India's Ex Intelligence Officers Blame Kulbhushan Jadhav For Getting Caught in Pakistan

India's former RAW officers, including one ex chief, have blamed Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, arrested by Pakistan in 2016, for getting caught in Pakistan as a "result of unprofessionalism", according to a report in India's "The Quint" owned and operated by a joint venture of Bloomberg News and Quintillion Media. The report that appeared briefly on The Quint website has since been removed, apparently under pressure from the Indian government.

The Quint Story:

Indian Agent Kulbhushan Jadhav

The story quotes a former RAW chief as saying that the “proposal to recruit Jadhav for operations, whatever it’s worth, was ridiculous.”  However, the report said that "(Jadhav's) recruitment was approved by a joint secretary as the supervisory officer.  The RAW has a special unit which also undertakes parallel operations in certain crucial target countries for which it seeks out its own recruits".

Several experienced RAW hands told the Quint that the usual practice is to “have a Baloch or a Pakistani national” do the “intelligence gathering job for us", adding that it was “foolish for to set an Indian the task to obtain intelligence from a country as hostile as Pakistan.”

This is only the second story in the Indian media to acknowledge Jadhav's status as a covert RAW operative in Balochistan.

Karan Thapar's Questions: 

An earlier story by Indian journalist Karan Thapar pointed out several flaws in the Indian narrative claiming that Jadhav was an innocent Indian businessman kidnapped from Chabahar by Pakistani agents.

Writing for the Indian Express, Thapar debunked the entire official story from New Delhi  by raising the following probing questions:

1. Jadhav's Two Passports:

Thapar asks why does Jadhav have two passports, one in his own name and another in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel?

According to The Indian Express, the second passport was originally issued in 2003 and renewed in 2014. The passport numbers are E6934766 and L9630722. When asked, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson would only say that India needs access to Jadhav before he could answer. But why not check the records attached to the passport numbers? Surely they would tell a story?

Additionally, The Times of India claims that since 2007, Jadhav has rented a Bombay flat owned by his mother, Avanti, in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel. Why would he use an alias to rent his own mother’s flat? Perhaps Jadhav changed his name after converting to Islam? But then, why did he deliberately retain a valid passport in his old name? Indeed, why did the government let him, unless he deceived them?

2. Abduction From Iran:

If Pakistan did abduct Jadhav, don’t we need to ask why, asks Thapar? Doesn’t that raise the question of what was so special about him that made them do this? After all, there are 4,000 Indians in Chabahar, Iran — and no one else has been abducted.

If Jadhav was indeed abducted from the Iranian soil, then why did India not pursue the matter with Iran, but, as the Indian foreign ministry spokesperson admitted, they don’t seem to have responded or, perhaps, even conducted an investigation yet. India seems to have accepted that. Odd, wouldn’t you say, asks Thapar?

3. Timing of Jadhav's Arrest:

Both The Indian Express and Asian Age suggest that Jadhav has links with the Pakistani drug baron Uzair Baloch who's also accused of terror in Pakistan.  Did Jadhav play dirty with him and get caught in a revenge trap set by the drug mafia? Given that Jadhav was arrested a month after Baloch was taken into custody by Pakistan, this could be part of the explanation?

4. Jadhav's Pursuit of RAW Employment:

The Indian Express has reported that between 2010 and 2012, Jadhav made three separate attempts to join the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). The paper suggests he also tried to join the Technical Services Division. What more do we know about this? Even if the media doesn’t, surely the government does? A. S. Dulat, a distinguished former chief of RAW, has unhesitatingly said Jadhav could be a spy. As he put it, if he (Dulat) was in the government, he would hardly admit it.

Summary: 

The Quint story and Karan Thapar's article dismantle the false narrative that the Indian and western media have been pushing since Kulbhushan Jadhav's arrest in Balochistan in March, 2016.  These reports are beginning to essentially confirm that Jadhav's confession on orchestrating murderous attacks in Pakistan is factual.

Here's Kulbhushan Jadhav's video confession:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVp62OinTeU




Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Karan Thapar Dismantles Official Indian Narrative on Kulbhushan Jadhav

Why is India Sponsoring Terror in Pakistan? 

Indian Agent Kubhushan Yadav's Confession

Has Modi Stepped Up India's Covert War in Pakistan?

Ex India Spy Documents Successful RAW Ops in Pakistan

London Police Document Confirms MQM-RAW Connection Testimony

China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

Ajit Doval Lecture on "How to Tackle Pakistan" 

Chabahar Port

Alleged "Spy" Gupta's Delhi Arrest Suspicious

Coming just days before the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC) summit in Bhutan, the arrest of Indian diplomat Madhuri Gupta on charges of spying for Pakistan is raising many serious questions among analysts and commentators.



On April 22, the 53-year-old Gupta was asked to return to New Delhi ostensibly to help prepare for the SAARC summit in Bhutan, according to a report in Time magazine. After landing at Indira Gandhi International Airport, she was taken away by the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials for interrogation in an undisclosed location. Twenty-four hours later, she was handed over to Delhi police, charged with treason and accessing confidential documents under India's Official Secrets Act, and passing sensitive information on to ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency. Indian news agency PTI is reporting that the head of India's intelligence agency RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) in Islamabad is also being investigated. Her alleged visit to the Indian side of the LOC in disputed Kashmir region are among her suspicious activities being investigated by Indian authorities.

Some of the probing questions being asked relate to the timing of the arrest just prior to the SAARC summit, the level of access a low-level diplomat like Gupta had to India's classified information, the role and the motivations of India's Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials, and Gupta's possible role as a double agent working simultaneously for both India's RAW and Pakistan's ISI. Other questions include as to why was India's intelligence agency RAW kept out of the loop? Is the Indian IB attempting to delay, or even scuttle the resumption of India-Pakistan composite dialog? Did Gupta run afoul of her Indian handlers that led to her outing and arrest?

S.M. Mushrif, former Police Chief of Maharashtra and the author of "Who Killed Karkare?", believes that the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) is up to its neck in conspiring with the extreme Hindutva groups against Indian Muslims and creating trouble between India and Pakistan.

The power establishment that really runs the affairs of India (Mushrif says it is not Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi) does not want to expose the rabidly anti-Muslim Hindutva terrorists, and by extension, see peace between India and Pakistan.

The Times of India hints at the possibility of Gupta being double agent working for both Indian and Pakistani spy agencies. In a piece titled "Spy Games", the Times argues that there are many questions that need to be answered by the officials in the Gupta espionage case. It says: "For those pressing charges against Gupta, the questions that need to be probed are: When and how was Gupta contacted by Pakistani agents? Was she allowed access to information above her clearance level? How long did it take for her activities to be noticed on the Indian side? And perhaps most importantly, what was her motivation for becoming a double agent? Finding the answers to these questions could go some way towards revealing the lacunae in our security protocols abroad and preventing recurrences of such breaches."

Some of the Indian analysts are probably correct in their assessment that at least a part of the Pakistani "establishment" does not want serious progress in talks with India. But I also believe there is a similar anti-Pakistan establishment in India that wants to thwart any possibility of peace with Pakistan.

I often hear references to India's "shadowy security establishment" and "agencies" by Indian columnists like Siddarth Varadarajan in The Hindu newspaper, and allegations against "some vested interests in militants and agencies" by politicians like Mehbooba Mufti after the Srinagar hotel attack earlier this year.

Espionage cases like this need to be thoroughly investigated. However, I do not think it's likely that the public will ever learn the full truth in this case.

Related Links:

Case For Resuming India-Pakistan Dialog

India's Covert War in Pakistan

Hindutva Terror

Who Killed Karkare?

Bloodbath in Kashmir Valley

Behind India's Bust of a Pakistani Spy

Spy Games

Mumbai's Puzzle Points to Indian Culpability

Mumbai attacks plot is thickening by the day. Several names and details are emerging that seem to implicate Pakistanis, Indians, Kashmiris, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and India's Intelligence Bureau.
For example, Calcutta police arrested Mukhtar Ahmed, an Indian Muslim, for procuring SIM cards for the Mumbai terror group without knowing that he was an undercover operative, according to a BBC report. He was on a long-term mission with police in Indian-administered Kashmir. Senior intelligence sources say a "high-value asset" has been blown and his family put at risk.

Police arrested four Indian Muslims for alleged involvement in a planned attack on Mumbai as early as February, a senior police officer who handled the case told The Times Friday.

One of them, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, was carrying a fake Pakistani passport and a list and maps of nine targets in southern Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal hotel and other sites attacked last week, the officer said. Ansari was born in a slum in Mumbai and was recruited by LeT when he took a job as a mechanic at a printing press in Dubai in December 2005, according to reports. He was taken by boat to the Pakistani port of Karachi a year later and then on to an LeT training camp in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

The revelation appears to undermine India’s assertion that the attack on Mumbai last week, in which 171 people were killed, was planned and executed only by Pakistani members of the Kasmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which has had links to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

The Times further reports that security officials and experts have told the Indian Government that it faces a growing threat from home-grown Islamic militants recruited from the country’s 150 million-strong Muslim population.

According to a report produced by a committee led by a former Indian chief justice, Rajender Sachar, Muslims are now worse off than the Dalit caste, or those called untouchables. Some 52% of Muslim men are unemployed, compared with 47% of Dalit men. Among Muslim women, 91% are unemployed, compared with 77% of Dalit women. Almost half of Muslims over the age of 46 are illiterate. While making up 11% of the population, Muslims account for 40% of India’s prison population. Meanwhile, they hold less than 5% of government jobs.

As the world focuses on the ISI and its possible role in support of LeT, it's important to also recognize India's intelligence agencies' involvement in promoting trouble in South Asian region. India's RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) involvement in Bangladesh, supporting both secular forces and the area's Hindu minority has been mentioned by Federation of American scientists (FAS). The involvement of RAW in East Pakistan is said to date from the 1960s, when RAW supported Mujibur Rahman, leading up to his general election victory in 1970. RAW also provided training and arms to the Bangladeshi freedom fighters known as Mukti Bahini. RAW's aid was instrumental in Bangladesh's gaining independence from Pakistan in 1971.

RAW has had a significant role in the creation of Sri Lankan terror outfits. During the course of its investigation the Jain Commission received testimony on the official Indian support to the various Sri Lankan Tamil armed groups in Tamil Nadu. From 1981, RAW and the Intelligence Bureau established a network of as many as 30 terrorist training camps for these groups in India. Centers were also established at the high-security military installation of Chakrata, near Dehra Dun, and in the Ramakrishna Puram area of New Delhi. This clandestine support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), some of whom were on the payroll of RAW, was later suspended. Starting in late 1986 the Research and Analysis Wing focused surveillance on the LTTE which was expanding ties with Tamil Nadu separatist groups. Rajiv Gandhi sought to establish good relations with the LTTE, even after the Indian Peace Keeping Force [IPKF] experience in Sri Lanka. But the Indian intelligence community failed to accurately assess the character of the LTTE and its orientation in India and its political leaders. The LTTE assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was apparently motivated by fears of a possible re-induction of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka and a crackdown on the LTTE network in Tamil Nadu, according to FAS.

An FAS report says Pakistan has accused RAW of sponsoring sabotage in its Punjab province, where it has been supporting the Seraiki movement, "providing financial support to promote its activities in Pakistan and organizing an International Seraiki Conference in Delhi in November December 1993". It adds: "RAW has an extensive network of agents and anti-government elements within Pakistan, including dissident elements from various sectarian and ethnic groups of Sindh and Punjab." There are also reports of RAW involvement in Baluchistan and Afghanistan to attack Pakistani interests. Throughout the Afghan war, FAS report says “the RAW was responsible for the planning and execution of terrorist activities in Pakistan” to deter Pakistan from supporting the Afghan liberation movement against India’s ally, the Soviet Union. The assistance provided to the RAW by the KGB enabled it to “arrange terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities throughout the Afghan war.”

It appears that the Indian investigators of Mumbai are operating with only a few pieces of a much larger and more complex puzzle of the tragic terror attacks in Mumbai. What is needed is a broader, more independent, high-level investigation that also looks into the role of Indian intelligence agencies before, during and after Mumbai attacks. Just based on the few reported pieces of this large and complex puzzle, it seems that Pakistan is at least partially culpable, but India must also share responsibility for the horrible treatment of its Muslim minority and the role its security officials and intelligence agencies have played in their dealings with unsavory characters and gangs involved in domestic and international terror.