Abingdonboy
ELITE MEMBER
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2010
- Messages
- 29,597
- Reaction score
- 46
- Country
- Location
What hat started as just another case of bare-knuckled diplomacy snowballed into a confrontation last fortnight with India calling off secretary-level talks with Pakistan.
Calling the assault on the 45-year-old Indian Police Officer on deputation to the Islamabad mission - a euphemism for a Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agent - Rajesh Mittal, a blatant violation of international law, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) arranged for him to return home.
Privately, MEA officials saw in the attack symptoms of a relationship which even at the best of times has been a continuation of war by other means.
One section of the MEA saw the attack as a reprisal for recent Indian arrests of Pakistanis on charges of spying, insisting that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is part of the Pakistan Army.
Another section talked of a wider conspiracy, engineered by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and his hawkish establishment - who don't want India and Pakistan to come closer - to embarrass Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif every time the peace process begins to move.
The Indians accuse the Pakistanis of kidnapping a diplomat's wife and harassing women and children.
The Pakistanis, however, insist that some MEA officials see a conspiracy under every bed and charge them with hindering normalcy. In fact, the only strand common to the versions put out by the foreign offices of both nations is that Mittal stepped out of his house on May 24.
The Indians say that Mittal was pulled out of his car and bundled into another. His father rushed out to help, but ISI agents held him back. Mittal was then blindfolded, taken to a wooded area and interrogated. Pakistan says that ISI men trailed Mittal as he went to meet one of his agents and pounced on him while he was buying sensitive documents.
Mittal has said that his captors tried to force him to sign a "confession" about the purchase. Pakistani diplomats in New Delhi claim that the ISI has pictures of Mittal actually receiving those documents, MEA officials insist Mittal's diplomatic number-plate was removed to frame him. Pakistani officials say their sleuths took pictures of Mittal changing his own number-plate.
Four ISI men caught on the Punjab border
It has become a messy, sordid war of words. What is clear is that Mittal, a senior officer at the mission, was tortured with electric shocks and vicious blows. It was an incident unparalleled in diplomatic history. A senior MEA official called it the "gravest episode in Indo-Pakistan diplomatic ties".
Retribution was quick. India told two Pakistani consuls, Sayed Fayyaz Mahmood Endrabi and Zafarul Hasan, to leave. They were charged with "indulging in activities prejudicial to India's security" - diplomatese for espionage. The non-violent expulsion did little to soothe tempers in the MEA.
"You may as well bid goodbye to the Vienna Convention. No one bothers about diplomatic immunity in Pakistan," says an official. To back their point, Indian officials recall the kidnapping of a diplomat's wife in Pakistan. And mention cases of dupattas and lunch boxes being snatched as the Indian diplomatic community lives in terror of ISI agents.
While Pakistani diplomats cite 10 cases of physical abuse and torture faced by their officials since November 1988.
Pakistani diplomats, on the other hand, have listed 10 cases of physical torture of their officials since November 1988, when their military attache, Brigadier Abbasi, was arrested, on the charge of trying to "purchase documents from his contact".
More recently, an official named Arshad Ali was apparently jailed for two days on April 15 for spying, as were four Pakistani armymen who had allegedly strayed into the no-man's land near Punjab. The MEA claims definitive evidence to show the four men were spies.
But the Pakistanis insist they were genuinely lost. "They were tortured for five weeks. We kept telling the Indian Government that no spy would have entered India with such official trappings. But no one listened." As both foreign offices accuse each of casting the first stone, the Vienna Convention seems to be a forgotten piece of meaningless paper.
Read more at: India retaliates following an assault on its envoy by Pakistan : NEIGHBOURS - India Today
India retaliates following an assault on its envoy by Pakistan : NEIGHBOURS - India Today
@Dillinger @INDIC @Flamingo @he-man @neehar
Last edited by a moderator:
