Pannun case: Nikhil Gupta pleads guilty but unanswered questions are piling up

On June 30, 2023, Nikhil Gupta boarded a flight from India to Prague. The moment he landed, he was arrested at America’s request. He was later extradited, and this month, pleaded guilty in New York to conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. The target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist who holds US citizenship. The indictment identified a co-conspirator as Vikash Yadav (CC-1), described as an officer of India’s external intelligence agency, R&AW.

Those are the facts on the record, and they’re serious. But just laying them out isn’t analysis. The case needs to be looked at more carefully — at what actually happened, and whether the story we’ve been told holds together.

Sting operations are a perfectly normal law enforcement tool. Nobody’s saying they’re not. But here’s the thing: when a plot this serious — one that implicates a sovereign government — rests almost entirely on evidence gathered inside a single govt’s own controlled operation, that’s worth thinking about. It doesn’t mean the case is wrong. It just means we’re essentially being asked to take one govt’s word for what happened.

Then there’s the behaviour described in the indictment, which is harder to make sense of.

Vikash Yadav, identified in the indictment as a R&AW officer, apparently talked a great deal. He didn’t just discuss Pannun. He allegedly brought up other potential targets. He mentioned timing around the Indian Prime Minister’s visit to the US. He seemed worried about how things would look diplomatically. That’s an odd way for someone running a covert state operation to behave. Intelligence agencies work on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t volunteer information to a middleman you’re using as a disposable go-between.

If Yadav really said all this, one is left with three possibilities: either the operation was run with remarkable sloppiness, or he went rogue and acted beyond his intelligence brief, or the conversation went the way it did because the setting, a US-controlled sting, was drawing him out.

The alleged sharing of video footage from Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s killing is similarly puzzling. Why would anyone pass material like that down a chain that included a criminal broker? There are also GPS-tagged surveillance photos allegedly sent through the same chain, along with messages of praise and nudges about when to act. On face value, it looks like damning evidence. But if you know anything about how covert operations actually work, it looks like a lot of unnecessary talking. Professional operations don’t generate paper trails like this.

Gupta’s own profile is another loose end. He’s described in the indictment as an international narcotics and weapons trafficker. But before his arrest, there’s no obvious public record, no conviction. The indictment hints at a narcotics case in Gujarat being used as leverage over him, but where’s that case? Is it real, documented, verifiable? Or did it only come up within the sting? If the idea is that Gupta did this because he was scared of prosecution, you’d want to see some evidence that the threat was real.

And then there’s Prague. By the time Gupta got on that flight, American authorities had already built a case against him by their own account. The Czech Republic extradites to the US. Anyone who knew they were in serious legal jeopardy wouldn’t casually fly into that situation. So either Gupta didn’t know, which seems unlikely, or he thought he was protected.

This is where things get murkier. There are suggestions from people familiar with intelligence networks that Gupta wasn’t just a freelance criminal middleman. He may have had prior contact with a woman Indian intelligence officer based in the US and operating within a broader intelligence setup. That same officer later came under suspicion in some quarters of having been too close to American intelligence, even of having fed Gupta into the situation deliberately. None of this has been tested in court, and no judge has made any such finding. But in intelligence work, handlers get compromised, loyalties shift, and the person left holding the bag is usually the one furthest down the chain.

If Gupta was operating on the assumption that he had some kind of cover, his decision to fly to Prague starts to make more sense not as blind recklessness, but as a miscalculation based on bad information from a handler he trusted.

The identification of Vikash Yadav (CC-1) as a R&AW officer in the indictment adds another layer of seriousness. The communications attributed to him run through the same controlled sting channel established by US law enforcement. No public charges have been filed against him in the US beyond the indictment reference, and no judicial findings in India have addressed the matter publicly. That leaves the allegation suspended in an unusual space — specific enough to name, but not yet tested in open court.

None of this happened in a vacuum. The Nijjar killing in Canada had already badly damaged India’s relationships with several western governments. Trade, energy, strategic rivalry — all of that was in the air. Legal cases involving these kinds of geopolitical stakes are never purely legal.

To be clear: none of this exonerates Gupta. He has pleaded guilty. But guilty pleas aren’t full trials. They settle cases without putting every link in the chain under scrutiny.

What we’re left with is a narrative that comes almost entirely from one government’s sting operation, describes behaviour that looks strange for a professional covert operation, involves a man whose criminal background isn’t clearly established, and rests on a leverage theory with no visible paper trail. The Prague decision doesn’t fit ordinary risk logic either.

Maybe it was all just spectacularly badly run. Or maybe what happened underneath is more complicated than the official version shows.

The Gupta case isn’t just about one man anymore. It’s about what India’s institutions were or weren’t doing, and whether the country is willing to be honest about it. The official narrative may be legally sufficient. As an explanation of what actually happened, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and those questions aren’t going away.

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