The Jadhav case — only the facts

A serving commander of the Indian Navy, working for the notorious Indian intelligence agency Raw, Kulbhushan Jadhav, S/o Sudhir Jadhav, was arrested from the Balochistan province. He made startling disclosures about the Indian involvement in subversive activities in Pakistan.

Jadhav was arrested from Quetta, around 1,000 kilometers from the nearest Pakistani port. The picture of the Indian officer, his identification number issued by the Indian Navy, a copy of his Indian passport and Iranian visa had been made public.

Jadhav currently is an Indian Navy officer with the employee number 41558 and will retire in 2022. He joined the Indian National Defence Academy in 1987. He was commissioned in the engineering branch in 1991.He has a wife and two daughters who live with his father Sudhir. But the family of Jadhav had gone missing from his hometown in Mumbai, apparently picked up by the Indian intelligence agency after his arrest so that it did not speak to the media, further embarrassing the already jittery Indian establishment.

Kulbhushan Jadhav told his interrogators about the Indian funding and plans to destabilise Karachi and Balochistan. He had run a secret terrorism network with millions of dollars in Pakistan while sitting at a jewelry shop in Chabahar, Iran. He met the RAW head Rajindar Khanna four times in six months. He entered Pakistan on an Iranian visa and remained in contact with the Afghan secret agency too. He entered Chabahar with a visa stamped on a fake passport (L9630722) in 2003. Here he had a new identity i.e. Hussain Mubarak Patel, born in August 30, 1968, in Maharashtra, India.

From Iran, he crossed into Balochistan. His job was to destabilise Pakistan by strengthening a separatist movement in Balochistan and Karachi. The mission officially began in 2013. He told investigators about the presence of more operatives in the southern metropolis. Earlier, in 2013, a retired Indian Army chief, Vijay Kumar Singh, had admitted that India had sponsored bomb blasts in Pakistan and doled out money to the separatist elements in Balochistan.

While it was known to all that India had been orchestrating sectarian and political violence and sabotage activities across Pakistan, from Fata to Gwadar and to the streets of Karachi, the arrest of the Raw spy, a serving officer of the Indian Navy, has put the Indian establishment in a dilemma. The exceptional breakthrough of its kind provided the hard evidence and the connection about the Indian involvement in destablising Pakistan.

Being a terrorist, Yadhav’s case does not fall under the Vienna Convention and that is why councilor access was not granted and his fair trial was done under the military courts, which is challengeable in any civilian court of Pakistan. However, meeting with his family was purely on humanitarian grounds without any pressure.

The Indians have been scathing about the way Pakistan has handled the terrorist Jadhav case. The arrest inspired fear at the Raw headquarters. Soon after the arrest by Pakistan, the Indian government launched a cynical exercise in political opportunism and extracted every morsel of propaganda from the case. It was only natural to feel uneasy after being caught with pants down.