Opinion Quality of mercy in Pakistan stained, as Kulbhushan Jadhav ‘meets’ family

To see, but not to touch, to hear, but through a telephone line. To allow Jadhav’s mother and wife the semblance of hope, but to know as they emerged from that room that all hope was really dashed.

Kulbhushan Jadhav, Pakistan, Jadhav family, Kulbhushan Jadhav media coverage, Indian Express

Jyoti Malhotra

December 26, 2017 07:49 AM IST First published on: Dec 26, 2017 at 07:15 AM IST

Kulbhushan jadhav, Pakistan, India, Islamabad, Kulbhushan Jadhav family, Indian spy, Terrorism, kulbhushan jadhav pakistan, kulbhushan jadhav india, ISI, spy agency,

Certainly, to allow Kulbhushan Jadhav to meet his family was a good deed on the part of the Pakistani authorities.

Kulbhushan Jadhav, the alleged Indian spy arrested by Pakistan in March on charges of fomenting terrorism inside Pakistan, was turned into human bait on Christmas evening as Pakistani authorities released a video of Jadhav seeing his wife and mother through a glass wall and spoke to them through a telephone that connected the two sides.

To see, but not to touch, to hear, but through a telephone line. To allow Jadhav’s mother and wife the semblance of hope, but to know as they emerged from that room that all hope was really dashed. The quality of mercy in Pakistan has not only been irreparably stained, that too on the birth anniversary of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, it has been shot through by a self-aggrandising self-goal.

“Let me be very clear that Pakistan permitted the Indian request totally on humanitarian grounds in line with Islamic principles and teachings. Islam is a religion of peace… and it was a gesture of good faith and compassion,” said the Pakistani foreign office spokesperson Muhammed Faisal, adding, “It has nothing to do with consular access.”

Perhaps. After all, who is to judge what religions really propose, or dispose. Certainly, to allow Jadhav to meet his family was a good deed on the part of the Pakistani authorities. But to allow them to meet him in this way, when he was much more apparition than flesh-and-blood, is to dress up cruelty and pass it off as a humanitarian gesture.

Most certainly, there is no, or very little, place for emotion in the conduct of foreign policy. National interest can be brutal, especially when nations look forward to poking their finger in the other’s eye. Whether or not Jadhav is a spy, as Pakistan claims he is, this deliberate diminishing of a human being, this discarding of his dignity, is shaming, to say the least.

The reason it is shameful is because Pakistan carried out this meeting with one eye to gaining brownie points – the lusty reaction in the Pakistani domestic audience has already become a roar — in the international community, especially when the International Court of Justice meets again in a few months time. ‘At least we allowed this Indian spy to meet his wife and mother,’ is the line Islamabad has put out, unfazed by the fact that the manner in which the so-called meeting took place lacks several norms of civility. Worse, several people in the international community may even believe this line.

Certainly, this meeting will deepen the bitterness between India and Pakistan as well as further consolidate the anger that the Indian strategic community feels with the Islamabad-Rawalpindi equation. But it is also true that prime minister Narendra Modi’s on-off Pakistan policy, in which he oscillated between travelling to Lahore to meet former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif and then putting all ties into deep freeze, has significantly contributed to this impasse.

At the best of times, the relationship with Pakistan has to be handled with kid gloves. Certainly, there is little point in showing them all your cards. What kind of foreign policy that replaces old-fashioned commonsense with anger when dealing with a troublesome, fractious neighbor?

At the worst of times, the Pakistani people were – are – India’s best bet against its own contradictory, self-serving dictators who have seem determined to run their country to the ground these last several decades. But these days, the dictators have learnt their lessons. So they have abandoned the muscular coup, the sturdy trappings of martial law. In its stead, is the only half-serious ranting of mullahs like Khadim Hussein Rizvi who held Islamabad-Pakistan to ransom a few weeks ago; none other than Pakistan army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa defended the so-called “mediation” by the Army and the ISI with the political authorities in helping break up that protest demonstration.

The travesty that was a meeting between Kulbhushan Jadhav and his family was a public relations coup that seems to have been engineered by the military-ISI complex. The people of Pakistan may have been afraid of this complex, but they were also secretly disdainful of it. Now, an Indian spy has not only been paraded publicly, but his family has been allowed to “meet” him. How kind!

As 2018 beckons, the India-Pakistan relationship seems destined for a further fall. It will take all the imagination of the political class on both sides to arrest that slide. But as Delhi constantly looks at Washington for approval, it is clear that as of Christmas evening, 2017, any inclination in that direction is missing.