Sarabjit’s sister calls Jadhav’s meeting with family a ‘drama’

• Dalbir Kaur claims Pakistan played ‘cruel joke’

CHANDIGARH: Dalbir Kaur, the sister of Sarabjit Singh who died in a Lahore jail in 2013, has said that Pakistan played a ‘cruel joke’ by not allowing Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav to meet his mother and wife freely and dubbed the entire exercise a ‘drama’.

Jadhav, on death row in Pakistan for spying, was allowed to meet his wife and mother at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad. It was the first time Jadhav was meeting his family since his arrest in March last year.

Pakistan portrayed the meeting as a humanitarian gesture. But Dalbir Kaur found no ‘humanism’ in the meeting. “When it was held under such tight security and close relatives are separated by a glass screen, it has little meaning,” the Press Trust of India news agency quoted her as saying.

Having lost her brother four years back, Kaur said that she could fully understand what Jadhav’s family must be going through at this hour. “Jadhav or his family would know what they were going through by this meeting, but in the real sense not meeting at the same time,” she said.

“His family would have wanted to hug him, talk to him freely. But nothing of that sort happened. What solace would this meeting have provided them,” Dalbir Kaur said, adding that Pakistan portrayed the meeting as a humanitarian gesture, but if they believed in humanism, they should have allowed the family to meet Jadhav freely.

“They played a ‘cruel joke’ on Jadhav’s family and with people of India. They staged drama of a meeting, which I can say was just a sham,” she said, adding that Pakistan had pre-planned everything. “They played to the gallery and tried to befool the international community,” she claimed.

“They do not know what justice is. India should take up Jadhav’s case even more forcefully while the international community should put pressure on Pakistan and expose them,” she said. Pakistan said that its security forces arrested Jadhav from Balochistan province after he reportedly entered from Iran.

“Just because he is an Indian, he has been given a death sentence. This shows the hatred and enmity Pakistan harbours towards India,” Kaur said about Jadhav. Kaur’s brother Sarabjit had died following an assault by fellow inmates at a Lahore prison in April 2013.