What They Said: Madhuri Gupta’s Arrest

Source: WSJ

By Arlene Chang

India Real Time presents a round-up of commentary and analysis of one of the key news events this week – the arrest of Madhuri Gupta, an Indian female diplomat working in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, who allegedly passed on sensitive information to Pakistani intelligence agencies.
Commentators took this opportunity to elaborate on why Madhuri Gupta, was vulnerable to becoming a mole for Pakistan’s intelligence. The Hindustan Times said that being bright should not be the main criteria of getting a posting in Pakistan, being “temperamentally sound” should. Vinod Sharma was of the view that Ms. Gupta was an “obviously vulnerable” candidate. She was “single, middle-aged and a huge temperamental misfit on a tangibly inimical and lonely beat.”
Rajinder Puri in The Statesman asks why the government was surprised about the alleged involvement of the second secretary passing on classified information to Pakistan, terming the government’s attitude to national security as “either criminally negligent or criminally subverted.” He also took this opportunity to point out that if the government is serious about its war on terror it should also look into the workings of the country’s other surveillance agencies. “It is not enough to comb MEA for moles spying against the nation. The entire security establishment needs close security to ferret out possible subversion and anti-national activity,” he said.
Others think that this warrants that the Government of India should pay more attention to Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, which handles domestic intelligence and internal security matters instead of its preoccupation with the Inter Services Intelligence or the ISI, which monitors internal and external national security issues. Writing in the weekly magazine Outlook, B. Raman seeks an analysis of the case to understand how Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau works and what should be its objectives – “First, to identify weaknesses in our counter-intelligence set-up which enabled the Pakistani intelligence to recruit and operate her; second, an assessment of the damage caused by her; and third, an understanding of how the Pakistani intelligence works now.”
The Times of India says the “the importance of this case lies in what it reveals about the trend of reported security breaches by Indian personnel serving abroad” and some of the questions that need to be investigated should be: “When and how was Gupta contacted by Pakistani agents? Was she allowed access to information above her clearance level? How long did it take for her activities to be noticed on the Indian side? And perhaps most importantly, what was her motivation?”
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