Pakistan: On The Other Foot

PAKISTAN

On the Other Foot

The most well-known cause of tensions between India and Pakistan is their dispute over territory in Kashmir – where New Delhi accuses Islamabad of helping insurgents sneak across the border to attack the Indian army and carry out terrorist attacks.

This month, a flare-up in cross-border firing has resulted in the deaths of 13 civilians and nine soldiers, as well as dozens of injuries, the Associated Press reported. But as India celebrates its Republic Day on January 26, in a similarly troubled region of Pakistan the shoe is on the other foot.

Former Indian naval officer Kulbhushan Sudhir Jadhav was arrested in the Pakistani province of Balochistan in March 2016. He was convicted of espionage and plotting to sabotage government projects there and sentenced to death – the latest in a long string of alleged spies arrested and used as bargaining chips by Islamabad, Reuters reported.

Shortly after Christmas, a fresh row erupted over Pakistan’s supposed attempt to show a bit of mercy, however. After a rap on the knuckles from the International Court of Justice – which in May temporarily barred Pakistan from executing Jadhav and insisted he be granted consular access – last month Islamabad allowed the accused spy a visit from his wife and mother.

But they were forced to meet from opposite sides of a glass wall. The two women were compelled to remove their jewelry, change into different clothes and give up their shoes before being allowed to see the accused. And India claimed Jadhav’s wife’s shoes were never returned.

“For some inexplicable reason, despite her repeated requests, the shoes of his wife were not returned to her after the meeting,” Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper quoted an Indian Ministry of External Affairs statement as saying. The Pakistan Foreign Office rejected India’s “baseless” allegations and said it does not wish to indulge in a “meaningless battle of words.”

Not long after that, a group of Indian-Americans and Balochs held a protest by the name “Chappal Chor Pakistan” (“Slipper Thief Pakistan”) outside the country’s embassy in Washington.

It would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.

The boilerplate fears of the two longtime enemies touching off nuclear Armageddon – invariably mentioned in any article about Kashmir – are exaggerated, local analysts say.

But Jadhav faces the death penalty and the residents of both Kashmir and Balochistan face a military occupation and extrajudicial killings, Malik Siraj Akbar opined in the Huffington Post. And the specter of an Indian tit-for-tat response threatens to undermine the progress New Delhi has made in isolating Islamabad over its alleged support for terrorism. (The Trump administration’s freezing of military aid to Islamabad earlier this month marks a prime example.)

The US and many of its allies now take Pakistan’s apparent support for Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, and other dubious characters as an established fact. But Britain and others also take seriously the allegations that India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, is fomenting the insurgency in Balochistan, the WikiLeaks cables suggested.

The spat over shoes makes it harder to argue that New Delhi always takes the high road.