The Lankan Gangster?
By Ali Sukhanver 
To the handful unlucky Pakistanis who dream of a very cordial rather brotherly relationship with India, the news of arrest of Arun Selvarajan, a Lankan national, would not be very much pleasing. The Indian media says this Lankan national is a spy working for Pakistan. Selvarajan was carrying two passports when he was arrested — Sri Lankan and Indian. The officials of National Investigation Agency of India in Chennai (NIA) officials told the Indian media that this man was arrested for spying at the behest of Islamabad. The Indian investigators blamed that an official in the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo was his handler and provided funds to him. It was also told to the media that Selvarajan is part of the Thameem Ansari gang. Ansari, an alleged Pakistani spy, was earlier arrested with dossiers on Indian defense installations.
On the other hand the story of Thameem Ansari gang is interesting as well as full of contradictions. The story was leaked by the Indian media and vigorously spread throughout the world but existence of any such dossier was categorically disowned by the India’s National Intelligence Agency. Sulochna Ramiah Mohan of ‘Ceylon Today’ penned down a detailed investigative report on the issue of Thameem Ansari Gang. He referred to the statement of an NIA Source who categorically rejected the story of ‘dossier’ which was the sole basis of Thameem Ansari’s arrest. The source said, “There was no dossier in the story but they have in fact written a letter to the Sri Lankan side.” After Thameem Ansari’s arrest, the Indian media had been raising great hue and cry that he was involved in a conspiracy of transmitting photographs, video clippings and sketches on the security aspects of the Willington Military Training Centre near Udhagamandalam in Nilgiris district, the Karaikkal and Nagapattinam harbours and the Indian Naval base at Mallipattinam through e-mail and in person to a foreign country, certainly Pakistan.
The Zee news reported that Ansari was carrying vital details about India when he was picked following an intelligence tip-off. The sources said he was going to Sri Lanka to pass on those crucial details to his handlers there. In short, the Indian media is doing all its best to defame Pakistan and Sri Lanka and stamp the two countries as the promoters of terrorism in India. But India has completely forgotten what it has been doing in Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the recent past. It has been so many times proved that most of the terrorist organizations operating in Pakistan and Sri Lanka are trained, financed, armed and supported by India. The world’s most notorious terrorist organization LTTE is the worst example of Indian patronage. In an exclusive interview to VK Shashikumar of Media Grove, LTTE leader Kumaran Pathmanathan, who is now in Sri Lankan custody, said that India started training the Tamil rebels in the early 1980s around the time when peace talks were floundering. India also allowed the LTTE and other militant groups of Sri Lanka to set up base in Tamil Nadu and provided them huge funding and weapons also. Since long, with the help of such concocted news stories, Indian media has been trying to create misunderstanding between the two traditional friends, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The Indian intelligence agencies bribe the local Indian media-men in different forms and different shapes to propagate the false and misguiding information provided to them by the intelligence agencies. The story of Thameem Ansari is also based on one of such misguiding pieces of information. The Defense Ministry of Sri Lanka sternly rejected the Indian story ‘Thameem Ansari and the dossier’ and condemned all Indian blames and allegations on Sri Lanka. The matter of the fact is that by blaming the neighbouring countries of supporting terrorism and by concocting ‘adventurous stories’ about the security and intelligence agencies of the neighbouring countries, India is simply trying to divert the attention of the international world from the actual culprit.
To give a new intriguing turn to the story of Thameem Ansari, The Times of India published another so-called ‘investigative’ report on 29th July, 2014. According to the report, ‘Amir Zubair Siddiqui, a Pakistani diplomat named as the person managing ISI activities in India from Sri Lanka, was on the radar of Indian intelligence agencies since 2012. He was first booked by the Tamil Nadu police after they picked up a suspected ISI agent, Thameem Ansari, in September 2012. Amir Zubair is said to have provided an ATM card to Ansari and sent money to him from Colombo. Ansari was an onion trader. He was contacted by Shah Ji, a Tamil-speaking Lankan Muslim, when he was in Colombo. Shah Ji introduced Ansari to Siddiqui, who was posted in the Pakistan high commission in Colombo that time.’ The Times of India further reported that embarrassed by the exposed links of this Pakistani diplomat, the government of Pakistan had recalled him from Colombo in October 2012. However, the diplomat was posted again in Colombo a year later. Amir Zubair’s name again figured after the IB, on a tip-off from its Malaysian counterparts, foiled an ISI attempt to carry out attacks on two foreign consulates in south India. After rejoining the Colombo office, Siddiqui trained Lankan Tamil Muslim Zakir Hussain and sent him to India to recruit people for terror activities from south India. Zakir Hussain was arrested in April this year and the IB recovered Siddiqui’s business cards from him.’ This so-called ‘Investigative’ report is simply a pack of lies because the said officer had spent his full tenure at the High Commission in an uninterrupted manner to the fullest satisfaction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Pakistan and after completion of his term, he traveled through normal Sri Lanka Air flight with due protocol to join the Ministry under regular annual posting plan. All these things could be verified through the records of the Pakistan High Commission and that of the ColomboAirport. The most pathetic fact is that India considers Pakistan as the most formidable hindrance in its path to become the regional ‘USA’ despite Pakistan’s various friendly gestures including MFN status consideration. And the Indian media is fully co-operating with the policies of the government of India. The role of the Indian media must be an eye-opener to those media groups in Pakistan which apparently belong to Pakistan but in fact serve their foreign masters whose utmost desire is to see the world map with no Pakistan.
