The arrest in Pakistan’s troubled Balochistan province of a former Indian naval officer, accused of being an Indian spy and fomenting the separatist rebellion there, cannot have come at a more inopportune moment in India-Pakistan ties.
There can only be one reason for inveigling Kulbhushan Yadav, who exited the Indian Navy 13 years ago, into a trap laid by Pakistan’s counter-intelligence unit, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and parading the Iran-based businessman as a Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) agent. A special investigation team (SIT) from Pakistan arrives on Sunday to probe the Pathankot attack. Pakistan needs any evidence of Pakistan Army involvement counter-weighed by India’s purported involvement in Balochistan.
Yadav’s arrest is also designed to wreck the rapprochement between India-leaning Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian PM Narendra Modi and derail India-Iran ties. Yadav’s arrest was announced on the day that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was making his first visit to Pakistan. As UN trade sanctions on Iran are lifted, India’s push to open trade routes through Iran’s Chabahar port and Afghanistan into energy and resource-rich Central Asia to counterbalance a Beijing-backed Pakistan initiative to link Gwadar, on Pakistan’s coast, for a parallel and rival trade route, could come a cropper.
Mr Sharif has miscalculated that freeing his former tormentor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, would get the Pakistan Army off his back, that a Pakistan Army Chief who is half way out the door would not throw a spanner in the India-Pak works. Given the intense enmity between the two armies, Gen. Raheel Sharif, who retires in November, or any general who succeeds him as Army Chief, is unlikely to back the Pakistani PM on his pro-India track. The Pakistan Army’s concern is that Mr Sharif and Mr Modi, to meet on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit in Washington on May 31, could strike a deal that would be inimical to their interests, even as Mr Modi heads for Saudi Arabia, which has distanced itself from its long-standing ally over the Pakistan Army’s foot-dragging on backing the Saudi offensive against Shia elements in Yemen.
Balochistan is the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan Army’s biggest embarrassment. The restive province, which has no strategic provenance for the United States, has seen Washington turn a blind eye to the 2006 assassination of Baloch separatist leader Sardar Akbar Bugti, and scores of Baloch who stood up to the systematic exploitation and impoverishment of their home state.
India doesn’t need a Yadav to stir the Balochistan pot. Pakistan’s mishandling of the separatists has led to this rebellion in its own backyard. Balochistan is not India’s quid pro quo for the ISI’s destabilisation of India. Grasping at an R&AW straw to cover up for its own malfeasance will only prove counter-productive.
