This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Diplomacy between India and Pakistan can involve high-stakes negotiation, subtle messaging and the ever present threat of nuclear war. Sometimes it involves ringing someone’s doorbell in the middle of the night and running away.

Islamabad has recalled its high commissioner to Delhi for “consultations” amid a row between the neighbours about the alleged harassment of each country’s diplomats and their families.

The mistreatment allegedly includes tailing the cars of high commission officials, cutting off water and electricity supplies and ringing the doorbells of senior diplomatic staff at 3am and then fleeing.

It is understood that India’s deputy high commissioner in Islamabad, JP Singh,has complained about being victim of the latter, as has his Pakistani counterpart in Delhi.

Some of the allegations have been detailed in an official complaint lodged by Pakistan this week claiming its envoys were struggling to function in Delhi. India’s ministry of foreign affairs said on Thursday its officials too were facing harassment in Islamabad.

Harassment of diplomats, including by ringing their doorbells in the middle of the night, was “neither new nor unusual”, said TCA Rangachari, a retired Indian diplomat who served in Algeria, France and Pakistan.



He said the Americans and Soviets would routinely harass each other at the height of the cold war, while the Chinese made a speciality of summoning foreign diplomats for meetings at 2am. “You have to put on a suit, and the streets are all dark. These are the kinds of games which are played,” he said.

The spat this week reflects a poor start to the year for Indian and Pakistani relations, with more than 434 ceasefire violations at the disputed border in Kashmir in the first two months, according to Delhi’s figures, compared with about 806 violations in all of 2017.

Why Pakistan and India remain in denial 70 years on from partition Read more

Sources in India’s ministry of external affairs have confirmed receiving the complaints from their Pakistani counterparts and said they would be fully investigated.

They said Indian diplomats in Islamabad had been experiencing harassment which had led most families to return home, but which Delhi had chosen to address “with quiet and persistent diplomacy rather than by airing issues in the media”.

Pakistani TV stations this week aired footage shot by one of their diplomats in Delhi alleging to show his car being deliberately blocked in traffic by a slow-moving vehicle. He also claimed to have been followed by two men on scooters.

India, in turn, claims a senior official had his house broken into and laptop stolen, while aggressive surveillance and abusive phone calls had become the “new normal”.

Rangachari said he was surprised the issues were being publicly aired, given how commonplace they were in relations between the two countries, and predicted they would blow over.

“What becomes more troublesome is when you have physical incidents,” he said. “But so far in the recent chain of events, I don’t think we’ve seen that.”

