India Is Making An All Out Effort To Provide Consular Access To Alleged Spy Arrested In Pakistan

India has issued as many as 6 note verbales to the Pakistan foreign ministry for consular access to alleged India spy Kulbhushan Jadhav.

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The government reportedly has not given up or gone slow, on Jadhav, who has been booked for terrorism by Pakistan authorities.

A note verbale is an unsigned diplomatic communication which is less formal than a letter of protest but is used to forcefully remind the receiving nation of its diplomatic obligations.

Official sources said India will continue to seek consular access to Jadhav. While Pakistan claims that Jadhav is a commander-rank officer with Indian navy, India maintains that he retired from the navy in 2002 and had nothing to do with the Indian government when he was arrested allegedly from Balochistan.

"India has relentlessly sought access to Jadhav. And we don't believe that he is a spy because had he been one, he wouldn't have been carrying an Indian passport," said a source here. Jadav's Indian passport was in the name of Hussein Mubarak Patel.

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The Vienna Convention on Consular relations says that "consular officers shall have the right to visit a national of the sending state (India) who is in prison, custody or detention, to converse and correspond with him and to arrange for his legal representation".

"Vienna Convention prohibits us from acting on his behalf only if he himself says so but Jadhav has not said that," said another official source.

Islamabad has used the arrest of Jadhav at every international forum to drum up support for its contention that India's external intelligence agency, RAW, was fomenting terrorism in Balochistan. It has repeatedly briefed envoys of EU and P-5 nations about Jadhav's "subversive activities" in Balochistan.

Pakistan foreign ministry last week said in a report to the Senate Standing Committee? on Foreign Affairs that its claims about India's involvement in Balochistan had been vindicated by "serving RAW officer" Jadhav's confessions and also PM Narendra Modi's comments on August 15 in which he reached out to the people of Balochistan.

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With Pakistan using Jadhav to counter India's scathing indictment of Islamabad over the issue of terrorism, the attack on a police training centre in Balochistan's capital Quetta this week is only likely to complicate things further for the alleged spy who, according to Pakistan, was arrested from Balochistan in March this year.

Islamabad disclosed Jadhav's arrest days before a Pakistam team visited Pathankot to investigate the attack on the airbase which was carried out in January this year. In what came as a surprise to many, India quickly acknowledged that Jadhav had worked with the navy in the past even while insisting that he had nothing to do with the government. India believes that Jadhav might have been a businessman operating out of Chabahar in Iran.

In an interesting twist to the case, a former German ambassador to Pakistan, Gunter mulack, claimed to have information that Jadhav had been abducted by Taliban from near Balochistan-Afghanistan border and later "sold" to ISI.