New Delhi
27 April 2010
An Indian diplomat posted to Islamabad has been nabbed in New Delhi for
passing information to the Inter Services Intelligence or ISI, Pakistan's external spy
agency.
External affairs ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash, who is Thimphu in connection with
the Saarc summit, did not reveal the identity of the official, and did not take questions.
But sources in New Delhi identified the diplomat as Madhuri Gupta, who served as
second secretary in the press and information wing of the Indian high commission in
Islamabad.
Talking about the affair suo motu, Mr Prakash said, "We have reason to believe that an
official in the high commission of India in Islamabad had been passing information to the
Pakistani intelligence agencies. The matter is currently under investigation. The official
is cooperating with our inquiries."
In New Delhi, Home Secretary GK Pillai confirmed Ms Gupta "has been arrested", but he
did not elaborate. Sources said she is being held on charges of violating the Official
Secrets Act.
According to sources, Ms Gupta was apprehended after she was summoned here by the
ministry of external affairs on the pretext of discussions over Saarc summit being held
in Thimphu. She was extensively questioned by sleuths of Intelligence Bureau and Delhi
Police officials during which she claimed that she used to get the sensitive information
from another senior Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad, whose role has also come
under the scanner. However, it was not immediately clear whether the senior Indian
diplomat knew about Ms Gupta's real designs.
Ms Gupta was working in the Indian mission in Hyderabad for nearly three years and
she is understood to have told the investigators that she had been passing information
to a foreign country since 2008.
Ms Gupta first came under the scanner after she showed extraordinary interest in areas
beyond her role in the information wing of the Indian mission in Islamabad. Sources said
Indian security agencies then involved senior officials of the ministry of external affairs
by briefing them about her activities in Pakistan, which included supplying of sensitive
and classified documents related to Indian activities in that country and Afghanistan.
Ms Gupta (53) is not a career diplomat; she belonged to the grade-B of the Indian Foreign
Service (IFS) and came to be promoted to the rank of second secretary. Before her
Islamabad posting, she is believed to have served in the Indian Council of World Affairs,
a think-tank based in New Delhi. Earlier, she was associated with "India Perspectives",
which is published by the external publicity division of the external affairs ministry, and
she is said to have been transferred to the public diplomacy division afterward. Ms
Gupta is an Urdu language specialist.
It is perhaps the first time a serving woman Indian diplomat has been arrested for spying
for a foreign country, but a few sensational disclosures have been reported in the recent
past. In 2007, Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency,
had to call back its 1975 batch officer Ravi Nair from Colombo because of his alleged
involvement with a woman agent of Chinese intelligence acting as honey trap for him. In
2004, a R&AW official Rabinder Singh fled via Nepal to the US to escape arrest and
interrogation for spying for a foreign country.
B Raman, a former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who served in the R&AW, feared
that Ms Gupta could have planted transmitting devices in the Indian mission and tapped
phones.
In a signed article Mr Raman wrote for a private Indian news portal, Mr Raman said Ms
Gupta might have been recruited by an agency -- either the ISI or the intelligence agency
of a Western country through its intelligence officer working under the cover of a
diplomat in Pakistan -- which was using her either as an information agent or as a
service agent.
An information agent, Mr Raman explained, consciously supplies intelligence to which
he or she has access. A service agent facilitates an intelligence operation of the
recruiting agency in various ways, such as planting bugs in the offices of the Indian high
commissioner and other diplomats, and attaching transmitting devices for transmitting
the telephone conversations of the high commissioner and others to the person who
recruited her.
"If she had been working as a service agent, she would have caused immeasurable
damage by enabling the agency that recruited her to collect electronically a lot of
sensitive intelligence. It would never be possible to quantify and assess the extent of
damage caused by her. She herself would not know since she would be unaware what
kind of intelligence had been going on to her controlling officer through the gadgets
which she had planted in the Indian High Commission on his direction," Mr Raman
noted.
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