Thanks for being a responsible media: Pak foreign office

When the Pakistani government announced that they would allow the family of Kulbushan Jadhav to visit Islamabad and meet with the imprisoned Indian in Pakistan, it seemed like relations between the two neighbours were going to move in a positive direction.

But this hope for progress was short-lived, and if anything, the relations have actually worsened, ever since the wife and mother of Mr Jadhav met him at the Ministry of Foreign Office’s compound in the Pakistani capital, with Indian government lambasting the treatment Jadhav’s family received during their one-day-long stay in Pakistan.

To add fuel to the fire, the Line of Control (LoC) has also heated up, and may very well be linked to the fall-out from the Jadhav meet-up.

But, as it is always the case with the LoC, both sides have different versions of what happened there and it is almost impossible to have independently verified information with regards to that. While the military guns have gone silent for now, the diplomatic spat continues with the latest controversy over the missing shoes of the wife of Jadhav, which the Pakistani officials confiscated, claiming that the shoes had some foreign metallic object hidden in them.

As a Pakistani journalist working for an Indian news outlet, I have been covering all of this closely, and most of it is repetitive of what I have seen before. But there is one aspect that was and continues to surprise or rather shock me – the behaviour of my fellow journalists who waited alongside me for the arrival and exit of Jadhav’s relatives along with an Indian diplomat, at the Pakistan Foreign Office complex.

That day, the reporters did not ask questions, they shouted accusations, allegations and slogans at the two women who may have met their loved for the last time, given that Jadhav is on death row and can be executed anytime.

Whatever his alleged crimes are, but the two women did not deserve such harassment from supposedly trained professionals. 

One reporter screamed how Jadhav’s mother felt “being a parent to a terrorist?” Another one asked the wife if she supported her husband who was “a killer of hundreds of Pakistanis?”

The Pakistani Foreign Office had ensured that the reporters stayed at a distance so there was no up close interaction, but we stood a few feet away from the trio, and I had heard one of the government officials promising some of the journalists “an interaction” with the family once they came out. 

When they exited the building, the Pakistani government’s vehicle they were to be transported back was nowhere to be seen, giving enough time for the journalists to hurl taunts at the Indian visitors. As the four-wheeler arrived another journalist went one step further and chanted “Pakistan Zindabad” (Long-live Pakistan). This riled up others around and soon a large number of them joined in the chorus. 

While all this may have taken then less than ten minutes to transpire, it left me in a shock, because I felt like I was the only one who thought this was wrong, as I saw the rest of my brethren pack-up and move away from the location. Some of them even laughed about how they did a great job.

I thought of talking to the foreign office officials about it, since they could perhaps put some sense into the reporters who misbehaved this way. But I stopped myself short from doing so, when a message was sent out to journalists on the Pakistani Foreign Office list, thanking us for “being a responsible media.”

All I was left was to talk about it on air on my channel and I also decided to tweet about it. While the Indians may have thought all of us Pakistani media professionals as barbaric, I gave them a reason to think otherwise.