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Whose Terrorists? The Question Beneath New Zealand's Security Talk with India

 



Whose Terrorists? The Question Beneath New Zealand's Security Talk with India

Mohan J. Dutta

Among the announcements that accompanied Narendra Modi's visit to Auckland was talk of deeper cooperation on counter-terrorism, the kind of line that passes through a joint statement sounding unimpeachable, because who could be against fighting terrorism. The question that should stop New Zealand before it signs anything is quieter and more consequential: whose definition of terrorism would we be cooperating with?

India's answer is written into its statute book. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the country's principal anti-terror law, has been deployed against journalists, students, academics and human rights defenders, people whose offence was reporting, organising or dissenting. Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who had spent his life with Adivasi communities, was arrested under the Act and died in custody awaiting trial. Under the same legal architecture, broad swathes of Sikh and Kashmiri political expression are treated as terrorism, and the machinery operates inside a state that the Varieties of Democracy Institute has classified since 2021 as an electoral autocracy, its newsrooms raided, its scholars jailed, its Prime Minister untouched by an open press conference in more than a decade. A definition of terrorism produced by such a system is not a neutral technical input; it is the system's politics, exported in the language of security.

New Zealand does not need to imagine where that export leads, because Canada has lived it. In 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh activist, was shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia, and Canada's national police force subsequently linked agents of the Indian government to his killing and to a wider campaign of homicides, extortion and intimidation directed at the Sikh community, findings that led to the expulsion of Indian diplomats. That is transnational repression conducted inside a Five Eyes democracy, against citizens of that democracy, by a state now proposing to share intelligence with ours.

Nor does New Zealand need to look abroad for the warning. Our own Security Intelligence Service, in its most recent threat assessments, names transnational repression targeting diaspora communities as a live feature of this country's threat environment, and it adds a caution that reads as if written for this moment: some foreign states deliberately accuse New Zealand-based groups of being extremists or terrorists when they are not, a labelling tactic used to stigmatise communities and justify repressive activity against them. The SIS says it treats such labels with extreme caution. A formal intelligence partnership is precisely the channel through which such labels stop being claims and start being inputs, arriving as watchlists, requests and dossiers wearing the authority of a partner service.

This is what it would mean to script foreign interference directly into our own security architecture. Intelligence cooperation is never a one-way pipe; every partnership imports the partner's categories, and India's categories would place members of our own Sikh, Muslim and dissident Indian communities, New Zealanders, under a suspicion manufactured in New Delhi. The communities that would bear this are the same communities our security system was rebuilt to protect after March 15, and the same communities the SIS already identifies as targets of foreign interference. We would be asking the watched to trust the watchers who partnered with the state watching them.

None of this is an argument against engaging India. Trade, education, cultural exchange and diplomacy all carry their own logics, and the case for them can be made honestly. Security and intelligence cooperation is different in kind, because it traffics in the one commodity, suspicion, that an electoral autocracy manufactures in surplus and exports with intent. Before New Zealand deepens that cooperation, it should be able to answer the quiet question in public: whose terrorists would we be hunting, and who among our own people would wake up on the list.

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