Jadhav verdict proves once again army controls Pak
The broader implications of this sudden Pakistani action suggest a new level of desperation.
ows and looking for scapegoats, also captured a pair of Indian clerics, it must be remembered, recently. It detained the head of the Nizamuddin Dargah in New Delhi and his nephew, during their visit to Pakistan. They were let go off after a couple of days of questioning, but only after vigorous intervention of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.
Jadhav has been held without Indian consular access. It is a who will blink first game. India refuses to agree that Jadhav is a spy and grant Pakistan the equivalence it seeks. Pakistan won’t grant consular access unless we agree that he is.
Jadhav now has 40 days to appeal the order in the Pakistan Appeals Court, which may or may not be their High Court or even their Supreme Court in this instance. And failing which, to beg the army chief and/or the President of Pakistan for clemency. Will he have to do all this personally, without help?
India, officially ruled out of the action, cannot do the knee- bending, even if it wanted to. It can only exert diplomatic, back- channel and internationally orchestrated pressure, to resolve the matter and get Jadhav returned home.
That it may not even have 40 days, should the Pakistan army decide to hang Jadhav in a hurry, is also a matter of no little concern.
And since the primary effort at the moment is to save Jadhav’s life and secure his return, all other options on retaliation are necessarily on the back-burner.
Meanwhile, scrambling already for legitimacy in the face of the hue and cry raised by India, Pakistan is trying to retrofit Jadhav’s name with that of a minor Balochi mafia don it has been holding in custody for even longer. However, internationally, even spies are tried in the civil courts during peacetime, and guaranteed “due process”. This is a bit of a Pakistani PR problem, but the uniforms seem determined to ignore it. The use of a military court in this instance and the death sentence might also, some suggest, be a desire to urgently swap Jadhav with some of their assets languishing in Indian jails. But going by the past, the Pakistanis are not very keen on claiming any nationals caught on the Indian side for any reason.
In this context, more fevered theories include the notion that India may, or may not have, spirited a former ISI Lt Colonel out of Pakistan into Nepal and thence from Kathmandu to Lumbini and finally into its “non-state actor” clutches across the Indian border. Is this man for questioning, or trading, if we really do have him? Does he have anything to say and does Pakistan care? The US/USSR Cold War parallels may be vastly overblown here.
The manner of the doings with Jadhav certainly reiterates the point that it is the army, at Rawalpindi, and not the political dispensation, at Islamabad, that truly runs the country. And the Pakistan army, as usual, wishes to maintain its visceral hatred for India unchanged in order to maintain its domestic ascendancy.