Kulbhushan Jadhav reunion: India speaks in one voice to denounce Pakistan

New Delhi: The government on Thursday lambasted Pakistan for making “absurd” charges of a chip, camera or a recorder being installed in the footwear of the wife of Indian death row convict Kulbhushan Jadhav, saying that Islamabad has frittered away an opportunity to take the bilateral ties forward by turning the meeting with his family as a propaganda tool.

Speaking in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said, “This meeting could have been a step towards moving forward. But, it is a matter of great disappointment, that the meeting took place flouting all the understandings both countries had agreed to,” she said.

In a stinging attack on Pakistan, she said an emotional meeting of a mother with his son and a wife with her husband after 22 months has been “used” by Pakistan as a “tool of propaganda”.

Following the statement, members of all parties in the Lok Sabha as well as Rajya Sabha supported the government on the issue.

Ms Swaraj said Mr Jadhav’s mother and wife were taken for the meeting through a separate door without informing the accompanying deputy high commissioner of India, stripped of their mangalsutra, bindi, and bangles, made to change clothes and shoes.

She due to absence of his mother’s mangalsutra, Mr Jadhav asked about the welfare of his father as soon as they sat down for the meeting. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan foreign minister Khawaja Mohammed Asif on Thursday claimed that their investigators had found a ‘metal chip’ in the shoes worn Kulbushan Jadhav’s wife Chetankul when she had come to meet him on Monday.