New Delhi/Thimphu, April 27: An woman diplomat posted at the Indian high commission in Islamabad has been arrested for allegedly spying for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. This is possibly the first time that a serving Indian woman diplomat has been arrested on charges of espionage.

Madhuri Gupta, 53, second secretary in the high commission’s press and information wing, was arrested late last week in New Delhi after she was ordered home on the pretext of being needed for consultations at the external affairs ministry on this week’s Saarc summit in Bhutan.
Ms Gupta, a Grade B Indian Foreign Service officer who was promoted to second secretary, was produced on Monday before a magistrate in New Delhi, and remanded to five days in police custody.
Sources said Ms Gupta first came under the scanner after she showed “extraordinary interest in areas beyond her role” in the information wing of the high commission in Islamabad.
Speaking to reporters in Thimphu, external affairs ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said: “We have reason to believe that an official in the high commission of India in Islamabad had been passing information to Pakistani intelligence agencies. The matter is currently under investigation. The official is cooperating with our inquiries.”
In New Delhi, Union home secretary G.K. Pillai confirmed that Ms Gupta “has been arrested”, but did not elaborate. Sources said she was being held on charges of violating the Official Secrets Act.
Ms Gupta, who has been posted at the Islamabad mission for nearly three years, told investigators she had been passing information to a foreign agency since 2008. She was extensively questioned by sleuths of the Intelligence Bureau and the Delhi Police, during which she claimed she used to get sensitive information from a senior Indian diplomat posted in Islamabad, whose role has also come under the scanner. It is not, however, known if this senior Indian diplomat knew about Ms Gupta’s real designs.
Sources said the Indian security agencies then involved senior officials of the external affairs ministry by briefing them about her activities in Pakistan, which included supplying sensitive and classified documents on Indian activities in that country and in Afghanistan.
Prior to her Islamabad posting, Ms Gupta is believed to have served at the Indian Council of World Affairs, a think tank run by the MEA in New Delhi. She was earlier associated with India Perspectives, a journal published by the MEA’s external publicity division. Ms Gupta, an Urdu language specialist, is learnt to have then transferred to the MEA’s public diplomacy division. She has also served in the high commission in Kuala Lumpur.
Counter-terrorism specialist B. Raman, a former Indian Police Service officer who served in India’s external intelligence agency RAW, has expressed fears that Ms Gupta could have planted transmitting devices in the Indian high commission in Islamabad and even tapped telephones.
In a signed article for a private Indian news portal, Mr Raman wrote that Ms Gupta might have been recruited by an agency — either Pakistan’s ISI or a Western intelligence agency operating through an agent working under diplomatic cover in Islamabad — 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 senior diplomats, and attaching transmitting devices for transmitting 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 (might have) planted in the Indian high commission on his direction,” Mr Raman wrote.
 

Age Correspondents