Category: Indo-Pak Relations

There are few countries where the U.S. President’s business interests are so strong, and relations with the U.S. so robust.

Donald Trump Jr. is in India for an extraordinary visit, to play the role of both businessman and diplomat. While mainly helping sell properties tied to the Trump Organization, where he serves as executive vice president, Mr. Trump Jr. is also delivering a policy address on “Reshaping Indo-Pacific ties”.

It’s hard to imagine this type of trip taking place in other countries. U.S. President Donald Trump and some of his progeny are personae non grata in many nations, including top allies such as the U.K. Aside from the issue of unpopularity is one of ethics. Many countries would be reluctant to host the U.S. President’s son for a visit that includes the opportunity for buyers of Trump-branded apartments to pay to meet with Mr. Trump Jr. The fact that India rolled out the red carpet for Mr. Trump Jr. amplifies the uniqueness of U.S.-India relations at this moment in time: There are few, if any, countries in the world where President Trump’s business interests are so strong, and relations with the U.S. so robust.

Business opportunities
Take the commercial side first. The Trump Organization features business dealings in more than two dozen countries, from Trump-branded condos in Seoul to a golf course in Ireland. And yet a Washington Post investigation has concluded that “the Trump Organization has more business entities in India than in any other foreign country.” The study, released in November 2016, contended that Mr. Trump is “involved in at least 16 partnerships or corporations” in India. Mr. Trump Jr. has himself said that India constitutes the largest market outside the U.S. for the type of real estate deals pursued by the Trump Organization.

It’s not just Mr. Trump and his family who value business opportunities in India; members of his cabinet do too. In 2006, Wilbur Ross, who is now Commerce Secretary, established a $300 million fund focussed on India and bought the textile company OMC India Ltd. In 2008, he bought $80 million in convertible bonds issued by the airline SpiceJet. (He subsequently sold it.) Goldman Sachs, the previous employer of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, boasts a significant presence in India and has provided support to the Indian renewable energy firm ReNew.

Now consider the diplomatic side. Since Mr. Trump took office, Washington’s relationships with traditional foes such as North Korea have worsened, while those that had enjoyed recent periods of relative détente (Pakistan, Iran) have regressed. Most strikingly, relations with some top allies (the U.K., Germany, and Australia) have taken tumbles.

Strengthening ties
By contrast, the U.S.-India relationship has continued to flourish under Mr. Trump. It’s easy to understand why. The two core strategic concerns that have long brought the two together — China’s growing influence and international terrorism — resonate strongly with the Trump administration. Also, arms sales and technology transfers — two main engines of the defence partnership that powers U.S.-India relations — are welcomed by a Trump administration that is unabashedly transactional in its foreign relations. Furthermore, President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi share much in common, from their conservative politics to their fractious relationships with the mass media and strong embraces of social media.

To be sure, there are bones of contention, from the Trump administration’s immigration policies that could deleteriously affect Indian workers in America to Washington’s refusal to pull the plug on its problematic partnership with Pakistan. The two sides also fail to agree on what should constitute their strategic partnership. Washington wants New Delhi to participate in joint operations and other types of alliance behaviour to which India remains allergic. Yet, deep repositories of goodwill and sharp convergences of interests enable the U.S.-India relationship to weather these policy disconnects.

Essentially, Mr. Trump’s expansive business interests in India coupled with rock-solid bilateral relations help explain why New Delhi has pulled out all the stops for Mr. Trump Jr.’s tendentious trip. Could the First Son take his salesman-in-chief/senior diplomat double act elsewhere overseas? Only two possible destinations come to mind: Israel and Saudi Arabia. If he does venture to those locales, however, his achievements this week would be a hard act to follow. Mr. Trump Jr.’s visit to India coincided with that of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The son of the most controversial U.S. President in modern history has not only stolen the spotlight from one of the world’s most beloved and photogenic leaders, he has also enjoyed much warmer treatment.
Michael Kugelman is the deputy director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/trumps-india-connect/article22818013.ece

Convicted Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav, who is currently on death row, has appealed to Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen Qamar Bajwa for mercy.

“Commander Kulbushan Sudhir Jadhav, the serving Indian Naval Officer who has been sentenced to death on charges of espionage, sabotage and terrorism, has made a mercy petition to the Chief of Army Staff,” the army’s media wing said in a press release issued Thursday.

“In his plea, Commander Jadhav has admitted his involvement in espionage, terrorist and subversive activities in Pakistan and expressed remorse at the resultant loss of many precious innocent lives and extensive damage to property due to his actions.

“Seeking forgiveness for his actions, he has requested the Chief of Army Staff to spare his life on compassionate grounds,” the Army said.

Commander Jadhav has reportedly exhausted an appeal to the Military Appellate Court, it emerged from the press release. If his appeal for clemency is rejected by Gen Bajwa, he will have recourse to appeal to President Mamnoon Hussain.

A new confessional video, released by Inter-Services Public Relations along with the news of Jadhav’s petition, purports to detail the crimes Jadhav has sought absolution from.

In the video, Jadhav can be heard saying that Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) sponsored various terrorist activities in Pakistan in order to disrupt economic activities linked to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and foment socio-political disturbance and strife in Balochistan and Karachi.

‘RAW-sponsored terrorism’
Jadhav, in his “confession”, has said that one Anil Kumar “on behalf of RAW” sponsored terrorist activities in Pakistan. These included encouraging sectarian violence targeting Hazara and Shia citizens, particularly those travelling between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan on pilgrimage.

The purpose of sponsoring various attacks in the region was so that “instability or some kind of fear is set into the mindsets of the people of Pakistan”, Jadhav said, saying that the high-profile assassination of Superintendent Police Chaudhry Aslam was an example of the kind of disturbance India wanted to create.

According to Jadhav, RAW also ‘directly sponsored’ the targeting of Frontier Works Organisation workers in Balochistan and sponsored Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks carried out by “Baloch sub-nationals” within Quetta, Turbat and various other cities of Balochistan.

The spy said that “various financing which subsequently happened for the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and various other Afghan anti-Pakistani terrorist groups led to the attack by TTP on one of the Mehran Naval Bases in which a lot of damage was cost to the Pakistani Navy.”

Other attacks that Jadhav said were “funded and directly supported by Anil Kumar” included a “sort of radar installation attack, the Sui pipeline gas attack, then attacks on civilian bus stations where some, I suppose, Pakistani nationals were being targeted by sub-nationals and murdered and massacred” in order to cause disruptions in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

“He wanted it [the attacks] to be raised to the next level so that complete disruption and complete stoppage of the CPEC between Gwadar and China is achieved,” Jadhav added.

A ‘military-style’ attack on the Pakistani consulate in Zahidan was also planned by RAW officials along with Baloch insurgents, Jadhav confessed.

“The aim was to either attack it with a grenade or some kind of Rocket-Propelled Grenade or IED attack or then try to harm the consul-general or some kind of vicious attack on the Pakistani consulate in Zahidan,” he said.

Additionally, he said, RAW had sponsored the creation of a new website for the Baloch movement in addition to handling an existing website “which was luring people from within Pakistan for various activities to be carried out in the future.”

Funding for these activities took place through hawala and hundi operations, Jadhav said, with finances moved from Delhi and Mumbai via Dubai into Pakistan.

Jadhav’s trial
Jadhav had previously been tried by a Field General Court Martial under Section 59 of the PAA and Section 3 of the official Secret Act of 1923 and sentenced to death.

Jadhav had confessed before a magistrate and court that he was tasked by RAW to plan, coordinate and organise espionage and sabotage activities seeking to destabilise and wage war against Pakistan through impeding the efforts of law enforcement agencies for the restoration of peace in Balochistan and Karachi, the ISPR had said earlier.

Jadhav’s first confession
Jadhav’s first confessional statement was aired by former ISPR head Lt Gen Asim Bajwa, in which the spy admitted to involvement in terror activities in Balochistan and Karachi.

Terming the Indian spy’s arrest a ‘big achievement’, Bajwa said at the time that Jadhav was directly handled by the RAW chief, the Indian National Security Adviser and the RAW joint secretary.

“His goal was to disrupt development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), with Gwadar port as a special target,” Bajwa had said, adding, “This is nothing short of state-sponsored terrorism… There can be no clearer evidence of Indian interference in Pakistan.”

“If an intelligence or an armed forces officer of this rank is arrested in another country, it is a big achievement,” Bajwa had said, before going on to play a video of Jadhav confessing to Indian intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) involvement in Balochistan separatist activities in Pakistan.

Case goes to ICJ
A 10-member bench of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ top court, is hearing an urgent bid by India to stop Pakistan from executing Jadhav.

The ICJ in a hearing of the case on May 18 restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav and rejected India’s request to delay proceedings in Jadhav’s case until December.

India was also ordered to submit a response by September 13 regarding the case.

Rejecting Pakistan’s argument that the court did not have jurisdiction in the matter, the court reasoned it could hear the case because it involved, on the face of it, an alleged violation of one of the clauses of the Vienna Convention, which both Pakistan and India ascribe to and whose interpretation falls under its purview.

“[Meanwhile] Pakistan should take all measures to ensure that Mr Jadhav is not executed till the final decision of this court,” the court said at the time.

The court also said Pakistan should inform it of all measures taken in implementation of the order.

THANE, India — Betsy Broder, who tracks international fraud at the Federal Trade Commission, was in her office in Washington last summer when she got a call from two Indian teenagers.

Calling from a high-rise building in a suburb of Mumbai, they told her, in tones that were alternately earnest and melodramatic, that they wanted to share the details of a sprawling criminal operation targeting Americans. Ms. Broder, who was no stranger to whistle-blowers, pressed the young men for details.

“He said his name was Adam,” she said, referring to one of the pair. “I said: ‘Your name is not Adam. What does your grandmother call you?’ He said, ‘Babu.’”

Babu was Jayesh Dubey, a skinny 19-year-old with hair gelled into vertical bristles, a little like a chimney brush. He told her that he was working in a seven-story building and that everyone there was engaged in the same activity: impersonating Internal Revenue Service officials and threatening Americans, demanding immediate payment
If they reached a person who was sufficiently terrified or gullible — this was known in the business as a “sale” — they would instruct that person to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of iTunes cards to avoid prosecution, they said; the most rattled among them complied. The victim would then send the codes from the iTunes cards to the swindlers, giving them access to the money on the card.

As it happened, the United States government had been tracking this India-based scheme since 2013, a period to cover back taxes during which Americans, many of them recent immigrants, have lost $100 million to it.

Though India had no reputation as a large-scale exporter of fraud in the past, it is now seen as a major center for fraud, said Suhel Daud, an F.B.I. agent who serves as assistant legal attaché at the embassy in New Delhi. Several trends have converged to make this happen, he said: a demographic bulge of computer-savvy, young, English-speaking job seekers; a vast call-center culture; super-efficient technology; and what can only be described as ingenuity.

“They have figured all of this out,” Mr. Daud said. “Put all of these together, with the Indian demographics in the U.S., and it’s a natural segue. Whatever money you’re making, you can easily make 10 times as much.”
‘I Want Money. That’s Why.’

Pawan Poojary and Jayesh Dubey, best friends and college dropouts, were impressed with the Phoenix 007 call center in Thane, a suburb northeast of Mumbai. The interviewer carried an iPhone; there were racing sport bikes parked outside, and, as Mr. Poojary put it, “girls roaming here and there.” The monthly salary was average for call centers, 16,000 rupees (about $230), they said, but the bonuses were double or triple that, based on sales.
The two friends had been playing a video game for up to eight hours a day, pausing occasionally to eat. They wanted in.

“At that time, in my mind is that I want money,” Mr. Poojary, 18, said. “That’s it. I want money. That’s why.”
They said they showed up for training in a room of young Indians like themselves, the first in their family to be educated in English. They were a slice of aspirational India: Mr. Poojary’s father, who owned two welding shops, was adamant that his son would rise to a higher place in society, an office job. Mr. Poojary was afraid to tell him he had dropped out of college.

The trainer assigned them names, Paul Edward and Adam Williams, and handed out a six-page script that started out, “My name is Shawn Anderson, with the department of legal affairs with the United States Treasury Department,” the teenagers said.

“We read the script, and I asked, ‘Is this a scam?’” Mr. Poojary said. “He said, ‘Yes.’”

“At that time I am money-minded. I thought, ‘O.K., I can do this,’” he said.

Mr. Poojary was excited and nervous about speaking to an American for the first time, and he was alarmed by the resulting bursts of profanity. Mr. Dubey said he tried to commit the entire experience to memory, in case he and Mr. Poojary someday decided to start a business of their own.

“I just wanted to become a great scammer,” Mr. Dubey said. “Everyone was scamming around me. I thought, ‘I will also become a great scammer.’”

The key to the whole thing, Mr. Dubey decided, was a psychological fact: Americans fear their state.

“I think they actually are really afraid of their government,” he said. “In India, people are not afraid of police. If anyone wants to come and arrest, they say, ‘Come and arrest.’ It is easy to get out of anything. But in America they are afraid. We just need to tell them, ‘You are messing with the federal government,’ and that is all.”

Preying on Fear

Inaben Desai, of Sugar Land, Tex., came home from grocery shopping, and her mother handed her the phone, eyes wide with alarm. Someone was on the line from the government, her mother said. They had called three or four times while she was out.

Ms. Desai, 56, worked as a cashier at Walmart. When she picked up the phone, a gruff-voiced man told her that she had failed to pay fees when she got her United States citizenship, in 1995, and that unless she did so she would be deported back to India, she said. When Ms. Desai said she needed to call her husband, a woman got on the phone, speaking sympathetically, in her native Gujarati.

“She said, ‘If you involve your husband, there’s going to be more problems,’” Ms. Desai said. “‘Your husband is going to get in trouble, too. Don’t involve your husband.’”

Ms. Desai had begun to cry. Still on the line with the woman, she took all the cash she had on hand and drove to a nearby grocery store, where she bought $1,386 in prepaid debit cards. Then the woman instructed her to go to her bank, transfer close to $9,000 to the account of someone named Jennifer, in California, and then fax confirmation and confidential details about her account.

“The bank lady tried to stop me, and she said, ‘This is your personal information,’” Ms. Desai said. “But I’m scared, and I faxed it to them because I’m scared of what would happen to my family.” The swindlers, who now had access to her bank balance, called back to demand another sum close to $9,000. Ms. Desai had to drive to another bank branch to make the transaction. The total amount she transferred, $17,786, was nearly all her savings.

Mr. Poojary was not the person who called Ms. Desai, whose case dates to 2014. But a similar conversation prompted him to contact the United States government. He recalled the woman’s name as Regella, and said that when she begged him to give her a little time, Mr. Poojary felt so sorry for her that he went to his supervisor, who told him to push harder.

“I just feel guilty at that time,” he said. “We are also Indians. We also don’t have money. They also don’t have money.”

A few days later, he called the main switchboard at the I.R.S. and said he wanted to pass on information about a crime. “They are not listening, they are just laughing at me,” he said.

Finally, he was transferred to Ms. Broder, the Federal Trade Commission’s counsel for international consumer protection.

“He was fairly insistent,” she recalled. “He was determined. The number of times he called me was overwhelming. I would guess that is why he was reaching out to me, because he wanted some form of law enforcement to take it down.”

The Raid

The risk of expanding a fraud aggressively is that the range of potential informants also expands. Supervisors may humiliate employees in front of their peers; paychecks may arrive late or not at all; ringleaders may spend so freely that they attract tax officials’ gaze.

The so-called Mira Road scam, named for the building’s neighborhood, had moved into a single floor of the seven-story high-rise in early 2016. By summer it filled the whole building.

“It got big,” said Mr. Daud, the F.B.I. agent. “And when it gets big, you leave bread crumbs.”

Nitin Thakare, a senior police inspector at the crime branch in Thane, will not say much about the person who contacted him in September with a tip.

But he will describe the raid, in loving, cinematic detail: How at 10 p.m., after the last of the call center staff had arrived for the night shift, 200 police officers streamed up the main staircase, blocking every exit and detaining all 700 people who worked inside.

As morning approached, the street outside filled with the workers’ parents, wives and girlfriends, said Amar Verma, who sells tea on the corner. “There was lots of sobbing,” he said. “There was one mother who came with her car. She was crying alone, the poor thing. She was sitting on the pavement in front of me, crying. Her child had not come home.”

Inside, the police cut the phone lines. Under interrogation, the suspects, one after another, insisted that they had been planning to quit just as soon as they collected their next paycheck, Mr. Thakare said. But the money made it hard to walk away, and after a few pay cycles, their qualms had faded. He felt for them.

“These are the youth of our nation,” he said. “They were misguided. For the first few days it seems glamorous. Someone is teaching them an accent, people are smoking, there are women. There’s freedom and night life. The youth love that.”

The police said that others, like the landlord who had rented the building to the swindlers, wondered why the authorities cared in the first place. “He said, ‘What happened?’” said Parag Manere, a deputy commissioner of police. “‘We are not cheating people in India! We are cheating people in the U.S.! And the U.S. cheats the whole world!’”

What they had stumbled on, it became clear, was a branch of a much larger network, the police said. Five days later, the police organized a second raid, of facilities in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, which they believed to be a nerve center. The Justice Department had come to the same conclusion: It has since released an indictment tracing 1.8 million calls targeting American residents to five call centers in Ahmedabad that used various schemes to defraud more than 15,000 people out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

By the time the police arrived at the Ahmedabad location, though, the syndicate was gone. “The place where we raided, it was a thousand-seat call center,” Mr. Manere said. “When we got there it was empty. Empty. Nothing. Not a piece of paper. Empty halls.”

‘It Will Not Stop’

Mr. Poojary said he happened to be at a job interview when he learned that the call center in Mira Road had been raided.

It was an honest, mundane customer service job, advising the customers of Delta Air Lines on such matters as lost baggage and frequent-flier miles, for a mediocre monthly salary of $150. He was sitting on a waiting room sofa when he picked up The Times of India and read that 700 of his co-workers had been detained the night before.
The first person he contacted was Ms. Broder, to tell her that the raid had hit the same operation he had described to her. That night, he and Mr. Dubey, who had left the Mira Road center after contacting Ms. Broder, celebrated over drinks.

“We brought it down,” Mr. Dubey said. “It started out as fun, then it got boring, then we truly understood the good and dirty parts of the job. Then we decided to bring it down.”

Whistle-blowers’ motives are often murky, and in their early conversations, Ms. Broder wondered fleetingly whether the two friends were calling on behalf of the scheme’s organizers to determine what American investigators knew. In an interview with The New York Times, the two men acknowledged being fired from the call center after getting into an altercation with co-workers.

Their claim to have brought down the center is unfounded, according to Indian and American investigators, who said that the raid in Thane was carried out entirely by the local police, without assistance from American officials. The Thane police said their informant was not employed by the swindlers. The raid was international news, and in the weeks that followed, the number of fraudulent I.R.S. calls to Americans dropped 95 percent, according to the Better Business Bureau.

But those who believe that the drop is permanent should consider this: In the weeks after Mr. Poojary and Mr. Dubey left the center, several lucrative job opportunities were presented to them. Each involved a phone scheme targeting Americans, they said. There was the Viagra scam, in which callers offered to sell cut-rate Viagra; there was a low-interest loan scam, in which people were asked to deposit $1,000 as proof of income. There was a tech scam, which warned Americans that their computer had been infected by a virus, and an American Express scam, which involved gathering personal information to break through security barriers on online accounts.

“Even if you shut down 400 buildings in India, it will not stop,” said Mr. Dubey, now known by his Delta clients as Jacob Davis. The two friends say they have given up on the notion of getting rich quickly, or of being paid by the United States government for the information they provided.

It has been replaced by a new hope — that, perhaps as a result of the public service they have provided, they will be granted visas to the United States, the home of so many of their favorite things: “The Fast and the Furious,” Vin Diesel and Robert Downey Jr. “I’ve spent so much time getting to know it, familiarizing myself with its states, talking to its people,” Mr. Dubey said. “I feel a bond.”