Pakistan court’s vengeful ways against Indians
A Pakistani military court has made a mockery of justice by awarding death penalty to Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav on charges of spying. The trial was held in secrecy, the Indian Mission in Islamabad had no access to the accused, the evidence was fabricated. It appears that Pakistan, out of spite for India, pursued a case that didn't exist. Pakistan has been claiming that Jadhav confessed to his role as an Indian agent out to foment trouble in Balochistan, but that admission was clearly coerced — as was the video confession. Many experts have doubted the authenticity of the confession.
There are so many loopholes in the Pakistani's prosecution's case that it would fill pages. For one, Jadhav possessed an Indian passport at the time of his arrest. Why would an Indian spy operating in a foreign land under cover, that too in Pakistan with an intent to cause unrest in Balochistan, move about with his national identity documentIJ Pakistan has never been able to convincingly explain Jadhav's presence in Pakistan or where precisely he was nabbed from. It is said that he had been picked up from Iran and taken to Pakistan, where the case against him was fabricated. Third, Jadhav had retired from the Indian Navy more than a decade ago and since then there is nothing to suggest that he had was involved in any manner with the Indian state, and certainly not as an undercover agent.
And fourth, even senior Pakistani officials had on occasions admitted that they did not have evidence to suggest that Jadhav was a spy; former National Security Advisor Sartaj Aziz had doubted the evidence. The shame is that while Pakistan shows alacrity in framing concocted evidence against an Indian, it does nothing to prosecute terrorists such as Hafiz Saeed against whom it has mountains of material, both from Indian and foreign sources. Worse, it continues to patronise such terrorists. The Indian Government is right in saying that, if the death sentence is carried out against Jadhav, it will be taken as “premeditated murder”. The question is: How will the Indian Government respond, beyond issuing the usual strong condemnatory statement or twoIJ It cannot stop just at that.
Pakistan's track record does not offer hope of Jadhav’s release. It had convicted another Indian national, Sarabjit Singh, of espionage and bombing and sentenced him to death. The evidence against him too was flimsy, but the fact that he was an Indian national was enough for Pakistan to go after him with vengeance. His plea that he was a farmer who had unintentionally strayed into Pakistani territory was dismissed. India had kept appealing to Islamabad to release him, but to no avail. Sarabjit was repeatedly tortured in the jail. Then one day, Pakistan declared that he had died in prison of brain damage after being attacked ferociously by prison inmates. The trial in his case too was a farce. There was a symbolic trial in the lahore High Court, after which the case went to the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He was sentenced to death in 1991, but the sentence was repeatedly postponed. It cannot be a coincidence that just when there were indications of the Pakistani Government, in 2013, of ‘positively considering' a release, Sarabjit Singh was brutally assaulted, that resulted in his death.