At the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, of which Pakistan is a prominent member, raised the targeted killing allegations at ministerial meetings and issued statements expressing concern about violations of Pakistani sovereignty. The OIC’s engagement provided diplomatic cover for Pakistan’s position but produced no concrete outcome. The organization’s influence on the countries that matter most in the international response, the United States, European Union members, and the Five Eyes countries, is minimal. The OIC’s involvement may have actually undermined Pakistan’s campaign by associating the allegations with a bloc that Western capitals view through a geopolitical rather than normative lens.

International human rights organizations provided the most sustained critical engagement with the allegations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch raised the issue repeatedly, framing India’s alleged operations within a broader pattern of “transnational repression” that included visa cancellations, surveillance of diaspora communities, and pressure on foreign governments to extradite individuals India designates as terrorists. The European Parliament’s January 2025 resolution on EU-India relations reflected some of this advocacy, recommending that the EU-India Human Rights Dialogue be upgraded and that concrete benchmarks for progress be established. But the human rights organizations’ influence on state behavior is limited when strategic interests are at stake, and the gap between their advocacy and government action on the targeted killing allegations was vast.

The failure of multilateral institutions to address the allegations reflects a deeper structural problem in the international system. The institutions designed to enforce norms against the use of force, the Security Council and the International Court of Justice, are either captured by great-power politics or dependent on voluntary cooperation from the states they are meant to hold accountable. The institutions designed to monitor human rights, the Human Rights Council and the treaty bodies, lack enforcement mechanisms. The institutions designed to prosecute international crimes, the International Criminal Court, lack jurisdiction over states that have not ratified the Rome Statute, which includes both the two countries. The result is an institutional vacuum in which allegations of state-sponsored extraterritorial killing can accumulate without any international body possessing both the authority and the capacity to investigate and adjudicate them.

Why It Still Matters

The international response to India’s alleged targeted killings matters for reasons that extend well beyond the India-Pakistan relationship. The response, or its absence, is establishing precedents that will shape how states interact for decades to come.

First, the response is testing whether the sovereignty norm has any residual force in an era of counter-terrorism. If New Delhi can allegedly conduct a sustained campaign of targeted assassinations on Pakistani territory with minimal international consequence, the sovereignty norm as applied to counter-terrorism is effectively dead. States with the intelligence capability and the political cover to conduct such operations will increasingly treat borders as administrative inconveniences rather than legal boundaries. The implications for countries hosting refugee populations, dissident communities, or opposition figures from powerful neighbors are severe.

Second, the response is revealing the true structure of international accountability. The nominal system, based on the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and customary international law, holds that all states are subject to the same rules. The actual system, as demonstrated by the differential responses to Russian, Saudi, and Indian operations, is that accountability is a function of power. States that are strategically valuable can conduct operations that would bring sanctions, expulsions, and condemnation upon less important states. This reality has always existed, but the targeted killing cases have made it visible with unusual clarity.

Third, the response has implications for the country’s own trajectory as a global power. New Delhi’s ability to conduct alleged extraterritorial operations with minimal consequence has strengthened the domestic constituency for offensive counter-terrorism. Operation Sindoor, which struck nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, demonstrated that the government was willing to use overt military force in addition to covert operations. The international community’s response to Sindoor, which ranged from concern to endorsement but produced no lasting consequences, reinforced the lesson that strategic value shields the country from accountability. This dynamic creates incentives for escalation that may, in a nuclear-armed neighborhood, carry risks far beyond the bilateral India-Pakistan relationship.

Fourth, the response has implications for how weaker states protect their sovereignty. Pakistan’s inability to generate an effective international response to alleged violations of its sovereignty, regardless of whether those violations were justified by the targets’ terrorist status, sends a signal to other countries that border powerful neighbors with grievances. If a nuclear-armed democracy with a GDP exceeding 3.5 trillion dollars can allegedly conduct sustained lethal operations on the territory of a neighbor with limited international standing, what protections does the sovereignty norm offer to smaller states facing similar pressures? The question is particularly relevant in regions where border disputes, separatist movements, and transnational threats create similar dynamics: Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and parts of Africa all contain configurations where powerful states might be tempted to apply the India model if it is seen to succeed without consequence.

Fifth, the response reveals the limitations of the “rules-based international order” that Western governments frequently invoke. The phrase implies a system where consistent rules apply equally to all states. The targeted killing cases demonstrate that the system operates instead as a power-based order in which rules are enforced selectively. When the perpetrator is an adversary, the rules are enforced vigorously. When the perpetrator is an ally or partner, the rules are acknowledged in principle but not enforced in practice. This inconsistency is not new, but the targeted killing cases have made it visible to a global audience that includes countries in the Global South who have long suspected that the “rules-based order” was a euphemism for Western hegemony. India’s ability to conduct alleged operations without consequence while Russia and Saudi Arabia face punishment for similar acts provides empirical support for that suspicion.

The question that the international community has not yet answered, and may not answer until a crisis forces it, is whether the current pattern of selective enforcement is sustainable. If it is, then the India-Pakistan shadow war will continue to evolve with New Delhi enjoying effective impunity for covert operations against designated terrorists. If it is not, the correction may come not through diplomatic dialogue but through a catastrophic escalation that forces the international community to confront the consequences of its own inconsistency. The Pahalgam-to-Sindoor escalation cycle of April-May 2025 provided a preview of how quickly covert competition can become overt conflict between nuclear-armed states, and how limited the international community’s tools are for managing that transition once it begins.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How has the international community responded to India’s alleged targeted killings in Pakistan?

The international response has been fragmented and uneven. Canada is the only country that has taken aggressive diplomatic action, expelling Indian diplomats and pursuing a criminal investigation into the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The United States pursued legal action through the Pannun plot indictment while preserving the broader strategic partnership. The United Kingdom, European Union, and Australia acknowledged the allegations with varying degrees of concern but took no substantive action. Israel endorsed India’s right to self-defense without qualification. China and Russia issued statements calibrated to their own strategic interests. No multilateral body, including the United Nations Security Council, has addressed the allegations formally. The pattern reveals that the international response is determined by strategic calculus rather than a universal standard of sovereignty or international law.

Q: Why did Canada condemn India while other Western countries stayed silent?

Canada’s response was driven by several unique factors. Nijjar was a Canadian citizen killed on Canadian soil, which made the case a direct sovereignty violation that Ottawa could not ignore without undermining its own authority. The Sikh community constitutes nearly two percent of Canada’s population and holds significant political influence. Canada’s intelligence agencies, embedded in the Five Eyes network, had access to signals intelligence corroborating the allegations. The political pressure on Prime Minister Trudeau was substantial. Other Western countries faced the same allegations but lacked the domestic political pressure, the direct sovereignty violation on their own soil, and the political motivation to risk a confrontation with a strategically valuable partner.

Q: Is the international response to India’s alleged killings hypocritical compared to reactions to Russia and Saudi Arabia?

The response is objectively inconsistent. Russia’s Salisbury Novichok attack produced coordinated expulsions from over two dozen countries. Saudi Arabia’s Khashoggi murder produced congressional sanctions and arms deal suspensions. India’s alleged operations produced one bilateral diplomatic crisis with Canada and otherwise minimal consequences. The inconsistency can be explained by strategic calculus, as India is too important a partner for the West to alienate, or by moral distinction, as the targets were designated terrorists rather than defectors or journalists. Whether the inconsistency constitutes hypocrisy depends on whether one believes the international community should apply the same standards regardless of context or whether the targets’ status and the perpetrator’s strategic importance legitimately affect the response.

Q: How does the response compare to reactions to Russia’s Salisbury poisoning?

Consider the contrast. Russia’s Salisbury attack produced over 150 diplomatic expulsions across more than two dozen countries, EU sanctions, NATO condemnation, and sustained international pressure. The coordinated response was possible because Russia was already an adversary, the weapon used was a chemical agent that posed broad public danger, the victim was a defector whose targeting struck at the intelligence relationships every country depends on, and the UK lobbied allies aggressively for solidarity. India’s alleged operations produced none of these conditions: India is a strategic partner, the methods used were precise conventional attacks, the victims were designated terrorists, and no country lobbied for coordinated action. The Salisbury comparison demonstrates that the norm against extraterritorial killing is enforced based on political context rather than legal principle.

Q: Why is the US response to India different from its response to Saudi Arabia after Khashoggi?

The Khashoggi case produced congressional action including a Senate resolution holding Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible, because the victim was a journalist with a Washington Post column who had connections to American media and political circles. Congressional pressure forced executive branch action regardless of strategic considerations. The India case has not produced comparable congressional pressure because the victims were designated terrorists without American constituency advocacy, the Pannun plot was foiled before anyone was harmed, and the broader strategic partnership with India is valued across both parties. The structural difference is that the Khashoggi case mobilized a domestic political constituency in the United States that the India allegations have not.

Q: Has the United Nations addressed India’s alleged targeted killings?

The UN Security Council has not addressed the allegations. No resolution has been proposed, no presidential statement issued, and no investigation mandated. The structural dynamics of the Council, where multiple permanent members have interests in avoiding scrutiny of extraterritorial operations, prevent the issue from reaching the agenda. The UN Human Rights Council has engaged indirectly through broader human rights dialogues and special rapporteur mandates, but these mechanisms lack enforcement authority. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killing has the mandate to investigate such cases but lacks the capacity to compel cooperation from a state with India’s diplomatic weight.

Q: Does India’s economic importance shield it from diplomatic consequences?

India’s economic importance is one of several factors that shield it from consequences, but it operates in conjunction with geopolitical, defense, and strategic considerations. The growing economy makes New Delhi an attractive trade and investment partner. Major Western countries are pursuing free trade agreements with New Delhi. India is one of the world’s largest arms importers, creating defense industry constituencies in France, Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom that lobby against diplomatic confrontation. The EU, UK, and Australia all have economic priorities with New Delhi that make confrontation costly. Economic importance alone would not create immunity, but combined with India’s geopolitical value as a counterweight to China and its status as a fellow democracy, it creates a structural shield that few countries are willing to test.

Q: Which countries have implicitly endorsed covert operations from New Delhi?

Israel is the only country that has explicitly endorsed India’s right to self-defense in the context of counter-terrorism operations, with Ambassador Reuven Azar repeatedly and publicly supporting India’s actions. Several other countries have offered implicit endorsement through silence, declining to criticize India’s alleged operations or to support Canada’s position during the diplomatic crisis. Japan, a Quad partner, made no public statement on the allegations. France, a major defense partner, remained silent. The Gulf states, several of which have their own complex relationships with both India and Pakistan, avoided the issue entirely. Implicit endorsement through silence is a deliberate diplomatic choice that signals acceptance without the political risk of explicit support.

Q: What role did the Pannun plot play in shaping international perceptions?

The Pannun plot was pivotal because it brought the allegations into the American legal system, where evidence standards, due process, and judicial oversight applied. The DOJ indictment named a specific Indian government employee as the directing intelligence, making the case more concrete than general allegations from Pakistan or even Canada’s parliamentary statements. When Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in February 2026 and received up to 24 years in prison, the case moved from allegation to established fact. The Pannun plot also corroborated Canada’s allegations by pattern, making it harder for India to dismiss either case in isolation. The case demonstrated that the allegations were not fabrications from hostile governments but were supported by evidence that met American prosecutorial standards.

Q: How did India respond to the international allegations against it?

India’s response followed a consistent pattern of denial, counter-accusation, and deflection. The Ministry of External Affairs rejected the Canadian allegations as “absurd and motivated” by political considerations, accusing Trudeau of pandering to Sikh voters. New Delhi acknowledged the Pannun case by confirming the named individual was no longer a government employee but did not accept responsibility for his actions. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar stated that it is not India’s policy to carry out targeted killings overseas. New Delhi rejected The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation as “false and malicious.” Regarding Pakistan’s allegations, India dismissed them as attempts to deflect from Pakistan’s own record of harboring terrorists. The response strategy was to deny everything while pointing to the targets’ terrorist designations as justification for why Pakistan’s complaints about sovereignty lacked moral standing.

Q: Did the Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor change the international dynamic?

Pahalgam fundamentally reframed the international conversation. Before the attack, the discussion centered on whether India had violated sovereignty norms. After Pahalgam, the discussion shifted to whether India had the right to defend its citizens against cross-border terrorism supported from Pakistani soil. The EU condemned the Pahalgam attack and affirmed every state’s right to protect its citizens from terrorism. Operation Sindoor, which struck nine sites in Pakistan, drew a range of responses from concern to endorsement but produced no lasting diplomatic consequences for India. The attack created a narrative context in which India’s counter-terrorism operations, both covert and overt, were viewed more sympathetically by the international community.

Q: Can Pakistan protect the targets on India’s alleged list?

Pakistan’s ability to protect individuals targeted by the alleged Indian campaign appears limited, as the sustained pace of killings over multiple years across multiple cities suggests either a significant intelligence penetration of Pakistani territory or a degradation of Pakistan’s own security capabilities, or both. The post-Sindoor security environment has further complicated Pakistan’s ability to provide protection. The individuals who have survived have reportedly changed residences, reduced public appearances, restricted communications, and retreated from operational roles, adaptations that suggest they take the threat seriously even if Pakistan’s security agencies cannot fully mitigate it. Pakistan’s security challenges in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa further divert resources from protecting individuals on India’s alleged target list.

Q: What is the legal status of targeted killings under international law?

International law on targeted killing is contested rather than settled. Article 51 of the UN Charter provides for self-defense, but whether it extends to killing non-state actors on foreign soil when the host state is unwilling or unable to address the threat is debated. The Israeli Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling established conditional legality for targeted killings under specific proportionality and necessity standards. The United States developed legal frameworks through Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying the drone campaign. India has no public legal framework for its alleged operations and maintains complete deniability. Most international law scholars argue that the “unwilling or unable” doctrine stretches Article 51 beyond its intended scope, but in state practice, multiple countries have applied it frequently enough to constitute a de facto norm even if not a de jure one. The global legal debate remains unresolved.

Q: How did the EU respond to allegations of India’s targeted killings?

The European Union was characterized by institutional silence on the specific targeted killing allegations. Brussels issued no formal statement addressing the alleged operations in Pakistan or the Nijjar killing in Canada. The European Parliament adopted a resolution on EU-India relations in January 2025 that raised human rights concerns but did not specifically address the assassination allegations. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch pressed the EU to raise the issue during the EU-India Human Rights Dialogue, but the response was limited to encouraging dialogue rather than demanding accountability. The EU’s silence reflected the collective weight of trade agreement negotiations, defense partnerships, and Indo-Pacific strategy investments that created structural incentives to avoid confrontation with New Delhi.

Q: What did Australia say about India’s alleged targeted killings?

Australia issued a measured statement saying it believes all countries should respect sovereignty and the rule of law. Foreign Minister Penny Wong raised the allegations with Indian External Affairs Minister Jaishankar during his visit to Australia in November 2024, but the substance of the exchange was not publicly disclosed. Australia’s position was shaped by its membership in the Quad alongside India and its broader Indo-Pacific security strategy, which made confrontation with New Delhi strategically costly. The contrast between Australia’s mild response to the India allegations and its aggressive response to Chinese covert police stations on Australian territory illustrates the same strategic calculus visible across Western capitals.

Q: Could the international community have done more to address these allegations?

The international community possessed multiple mechanisms that could have been deployed but chose not to use. The UN Security Council could have convened a formal session on the allegations. The International Court of Justice could have been asked for an advisory opinion on the legality of extraterritorial targeted killings. Western governments could have coordinated diplomatic responses as they did after Salisbury. Arms sales could have been conditioned on cooperation with investigations. Intelligence-sharing partnerships could have been leveraged to press for accountability. None of these mechanisms were used, not because they were unavailable but because the strategic cost of deploying them against India was judged to outweigh the normative benefit of enforcing sovereignty principles. The international community’s choice was deliberate: it prioritized strategic partnership over normative consistency.

Q: Are the Pannun and Nijjar cases connected?

Both cases appear to reflect a pattern of alleged Indian intelligence operations targeting Khalistan-linked individuals in Western countries. Both involved Sikh activists designated as terrorists by India. Both allegedly involved direction from Indian government officials. The temporal proximity, with Nijjar killed in June 2023 and the Pannun plot interdicted around the same period, suggests coordinated rather than coincidental activity. The US indictment in the Pannun case, by naming a specific Indian government employee as the directing intelligence, provided evidentiary support for the pattern that Canada alleged in the Nijjar case. However, the two cases are being investigated and prosecuted independently, and no formal legal finding has established a direct connection between the two operations.

Q: What precedent does the international response set for future cases?

What emerges is a de facto precedent that strategically valuable democracies can conduct extraterritorial operations against designated terrorists with minimal international consequence, provided the operations are conducted with precision, avoid mass casualties, and do not target individuals with standing in the international community such as journalists or diplomats. The precedent is implicit rather than explicit, established through practice rather than declaration, and may encourage other states with similar capabilities and strategic value to consider similar operations against their own security threats. The long-term implications for the sovereignty norm and the stability of the international order remain unclear but potentially significant.

Q: How did China respond to the India-Pakistan tensions and targeted killing allegations?

China, as Pakistan’s closest strategic ally, walked a careful line. Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged de-escalation during the 2025 crisis but avoided directly addressing the targeted killing allegations. Beijing’s position was complicated by its own record of transnational repression, including allegations of operating covert police stations in multiple countries and targeting Uyghur and Tibetan dissidents abroad. Any principled condemnation of India’s extraterritorial operations would have invited scrutiny of China’s own activities. China had also repeatedly vetoed attempts at the United Nations to designate JeM founder Masood Azhar as a terrorist, a position that undermined its credibility as a defender of sovereignty norms in the India-Pakistan context. The result was a response calibrated to support Pakistan rhetorically while avoiding specific commitments that could boomerang on Beijing’s own practices.

Q: Why has no international investigation been launched into these allegations?

No international investigation has been launched because no institution with the authority and capacity to conduct one has the political motivation to do so. The UN Security Council is deadlocked by competing permanent-member interests. The International Criminal Court lacks jurisdiction over the country, which is not a party to the Rome Statute. The UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur mechanisms lack enforcement authority and cannot compel state cooperation. The International Court of Justice could potentially hear a case if Pakistan or Canada brought one, but neither country has done so, likely calculating that the diplomatic cost of a formal international legal proceeding against India would outweigh any potential benefit. The absence of an investigation is not a function of institutional incapacity but of political calculation at every level.