Santwana Bhattacharya By

NEW DELHI: Had the story not moved on, India could have seen the FBI counter-insurgency investigation on longtime Af-Pak expert and ex-State Department diplomat Robin L Raphael as ‘sweet revenge’.

Simply put: Robin Raphael had done everything to make India angry, if such a term can be used to describe reactions to a career diplomat’s rather shrill manoeuvres.

From challenging the Jammu & Kashmir’s “instrument of accession” to India as “incomplete’’ in 1994 to getting J&K declared as a “disputed territory’’ in 1995 and to virtually re-activating Hurriyat during her controversial stint in New Delhi as then political councillor to the US Embassy here, between 1991 and 1993. It’s was on her advice that then President Bill Clinton sent a missive suggesting that the US get involved to “safeguard Sikh rights” in the provocative context of Punjab insurgency in the 1994.

This came just two months after she got into India’s crosshair over J&K. She was then Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration.

Late diplomat J N Dixit quizzically remembered in his book how Robin Raphael insisted that she be allowed to call on the Prime Minister of India, before leaving for the US despite the bad blood she had created and despite her ranking-barely that of a senior Joint Secretary-not commensurate with her demand.

“Responding to my queries about Robin Raphael questioning the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India, the US authorities clearly told me that Washington did not view the issue in constitutional and legal terms but in terms of existing around realities,” Mani Dixit wrote in ‘India-Pakistan War and Peace’.

She had vitiated the atmosphere against India and throughout her diplomatic career, she continued to be an anti-India hand in the US State Department, leaving little to imagination. For India, Robin L Raphel was bad news, if there was one. She made the already problematic ‘90s that much more difficult. Her tilt towards Pakistan was obvious and categorical.

One of the last batches of Cold War-warriors, Robin and her husband Arnold Raphael -- who was the US Ambassador to Pakistan -- died in the same plane crash with President Zia-ul-Haq. They seized the opportunity that Zia offered them to raise the likes of Mullah Omar and Taliban to strike a slow but certain death knell into Soviet Union.

A paid lobbyist for Pakistan and a thorn in the Indo-US relations, Robin Raphael had rubbed New Delhi wrong way. She was so disliked among the US officials here that her cartoons were carried in leading Indian newspapers.

B Raman wrote in 2009 that during her posting in New Delhi, she used her access to the Clintons, who she knew from younger days, to stop Pakistan being declared as state sponsor of terrorism after the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

She was apparently a close friend of Bill Clinton’s girlfriend in Oxford.

In fact, her questionable dalliance with the “deep state” in Af-Pak is what earned her the ‘Mother of Taliban’ nomenclature and seems to have finally caught up with her.

Now that she has been eased out of the State Department and the federal sleuths are over her Northwest Washington home in a “counter intelligence” probe.