Farcical trial of Jadhav gets more murky
The farcical trial of former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Jadhav in a military court in Pakistan continues to mock the criminal justice system in that country where military courts dispense justice at will without the civil courts being allowed to intervene.
Sentenced to death for espionage and subversion and denied basic consular access facilities, Jadhav, who has not been seen by an Indian government representative or by his own kith and kin right since he was jailed by the army authorities has been slapped with a confirmation of the death sentence. He has apparently been so severely tortured so as to extract a phoney confession from him that while the doctoring of the video tape is one side of the trial against him, the rattling off of the Pakistani version in a so-called confession is the other side. Shown on TV with an old recording, Jadhav shows tell-tale signs of torture. With Prime Minister Modi’s talks with US President Donald Trump round the corner, the US Congress deliberating on moves to rein in Pakistan to contain its propensity for being a fountainhead of world terror and the International Court of Justice seized of the Jadhav matter after an interim order not to execute him until the final verdict, the establishment in Pakistan thought it prudent to make a show of proceeding further with the case against Jadhav internally and of extracting propaganda mileage from it for whatever it is worth.
Ostensibly, Jadhav has been told by the army authorities that the only resort open to him is to file a mercy petition before the Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa. The world at large must see through all this subterfuge when the nation to which Jadhav belongs, India, is not being allowed to put up a legal defence of him in defiance of Geneva conventions. Pakistan must realize that it is behaving like a rogue state and its credibility is at its lowest ebb internationally. As for Modi, he will and must do everything to convince the Americans that Pakistan, in collusion with China, is a haven for terrorists and that its training camps for terror recruits need to be dismantled forthwith in the interests of world peace. Not just India but Afghanistan too is bearing the brunt of Pakistan’s terror machine. Iran too is beginning to smart under its impact.