Monday, August 07, 2006 E-Mail this article to a friend Printer Friendly Version
EDITORIAL: Tit-for-tat pantomime that no one buys
Pakistan has declared counsellor Deepak Kaul at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad persona non grata and asked him to leave Pakistan within 48 hours. He was allegedly caught “red handed” receiving “sensitive” documents in a service area on the Rawalpindi-Lahore road while on his way to India by road from Lahore to Amritsar. New Delhi has responded with unholy but familiar haste, finding Mr Kaul’s counterpart at the Pakistani High Commission, counsellor Syed Rafeeq Ahmed, ‘guilty’ of spying activity. No one is surprised, but a lot of well-meaning people on both sides will worry about how the two governments will handle the tit-for-tat they have started.
India has returned the compliment by threatening that the expulsion of Mr Kaul will affect the peace process negatively. Pakistan asserts, naively, that the Indian diplomat was involved in espionage and that Islamabad had suggested to New Delhi to keep the expulsion hush-hush, but that the Indians went public on it and resorted to counter-expulsion. The Indian side says no request was received for keeping the incident under wraps. Pakistan says it was within its rights to declare an offending diplomat persona non grata; India says Pakistan violated the relevant Geneva Convention by apprehending the diplomat and keeping him in illegal custody “hooded and handcuffed” before handing him over.
Islamabad went close to the “red line” of bilateral expulsions when it took Mr Kaul into the Foreign Office and then “handed him over” to an official of the Indian High Commission like a criminal. In the past, the two countries have resorted to quite cruelly beating up each other’s diplomats, risking a steep decline in mutual conduct unworthy of a state these days. Both pack their missions with “spooks” and spy on each other with a fixation that should surprise the world. They pretend to have secrets that no one knows and presume rather stupidly that only their own accredited diplomats and no other country can get at them. Yet both have a free press that denudes the state of its secrets with dull regularity.
India could have “notched up” its reprisal by doling out the same treatment to the Pakistani counsellor. Thankfully it did not. Yet if an escalation is in the works, the under-cover spooks on both sides should prepare to have their “foreign posting” ruined by getting picked up and bashed up. We had incidents in the days of General Zia’s “cricket diplomacy” when both sides staged entrapments and then roughed up the putative “diplomats”. In one instance, a Pakistani man beaten up in New Delhi had to be brought back on a stretcher. Memoirs written by Pakistani secret agents reveal that India and Pakistan relied on the intelligence of very low-level personnel to apply the bastinado to each other’s diplomats. At one time the expulsions came so thick and fast that the intelligence agencies complained of having lost most of their “posts”, and the trigger-happy agents tailing diplomats were asked to “cool it”.
The pantomime is shameful and no one really thinks it is serious stuff, apart from being an accepted mode of bilateral ‘signalling’. In the past whenever the two neighbours have indulged in this pastime it has invariably seemed as though things are getting out of hand through such tit-for-tat escalation and its low-IQ application. But this kind of signalling can be dangerous if the two sides have been whingeing about violating each other’s territorial integrity. At the present juncture, Pakistan is accusing India of stuffing its consulates in Afghanistan with spies of all kinds and spreading around billions of rupees as incentive for terrorists to attack installations in Balochistan. Some observers link the expulsion of Mr Kaul to the recent “discovery” of millions of rupees in a Baloch farari camp. On the other side India has accused Pakistan of getting one of its “terrorist organisations” to cause blasts in Mumbai. Equally, India has allegedly provided proof of Pakistan’s villainy to Islamabad and Pakistan has provided similar proof of Indian villainy to Kabul.
It is time to stop this sort of bilateral hostility from getting out of hand. Above all, it is important not to use expulsion of diplomats as a means of expressing bilateral anger. One, any action taken in this regard can be responded to through “reciprocal” action. Two, both have large staffs serving in their missions and most of them, barring the spooks, are needed for public service — mainly issuance of visas. There is a groundswell of complaints about delays and hardships in getting visas, especially in cases of emergency. Tit-for-tat action in the past has served no purpose. It won’t this time either. It should be given up. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\08\07\story_7-8-2006_pg3_1
You seem to be swamped by the same irrational fear. Check your post on the stuff you wrote about Israel wanting to bomb the hell out of Arabia and making a greater Israel.
