Pakistan
is a rogue state which will stoop to any level and take recourse to any form of
deception in order to achieve its “unholy objectives”
An Indian naval officer
arrested last year and charged with espionage and sabotage was sentenced to
death Monday, the Pakistani military said, a decision that is likely to further
strain relations between the two nations.
The condemned naval officer, Kulbhushan Jadhav, was arrested
in March 2016 in Baluchistan, the restive province in South-West Pakistan,
where a separatist insurgency has simmered for decades. While Jadhav was believed to be in
Iran, running a cargo business or business to service dhows and ships from the
port town of Chabahar, Pakistan claimed to have arrested him from the border
town of Chaman in its province of Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan. Pakistani
military officials described the capture of Mr. Jadhav as a major
counterintelligence victory. He was accused of running a clandestine terror
network within the province and of participating in various activities meant to
destabilize the country.
Pakistan has claimed that Jadhav had infiltrated into
Pakistan for “espionage and terror activities” and was in touch with Baloch
separatists. They also claimed that Jadhav was travelling on a false passport,
which identified him as Hussain Mubarak Patel, a resident of Powai in Mumbai. Mr.
Jadhav is also known to spell his surname Yadav.
The Pakistani military said Mr. Jadhav was a “spy” who “was tried through Field General
Court-Martial,” referring to a court-martial trial of heinous crimes, dedicated
to cases involving foreign agents and spies.
The Pakistani military also asserted that Mr.
Jadhav confessed before a magistrate that he was assigned by India’s spy
agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, “to plan and organize espionage
and sabotage activities” in Baluchistan Province and Karachi, the southern port
city that is the country’s commercial hub.
India disputes
Pakistan’s accusations, which has often been the case in the testy relations
between the two estranged, nuclear-armed neighbors. India gave a starkly
different version of Mr. Jadhav’s arrest and profession.
Indian officials accused Pakistan of kidnapping
Mr. Jadhav, whom they described as a former Navy officer, and said that
repeated efforts for access to Mr. Jadhav were denied.
According to certain media reports, Kulbhushan Jadhav had
reportedly approached Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) a number of times
but his offers were turned down by the agency. According to The Indian Express
report, between 2010 and 2012, Jadhav repeatedly had wanted to offer his
service as a freelance intelligence operative but the organisation rejected the
offer citing it will be ‘too much of a risk’.
In 2010, he had given proposal to R&AW, that his dhow,
the Kaminda, can be used as a tool to gather intelligence on Pakistan’s port
project at Gwadar. But “R&AW had little interest in Jadhav’s
intelligence-gathering proposals,” the report said. However Anand Arni, the
long-serving head of R&AW’s Pakistan Desk, who had retired in 2012, said “I
will only repeat what I said on Monday which is that Jadhav was not an asset of
the agency. Retired officers are never made assets, and we would
certainly never send anyone on a clandestine mission with an Indian passport. You are free to believe or disbelieve
me,” the report said.
In a videotape released by Pakistan’s military last year,
Jadhav says he was recruited by R&AW in 2013, 10 years after setting up his
base in Chabahar. However, there is no officer, past or present, bearing the
name he cites as his handler — Joint Secretary Anil Kumar Gupta. In the
videotape, Jadhav also claims he had contact with National Security Advisor
Ajit Kumar Doval, who served as Director of the Intelligence Bureau in
2004-2005, before taking up his current assignment in 2014. There is no
evidence, though of such contact, and intelligence insiders said it was profoundly
unlikely an intelligence service’s asset would be granted an audience with the
NSA.
It is extremely difficult to say with certainty whether the
former naval officer was working for the Indian intelligence. It is plausible
that Jadhav was conducting a legitimate business in Chabahar and was abducted
from the Iran-Pak border by an extremist outfit called Jaishul Adil linked to
Al Qaeda and thereafter sold to the ISI. Barring Pakistan’s assertion that he
was involved in espionage, there is little evidence to show that he was
involved in espionage.
Having got an Indian, and that too a former naval officer in
their custody, Pakistan thought it may reap political dividends by accusing
India of fomenting terrorism inside Pakistan. However, India has resisted this and till date has been exerting diplomatic pressure on Islamabad without resorting to a tit-for-tat. India
made it known that it sought consular access to Jadhav on thirteen occasions and
Pakistan refused to grant access to the prisoner; he was not permitted to legal
representation and his sham trial was conducted in secret by a Field
General Court-Martial. How New
Delhi hopes to attain its objective of getting one of its citizens illegally
detained by a rogue state with only diplomatic means is anybody’s guess.
Pakistan is an entity which has scant respect for international law or any law
for that matter; it does not give a damn for human rights of its own citizens
much less of Indians accused of espionage in its custody. Alleged Indian spies
like Ravindra Kaushik, Sarabjit Singh and many others have died in Pakistani
jails in the past several decades. Expecting Pakistan to hand over Jadhav is
like chasing a chimera.
If Jadhav ought not to meet the same fate as that of the
legendary Israeli spy Elie Cohen, India needs to change track in dealing with Pakistan.
India needs to pay Pakistan back in the same coin. One of Pakistani Army’s own needs
to end up in Indian custody. Indian agencies have the wherewithal to make this
happen. There already have been unconfirmed reports of the “disappearance” of a
retired Pakistan Army Lieutenant Colonel Mohammad Habib Zahir, a Pakistani
artillery officer who may have worked as an undercover ISI agent runner in
Nepal from Nepal’s Lumbini on 6th April. It is also being reported that
this Pak officer was involved in the abduction of Jadhav. If India is not
thinking on these lines it needs to start building its capabilities to conduct snatch
operations not only in South Asia but beyond. Instilling fear in Pak’s military
establishment is the only way in which India and Indians can be kept safe. In
the meanwhile Pakistani subterfuge continues.
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