Blowing hot and cold over spy saga

After Jadhav’s sentencing, the Pak military has whipped up anti-India sentiment. PM Nawaz Sharif must now tread a fine line.

The pot of simmering tension between India and Pakistan has been stirred to another spasmodic boiling point with the death sentence of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an alleged Indian spy on the payroll of India’s prime intelligence agency, the RAW.

Jadhav, said to be an in-service Indian Naval officer on loan to RAW, was handed down the capital punishment by a military court in Rawalpindi on April 10. The charge sheet against him alleged he was running an extensive spy network in Pakistan’s strife-torn Balochistan province—with hundreds of locally-recruited agents—from his sanctuary in neighbouring Iran. He’d been nabbed in Balochistan last year. His trial lasted for more than three months.

Briefing the Senate in Islamabad on April 11, Pakistani Defence Minister Khwaja Asif said Jadhav was working against Pakistan’s integrity by promoting terror and by spying for India. He defended Jadhav’s trial and conviction by being charitable at the same time. Under Pakistan’s Military Act of 1952, Jadhav has 40 days to appeal to a higher military court and has also the right to move a higher civilian court if his sentence is maintained. A mercy appeal to the president of Pakistan for clemency will be a last resort for him.

Understandably, the harsh penalty to Jadhav has touched a raw nerve in India. Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, decrying it as “pre-meditated murder”, warned Pakistan to beware of its fallout on Indo-Pakistan relations. She also assured an irate Lok Sabha  that India will “go out of its way” to ensure Jadhav's return. Of course she didn’t elaborate what that out-of-the-way would be.

Not surprisingly, Jadhav’s sentencing is being hailed in Pakistan as convincing evidence that a BJP-controlled India, swayed by its Hindutva ideology that professes hate against Muslims, has been pursuing a conspiracy to unhinge and destabilise Pakistan. The nerves in Pakistan have been badly rattled by the BJP’s victory in the recent UP elections.The complete eclipse of Muslim influence in what has traditionally been seen as the cradle of a millennium-old Indo-Gangetic culture has rubbed the Pakistanis—with many still having families in UP—the wrong way. The Jadhav saga has only fuelled their abhorrence of Hindutva’s exclusivist agenda. But there’s certainly much more to this cloak-and-dagger saga of an Indian spy caught red-handed as per the charge against him.

Giving a macabre twist to the unfolding drama of two countries with a hot potato on their hands is the ‘disappearance’ of a retired colonel of the Pakistan army from Nepal, close to the border with India.

The strange story of this ex-serviceman strains credibility and sounds too apocryphal to be true. He was called for a job interview to Nepal by an Englishman with a presence in that country. The phone number used turned out to be computer generated from India. The man hasn’t been heard from since April 9, from his last location near the India-Nepal land border.

But the bizarre twist has many takers in Pakistan. Conventional wisdom on the grisly episode is already hooked on the belief that the RAW has engineered this drama, enticed the Pakistani ex-soldier to walk into their trap and abducted him. The bets are on that there would, eventually, be a trade-off between the two countries.

Pundits are already refusing to hedge their bets on their prognosis that Jadhav will not be hanged. A spy swap will be an ideal scenario to bring down the curtain on all the commotion-filled drama. It will be a solution with a lot of necessary face-saving for both countries. And face-saving will have to be an essential and unavoidable part of any rancour-free settlement.

Once again, the dyarchy of the Pakistani establishment hasn’t failed to manifest its role in this spy saga, too.

The GHQ-inspired gung-ho chauvinism is looking for a lot of fodder in it to feed its nationalistic pride. It isn’t jingoism, exactly, but something bordering on it. Sushma’s tough talk hasn’t gone unnoticed and invited a quick and robust backlash from those not prepared to ever remove their blinkers. They aren’t mincing their words on paying back India in its own coin if New Delhi follows through on its warning of a dire fallout from the saga.

But Nawaz Sharif seems still unswayed and unscathed by the wave of swashbuckling riposte to India in the face of Sushma’s harsh words. Addressing the passing-out parade of officers at the Air Force Academy on April 12, Nawaz still seemed poised to extend an olive branch to India. Without ever mentioning the Jadhav episode, he said Pakistan believed in being on good terms with all its neighbours.

The Jadhav episode, since his arrest last year has, in fact, been wielded by Nawaz’s political opponents as a whip to lash him with publicly. Nawaz has been accused of being pusillanimous, vis-a-vis a jingoistic India. His opponents accused him, for instance, of getting cold feet in his address to the UN General Assembly last September, and not making a pointed reference to India’s blatant meddling in Pakistan and its alleged sponsorship of terrorism.

So Nawaz is apparently treading a very fine line, not only in the context of this spy saga, but in relation to the totality of Pakistan’s strained relationship with India. He must always keep an eye on how a robust parochialism, whipped on the theme of a confrontationist India, is distancing his softer approach from the popular wave. Nawaz is obviously on thin ice. But to his abiding dismay, if not alarm, his stance is getting no help from an India itself consumed by Hindutva fanaticism.

Someone has got to throw him a lifeline.


The author is a former Pakistani diplomat.

Email: K_K_ghori@yahoo.com

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