Pak artist Mushaal Mullick married Yasin Malik in 2009
An attempt to cite
Kulbhushan Jadhav's meeting with his wife and mother
to demand an Indian visa for Kashmiri separatist Yasin Malik's wife has been firmly rejected by the government. Union Home Ministry officials on Tuesday said there was no comparison between the two cases. In a stinging rejoinder to Mushaal Mullick, who married Yasin Malik in 2009, the government also underlined that the Pakistani artist had applied for a visa in 2013 and allowed to travel to India twice.
As Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother and wife reached Pakistan to meet the former Naval officer sentenced to death by what New Delhi has described as a "
kangaroo court", Mushaal Mullick put out a video message: "A Kashmiri has no right to meet his wife and child; he is being treated worse than a proclaimed terrorist."
Yasin Malik, who revived the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front back in the late 1980s that sent the initial batches of Kashmiri youth across the border for arms training, had married the artist in Pakistan. He had renounced terror in the mid-nineties but continues to be associated with hard-line separatist elements in Kashmir.
But officials at Indian Intelligence agency strongly countered her claim.
They said she had applied for visa in 2013 and got for two years. "From 2013 to 2015, she came twice to India to meet her husband and after that, she has never applied for visa... How can she play victim," says a senior intelligence officer.
When she does apply, the request would be assessed keeping in view all related factors, the officer said.
In her statement that officials suggest did not appear to be aimed at getting a visa but make a political point, Mushaal Mullick claimed that she was harassed by authorities the last time she was in the country. She had also claimed that she wasn't allowed to stay at a hotel.
Officials in Jammu and Kashmir and the home ministry brush aside the claim, pointing that they did not have any complaint from her about this charge at the state or central level. Also, a senior official said the information available with them indicated that contrary to fresh claims made by the artist, Mushaal Mullick had stay in a hotel in Srinagar and Delhi too.
The official suggested that the separatist's wife was playing into the hands of Islamabad's propaganda machinery which had already turned the meeting between Kulbhushan Jadhav and his family into a mega media event, harassed Mr Jadhav's wife and mother and violated the commitments that Islamabad had made when the offer was accepted by New Delhi.
In a detailed statement listing out the different counts on which Islamabad had violated the understanding between the two countries, a riled New Delhi had accused Pakistan's foreign office of attempting to use the meeting to bolster "a false and unsubstantiated narrative of Shri Jadhav's alleged activities".