India issued 6 notes verbales to Pakistan to get access to 'spy'

NEW DELHI: India has issued not one or two, but as many as six notes verbales to the Pakistan foreign ministry seeking consular access to alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, top government sources have told TOI.

The revelation runs counter to claims made by some quarters that the government had given up, or gone slow, on Jadhav who has been booked for terrorism by Pakistan. 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 Jadhav is a commander-rank officer with In dian Navy , India maintains he retired from the Navy in 2002 and had nothing to do with the Indian government when he was arrested allegedly from Balochistan in March.

"India has relentlessly sought access to Jadhav. And we don't believe 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.

The Vienna Convention on consular relations says "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".

"The Convention prohibits us from acting on his behalf only if he himself says so," said another official source.

Islamabad has used Jadhav's arrest at every international forum to drum up support for its contention that India's external intelligence agency RAW is fomenting terrorism in Balochistan.

Last week, the Pakistani foreign ministry 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 PM Narendra Modi's comments on August 15 in which he reached out to the people of Balochistan.

The attack on a police training centre in Balochistan's capital Quetta this week may complicate things further for the alleged spy.

Islamabad disclosed Jadhav's arrest days before a Pakistan team visited Pathankot to investigate the attack on the IAF base in January .Surprisingly , India quickly acknowledged that Jadhav had worked with the Navy in the past, 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, a former German envoy to Pakistan, Gunter Mulack, claimed to have information that Jadhav had been abducted by Taliban from near the Balochistan-Afghanistan border and was later "sold" to the ISI.