NSA Ajit Doval absent from PM Modi-Biden meeting

New Delhi: The name of National Security Advisor Ajit Doval was conspicuously missing from the list of the senior Government of India officials who accompanied Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his meeting with United States President Joe Biden in Delaware.

Doval’s counterpart Jake Sullivan was among the US officials who accompanied Biden in the meeting with Modi. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and India’s ambassador to the US, Vinay Kwatra were also in the entourage of the prime minister when he drove to the personal residence of the US president. So was Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri.

But Doval’s name was missing in the list of New Delhi’s delegates provided by the White House. The prime minister is generally accompanied by his National Security Advisor.

Biden was accompanied by Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, and Washington’s envoy to New Delhi, Eric Garcetti, during the meeting with Modi.

Doval’s absence from the list of New Delhi’s delegates provided by the White House fuelled speculation if he had accompanied the prime minister to the US.

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Canadian American citizen and a leader of Khalistani organisation Sikhs for Justice, filed a civil action lawsuit at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 17, demanding damages for the conspiracy allegedly hatched by some officials of the Government of India to assassinate him.

The court has summoned the Government of India, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, former chief of the Research and Analytical Wing Samant Goel, Vikram Yadav, who was identified as an agent of the intelligence agency, and Nikhil Gupta, a businessman now incarcerated in the US for allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill him in New York. New Delhi dismissed the lawsuit as “completely unwarranted and unsubstantiated imputations” and underlined the SFJ leader’s extremist antecedents.

A source in New Delhi, however, said that the prime minister’s National Security Advisor did not travel to the US due to Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.