Spy pigeon arrest harks back to an era of low rent India-Pakistan espionage

The arrest of a bird for suspected espionage might be seen as just another crackpot example of India and Pakistan’s mutual paranoia.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) activists pay tribute to Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh, accused of spying and involvement in the 1990 bomb attacks in Lahore and Faisalabad in which 14 people died, who dShow more

NEW DELHI // India’s recent arrest of a pigeon, on charges of spying for Pakistan, is the latest instalment in a long and often quirky history of espionage between the two countries, with each side eager to gain the upper hand in their 68-year-rivalry.

The pigeon, which landed in an Indian village in Punjab, was seen to have a message in Urdu stamped on its tail feathers. The message was mostly illegible but included a Pakistani phone number. The pigeon was then taken into custody by police and X-rayed, with the Times of India reporting that the bird was listed in police records as a "suspected spy".

Since they gained independence from Great Britain in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars – in 1965, 1971 and 1999. The friction between the two countries has revolved around the region of Kashmir, claimed by both India and Pakistan, and the venue for numerous skirmishes and standoffs.

A fence now lies along most of the common border – which stretches for roughly 3,300 kilometres on India’s north-west frontier – except for in sections of the arid and thinly populated Rann of Kutch, in the Indian state of Gujarat.

But over the decades, as the fence was gradually being constructed by Indian and Pakistani border security forces, both countries would deploy locals as low-level operatives, to accidentally “wander” across the border, Sushant Singh, a retired Indian Army lieutenant colonel, said.

“These aren’t high-flying spies,” Mr Singh told The National. “You’d pay a young man something like 2,000 or 4,000 rupees (Dh115 or Dh230) to cross over on foot and cross-check to see if say a bridge had been built or how good a road was.”

“This was the era before satellite imagery,” he said. “And these guys would be maybe local petty criminals or men who wanted to make some quick money. If they were caught, the countries would be able to deny that they were operatives, because they were such small fry.”

But the stories of these ad hoc spies on their walkabouts did not always end that smoothly.

The tale of Vinod Sawhney is an illustrative one. In 1977, when Mr Sawhney was a 24-year-old taxi driver in Jammu, a passenger asked him how much he earned. When Mr Sawhney said that he made roughly 300 rupees a month, the passenger replied that he could make much more by doing a little light spying.

The very next day, Mr Sawhney, given the code name “Vinod 22,” was sent across the border into Pakistan, as part of a small detachment led by a minder. The team rotated through a few Pakistani towns, but Mr Sawhney then got arrested. After a nine-month trial, he spent ten years in a prison in Multan, before being repatriated to India in 1988.

Mr Sawhney has established a body called the Jammu Ex-Sleuths’ Association, to represent the welfare of hundreds of other casual operatives like himself.

“We want compensation for the time we were in prison,” Mr Sawhney said in 2013, when he was conducting a small protest in Delhi. “We have many secrets to hide, and we do that even now out of love for our country. But the government has failed us.”

These low-level infiltration practices followed by both governments has generated deep suspicion of wandering men on the wrong side of their border. If such men are caught, prison sentences are inevitable.

Most famously, an Indian national named Sarabjit Singh, who claimed that he had mistakenly crossed the border in Punjab in a drunken haze, was arrested in Pakistan in August 1990. In a trial, he was convicted of organising bomb blasts in Lahore three months earlier and sentenced to death.

Mr Singh languished in a prison in Lahore until May 2013, when he died of injuries inflicted upon him by other prisoners.

So much attention is paid to the border that, for a few years in the late 1990s, India recruited Puggees, a tribe in Gujarat known for its ability to read footprints, to work the border in the unfenced Rann of Kutch, a massive salt marsh.

Studying the soil and the impression of a footprint, a Puggee could determine the weight of a person or a camel that had passed by, as well as how long ago and in which direction the trespasser came through.

The Puggees “are our anchormen on the Pakistan border in the Rann,” AK Singh, a police superintendent in Kutch, told the India Today magazine in 1999, shortly after the police, with Puggee help, arrested five Pakistani intruders armed with explosives and firearms.

Srinath Raghavan, a New Delhi-based military historian, told The National that espionage between India and Pakistan ran hot and convoluted, although he also said that none of the tales came close to, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency’s outlandish plots to kill Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.

“My favourite story has to do with the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane in January 1971, by people who were suspected to be Kashmiri militants,” Mr Raghavan said.

The plane landed in Lahore, where the hijackers were welcomed by Pakistani officials. The passengers were released, and the plane was set on fire.

“But there is a version of the story that says that the hijackers were actually agents of the Research & Analysis Wing [R&AW, India’s intelligence agency],” Mr Raghavan said.

India was able to react to this supposed hijacking by imposing a no-fly zone between West and East Pakistan, a development that contributed to the eventual break-up of Pakistan later that year, during which East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

“India has never really confirmed or denied this story of the hijacking,” Mr Raghavan said. “The hijackers stayed on in Pakistan after the incident.”

The story, contained in a book titled Mission R&AW by a former operative RK Yadav, published last year, has been denied by one of the hijackers, Hashim Qureshi. Last November, Mr Qureshi promised to sue Mr Yadav for defamation, calling the version a “baseless allegation.”

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