The spies operating in Australia’s Indian diaspora community

The guessing game began on March 17, 2021. That was the day on which the head of ASIO, Mike Burgess, revealed that a year earlier his intelligence agency had uncovered “a nest of spies from a particular foreign intelligence service” and quietly had them removed from Australia.

He provided just enough detail to make the point that this was an “acutely serious” matter. They had, he said, developed “targeted relationships with current and former politicians, a foreign embassy and a state police service”. The same spies had sought information on “security protocols at a major airport” and had “successfully cultivated and recruited an Australian government security clearance holder who had access to sensitive details of defence technology”.

They also sought to obtain classified information about Australia’s trade relationships and had “monitored” their country’s diaspora community.

What Burgess did not do was identify the country for which they had been working. That “would be an unnecessary distraction”, he said. He warned his audience not to “jump to conclusions” and made a point of saying the foreign intelligence service involved “was not from a country in our region”.

Immediately, sections of the media did jump to conclusions: if it wasn’t a country in our region, it must be one further away. Within days reports appeared, citing anonymous intelligence sources, saying it was Russia.

Until April this year, that is where the finger of blame remained pointed. That was until The Washington Post redirected it in a remarkable exposé of the activities of India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW.

The Washington Post’s investigation was triggered by two events in particular. The first was the assassination on June 18, 2023, of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was shot in the car park of a Sikh temple near Vancouver, Canada. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, subsequently said “agents of the government of India” were behind the killing.

The second was a plot to kill another prominent member of the Indian diaspora, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. It was planned to happen shortly after the Canadian killing but went wrong. RAW agents engaged someone they believed to be a drug trafficker to hire a hit man. In reality, the supposed dealer was an informant for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

In both cases, the targets were advocates of the creation of an independent Sikh nation, Khalistan, centred on the north-western Indian state of Punjab.

The story went to much more than those two operations, however. It quoted a US State Department human rights report released in April, cataloguing RAW’s actions, including “extraterritorial killing, kidnapping, forced returns or other violence”. The state department report described “threats, harassment, arbitrary surveillance and coercion” of overseas dissidents and journalists in numerous countries.

The “escalating campaign of aggression … against the Indian diaspora” under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, the story said, was overwhelmingly directed at Sikhs, especially the secessionist movement called Sikhs for Justice.

Among the examples of what it called “a series of clashes between RAW and Western domestic security services”, the Post detailed actions by German police and Britain’s MI5 over the surveillance and harassment of Sikhs.

It also referred to the Indian agency’s activities in this country. “In Australia,” said the story, citing unnamed Australian officials, “two RAW officers were expelled in 2020 after authorities broke up what Mike Burgess, head of the Australian intelligence service, described as a ‘nest of spies’.”

After the Post piece ran, several media outlets did more digging and confirmed the “nest of spies” Burgess referred to in his 2021 threat assessment report were Indian, not Russian. There were suggestions more than two Indian intelligence operatives were expelled.

Neither Burgess nor the government he serves have explicitly confirmed Australia’s removal of Indian intelligence operatives in 2020. Nor have they called out India directly for its aggression towards dissidents and its disregard for the sovereignty of nations that host them.

Burgess was being coy about it again last Sunday, when he appeared on the ABC’s Insiders program. He said he could think of “at least three or four” countries “actively involved” in interference with diaspora communities in Australia.

“Some of them would surprise you, and some of them are also our friends,” he said, naming Iran but not India.

In fairness, says Ian Hall, professor of international relations at Griffith University and a specialist in Indian foreign policy, Burgess is constrained in what he can say: “There’s no way in which Mike Burgess can go out and name a country without it having approval from the prime minister or at least one of the prime minister’s proxies.”

Burgess has gone close, however.

In response to questioning by the ABC last October, about the alleged involvement of the Indian government in the assassination of the Canadian citizen Nijjar, he said he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter”.

A few days later, on October 23, he fronted the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee.

Greens defence and home affairs spokesman David Shoebridge, who maintains contacts within the Australian Sikh community and who began raising concerns well before The Washington Post ran its exposé, put it to Burgess that information used by Canadian authorities was shared as part of the Five Eyes partnership. “Was that information shared with Australia?”

Burgess did not offer a direct answer but said: “We are informed by what happens in the world and what we learn about what other governments may or may not be capable of doing. We have partnerships with many countries, not just Five Eyes, and we take that into consideration when we look at our own domestic situation…”

Asked if there had been “any outreach” from ASIO to the Sikh community, given its anxiety following the assassination in Canada, Burgess said no. “But,” he said, “I’m aware of how members of the Australian diaspora communities and that community in particular feel about this subject, yes.”

Were these valid concerns, asked Shoebridge.

Said Burgess: “[N]ot in the sense that there’s going to be a sanctioned hit against any of them…”

At a subsequent estimates hearing, on May 29 this year, Shoebridge’s questioning grew sharper and more testy.

In the interim, the senator had heard back from “multiple” members of the Sikh community that ASIO had in fact been in contact. He noted the ABC had also reported that ASIO had met members of the community, long before the Canadian assassination, seeking evidence of any foreign interference by agents working for the Indian government.

He reminded Burgess of his previous denials.

“Your evidence in this committee was an active misdirect, wasn’t it?” Shoebridge said. “When you said there’s ‘Not a dark hand of the state directing it’, that was an active misdirect because we now know, don’t we, that in fact it was the Indian government who was engaged in monitoring their country’s diaspora community as well as the other appalling instances of espionage that you outlined in your 2021 assessment?”

Shoebridge noted the spy chief’s words in 2021, when he said the foreign intelligence service outed by ASIO was not from a country in our region.

“Why would you say that when we now know that it was India?” demanded Shoebridge.

Burgess acknowledged India was indeed part of our area, the Indo-Pacific region, but argued semantics about the phrasing of Shoebridge’s previous questions. He said his intent was to make the point “that foreign interference comes from more than one country” and that he wanted to avoid media reporting that might “jump straight to one country in particular”.

However, that is exactly what happened. Based on what he said, the media jumped to the conclusion that it was Russia. “And,” Shoebridge tells The Saturday Paper, “he let that run without any correction.”

“He will say it’s not his job to comment on media speculation,” Shoebridge says. “But if there is allegedly informed media speculation that is misdirecting the attention of elected officials and potentially the broader parliament, I think he has an obligation to correct it.

“Instead we find out about it through The Washington Post.”

Even now, Shoebridge says, Burgess hasn’t formally acknowledged the spies were Indian. “But when it was put directly to him, there was what you might call an embarrassed acquiescence.”

The question is, why the obfuscation?

“It’s a diplomatic calculation, pure and simple,” says one foreign policy expert, pointing to what happened after Trudeau publicly accused India of involvement in the 2023 assassination in Canada.

In that case, there was a furious response from the Indian government: Canada was forced to withdraw 41 of its diplomats; Prime Minister Modi refused to meet Trudeau at a subsequent G20 meeting; negotiations over a trade deal stalled.

Relations between the two nations remain frosty.

“If they’re otherwise friendly countries … I think we weigh up, you know, the diplomatic blowback or implications of naming them,” the source says.

“I think in the case of India, it’s a friendly country. We have an increasingly strong relationship. We called out their conduct – if not their nationality – and threw their people out. We made our point.”

In the view of Ian Hall, Burgess was making the point again on Insiders last Sunday. It was not necessary to name India to convey that we are alert to its activities and not happy about it.

“I see this as a shot across the bows: if their behaviour continues we might end up having to PNG [persona non grata] somebody else out of the country.

“There’s a desire to manage these things carefully and quietly. Partly because that’s what you do with countries perceived as being friends, but also it’s because, India being India, if you make a public criticism, then it will blow up and become an enormous issue. It’ll be much debated in public and the reaction will be quite loud.

“We see issues get completely out of control in the media in India. A good example is in the response to the recent events in Bangladesh. Rumours about the Bangladeshi prime minister being overthrown by the Americans have run throughout all the major Indian media. There is an acute sensitivity to criticism.”

That is particularly the case when it comes to the issue of Khalistan. Hall notes that Sikh separatism and the Hindu nationalism and religious intolerance of Modi’s supporters in the Bharatiya Janata Party have grown in parallel over recent years.

“They’re feeding off each other,” Hall says. “We’ve just seen two people associated with the movement elected to parliament from Punjab. And there’s a lot more concern that this has been kept alive outside of India.”

Over recent years, Sikhs for Justice has conducted “referendums” among the diaspora communities in a number of countries, including the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, a couple of European nations and Australia. Reportedly, tens of thousands collectively voted for independence, although precise numbers in this country are hard to determine.

They have received limited coverage in mainstream media here, but reports of growing tensions and brawls between pro- and anti-independence groups, along with alleged attacks on Hindu temples in Australia, have featured prominently in some Indian media. There have also been diplomatic complaints.

Last year, The Indian Express quoted a statement by the Indian High Commission in Canberra: “Signals that pro-Khalistan elements are stepping up their activities in Australia, actively aided and abetted by members of proscribed terrorist organisations such as the Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) and other inimical agencies from outside Australia, have been evident for some time.”

While Burgess might publicly play down the tensions, Hall says he has no doubt it is there and growing. The size of the diaspora community also makes the issue more pressing: Indian Australians are now the second-largest immigrant community in Australia.

According to the 2021 census, Hindus numbered 684,000 people, or 2.7 per cent of the population. The Sikh population was 210,400.

“Punjabi is actually spoken more at home than Hindi is,” Hall says. “Australia’s is a pretty significantly Punjabi-heavy diaspora.”

This makes the situation ticklish, particularly given Australia’s efforts to cultivate trade and defence relationships with the world’s largest nation.

According to the Department of Foreign Affairs, India was Australia’s fifth-largest trading partner in 2023, and one of the fastest-growing trade relationships. The five-year trend growth was almost 13 per cent.

The upshot, says Shoebridge, is that ASIO and the federal police have not taken complaints of Indian government-sanctioned interference in the Sikh diaspora in Australia seriously enough.

“They have repeatedly refused to act upon complaints of serious intimidation and harassment that have been happening online, threats against individuals, threats against their families back in India, threats against businesses that people are operating, and all of which would be offences under the Telecommunications Act,” he says.

Shoebridge does not suggest there is any “directive” from government to go soft. “But they’ve seen the prime minister give Modi bear hugs and call him ‘the boss’ and travel to India and ride in a chariot with him. You know, those signals are powerful.”

Interestingly, the enthusiastic embrace of India by the government is not reflected in popular opinion. A Lowy Institute poll in March – which found Trudeau the most trusted of world leaders, at 65 per cent – recorded a seven-point slump in confidence in Modi, to a lacklustre 37 per cent. Australians rated Japan as our best friend in Asia. Of six Asian partners, India came fifth, behind Singapore, Indonesia and China.

The public did reflect the government view in one regard. Overall, 42 per cent of Australians ranked trade and investment as the highest priority in the bilateral relationship, well ahead of human rights, at 32 per cent.

Essentially, we care more about the money than about India’s harassment of its diaspora community. Unless, of course, it becomes too obvious to ignore, as has happened elsewhere.

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