Switzerland has blind spot for democratic India’s repression of critics abroad

India pressures critics abroad, including in Switzerland. Yet its reputation as the world’s largest democracy shields its conduct from scrutiny, says Shrey Kapoor, co-author of a study the Swiss government commissioned into similar activities by China in the Alpine nation.

In February 2025, the Swiss Federal Council External linkacknowledged that China monitors and pressures Tibetans and Uyghurs living in Switzerland, drawing on a study I co-authored. In its broader discussion of transnational repression, the government’s reportExternal link named countries including China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Eritrea.

India attracts far less attention in this debate.

Yet in February 2026, the FBI described the intended victim of an Indian-directed murder plot in the United States as a target of precisely such “transnational repression”External link.

Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to targeting a Sikh activist and US citizen. According to the justice department, Gupta acted at the direction of Vikash Yadav, then working at India’s Cabinet Secretariat, which houses the foreign intelligence agency. The plan was underway while Prime Minister Narendra Modi was being received at the White House in June 2023. The Indian state has denied involvement.

Pressure that the government exerts on its critics abroad can take less dramatic forms.

Human Rights Watch has documentedExternal link the revocation of Overseas Citizen of India status, along with its visa and residency privileges, from academics and journalists who criticise the government. In my own research, I encountered a scholar from southern Germany who was refused entry at Delhi airport because his doctoral thesis on Modi’s Hindu nationalism was deemed unpatriotic.

>> Read more about the Swiss government’s 2025 report on transnational repression:

World’s biggest democracy gets pass

Whereas Switzerland’s renegotiation of a free trade agreement with China provoked public debate on human rights, its deal with India, concluded through EFTA, passed through parliamentExternal link with discussion limited to sustainability and investment. The silence on India’s treatment of critics abroad is difficult to separate from the nation’s growing economic weight and its value to Western governments as a strategic counterweight to China.

That Chinese abuses are on a far larger scaleExternal link doesn’t mean there aren’t questions for Switzerland on how its response to abuses diverges between authoritarian and democratic states. So far, India’s reputation for democracy supersedes any examination of its conduct.

While murder plots and withdrawal of visa privileges are obviously transnational repression, what I have observed in Switzerland is harder for authorities to identify. It’s less likely to trigger measures designed to counter surveillance and intimidation of critics.

Repression disguised as belonging

It is the structure of the Hindu nationalist movement that connects life in Switzerland, home to around 26,000 Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, to intercommunal mobilisation and violence in India, and that determines who in the diaspora can dissent and at what cost.

The movement from which Modi’s party emerged is organised as a family of associations around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak SanghExternal link, a right-wing volunteer paramilitary organisation.

Its basic unit is the shakha, a local branch in which members meet regularly for physical drills, exercises with bamboo staves, oath-taking and ideological instruction. The training produces disciplined cadres, who are sent out to found further branches. Modi himself rose through this system as a full-time organiser before entering politics.

Its record in India is one of organised violence against Muslims.

In December 1992, crowds of people – mobilised through the movement’s affiliates – demolished the mosque at Ayodhya, and the riots that followed across the country killed around 2,000 people. In 2002, with Modi as chief minister of Gujarat, a pogrom killed well over 1,000 peopleExternal link, most of them Muslims, and drove some 150,000 from their homes.

To an outsider, a shakha looks like a sports or cultural club. The movement’s overseas counterpart, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, has operated shakhas abroad since 1947.

Learning ‘real’ Hindu culture

During my research, I have observed them operating in Switzerland within a community association run by a group that identifies itself openly with the campaign for the temple at Ayodhya. The movement also organises events such as a residential weekend in the Alps, where some 200 people gathered so that children could learn “real” Hindu culture between hiking and meditation.

A family that would never join a nationalist organisation will send a child to a cultural weekend in the mountains. The movement also works through the temples and cultural associations that any diaspora builds. Most of their members are not nationalists and would not describe them as political. Where the movement gains a foothold in such institutions, it draws on their membership and their standing in ways that a shakha on its own could not.

As a member of the diaspora and a sociologist examining the violence this movement organises in India, I have observed two connected processes. Activities that appear entirely benign help to fund and legitimise a movement whose organisations are involved in violence in India.

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Contributing to nationalism

Diaspora money has already been used to further its aims. After the demolition at Ayodhya, Indians in the US raised funds for the temple that Modi inaugurated on the site in 2024.

In Swiss associations where the movement is present, donations are collected for religious and nationalist organisations in India. Among those close to the shakha networks, the collection comes with an unspoken expectation that a member seen to have avoided donating faces a social cost. Violence in India, in turn, gives these activities significance in Switzerland.

Pogroms and demolitions are marked as the restoration of a civilisation, an occasion for the community to gather, and each gathering redraws who counts as part of that community.

Associations that were once broadly South Asian narrow to a Hindu, Hindi-speaking core from which regional and religious minorities are pushed to the margins, until nationalist organisations come to speak for “the Indian community” as a whole. In one association, a children’s Christmas party that had been held for decades gave way to a Hindu celebration.

Governments do not classify any of this as transnational repression.

By their own definition they are correct but miss what these processes do. The conventional model begins with an identifiable dissident and asks what a foreign state does to silence that person. It does not ask how a transnational movement constructs the community within which anyone decides whether they can dissent at all. By the time anyone is targeted directly, the community that might have objected has often already been reshaped.

Implications for Swiss response

The Federal Council’s own report states that protective measures should not be confined to one community but extend to all victims of transnational repression. Taking that at its word would mean examining pressure on the Indian diaspora with the same care and designing the measures now under development so that they apply regardless of whether the state responsible is considered democratic or authoritarian.

Any response of this kind relies on community organisations as their interlocutors. In the Indian case, the groups that present themselves as representative may be the ones the movement works through, so the authorities should also reach the people these processes displace. That is regional and religious minorities and critics. Scholars and journalists whose access to India is used as a means of pressure also need protection.

The US confronted the Indian state’s reach abroad after a killingExternal link on Canadian soil that authorities linked to Indian agents. Switzerland, still shaping its response, can recognise the pattern before something comparable occurs here.

A response designed around authoritarian states alone would protect people only from the governments Switzerland already distrusts. But a response that includes the practices of the Indian state would extend that protection to everyone who is pressured on Swiss soil, whatever the reputation of the state responsible is.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of Swissinfo.

Edited by Tony Barrett/bvw/gw