India Fuming At Pakistani Newspaper For Leaking Story On Sex Providers

India is fuming because a Pakistani newspaper broke the news that the Indian military has finalized plans to deploy a unit of women sex providers in occupied Kashmir, where figures of suicides and mental problems among Indian soldiers deployed in a hostile territory have shot through the rooftop.

This time, Pakistani diplomats in the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi may receive an unusual Indian protest.  So far the Indians have been ISI-phobic, seeing the hands of Pakistan's feared premier counterespionage service in everything that went wrong in India.  Now the diplomats will be receiving a letter of protest against an independent Pakistani newspaper.

For the first time in the 60-year tumultuous relationship between Pakistan and India, New Delhi wants to lodge a complaint with Islamabad against a Pakistani newspaper, the Daily Mail.  The Mail is a small newspaper that publishes from Islamabad and Beijing.  But it's investigative stories make up for its small size.

On Sept. 11, The Daily Times ran a story filed by the paper's New Delhi correspondent Christina Palmer, titled 'Indian Army To Deploy Prostitutes As A Women Battalion In Held Kashmir'.

The PakNationalists, PakAlert, PKKH, PakistanFirst and tens of other Pakistani and international online news portals, picked it up.

Ms. Palmer's story was based on a statement issued by the Inspector General of Border Security Force Himmat Singh. The story basically said that the Indian military was concerned about the rising incidents of suicides among Indian soldiers deployed in Indian-occupied Kashmir, a territory where Kashmiris are fighting India for the right to determine whether they want to be independent or join Pakistan.

A high level Indian military delegation went to Moscow to study the Russian experience in dealing with such problems.  Like India, the former Soviet Union military was spread thin across a large territory, including distant and difficult regions.

Mr. Singh confirmed that a batch of 178 female soldiers was being sent to Northern Command where they would be deployed along with Indo-Pak border to check the border violations by women, working in the field.  Mr. Singh further stated that these women were not fully trained for operational military duties however in the next phase, after further training, they would be given the duties of operational Border security.  Mr. Singh refused to admit that these female soldiers were actually prostitutes and were being dispatched to the valley as undercover sex workers.  When contacted, Rohit Sharma, a senior defense analyst here in New Delhi, said that the move was a creative step by Indian army leadership as it would boost the medical and mental health of the soldiers.

Some departments of the Indian government were permitted to contact licensed brothels in several Indian cities to explore the possibility of recruiting candidates.

But the Indian reaction to this story was unexpected.

According to one Indian newspaper, an official of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs retorted by saying what he or she thought is a hit below the belt for Pakistan: "We do not have a Talibanised society like Pakistan's.  In India, women have very successful military careers."

Never mind that Pakistan has a large women's police force deployed in all the major cities of the country, in addition to active duty women officers in the Army and the Pakistan Air Force.

The Indian news portal Mid-Day.com confirmed that "India has decided to lodge an official complaint against the 'wrongful news reports" and that "the order to lodge a complaint has come directly from the office of Union Home Minister P Chidambaram."

The Indian portal quoted an unnamed Indian diplomat as saying, "Such news can tarnish the image of our forces. So far, it was a conscious decision by the government not to deploy women troops on the border. But we want total success of this experiment and we need to tell the Pakistanis to behave."

Several foreign reporters based in the Indian capital reported receiving calls from Indian government and intelligence officers asking where to find Christina Palmer.

Ms. Palmer, who will be appearing on Geo Network's weekly show TSS with Ahmed Quraishi tomorrow, is a British journalist who lives with her Indian husband. According to Indian laws, you have to be a Pakistani citizen legally residing in India or an Indian journalist to work as a correspondent for a Pakistani newspaper.  Non-Indian journalists cannot represent Pakistani media in India.  For this reason, Ms. Palmer writes under an assumed name.

But to prove that she is real, Ms. Palmer is appearing through telephone from New Delhi on a Pakistani television talk show.

In her report, Ms. Palmer wrote on Oct. 6: "In a unique and unprecedented move, India’s Minister for Home Affairs Mr. P. Chidambaram has threatened the Islamabad-based Pakistani newspaper The Daily Mail over one the investigative reports by the Daily regarding first female troops of Indian Army that have been deployed in the Held Kashmir. According to the reports appearing here in local Indian media as well as international media, the Home Affairs Minister has ordered his officials to lodge an official complaint with Pakistan’s High Commission in New Delhi to sort out The Daily Mail."

The paper's editor-in-chief Makhdoom Babar Sultan defended his newspaper's credibility in a special editorial: "Mr. Chidambaram’s action has shocked the entire global media community as it is the first move of its kind in which a top minister of a country has threatened an independent newspaper of another country of lodging a complaint against it and seeking strong action, there this move of India’s MHA has exposed the true face of so-called secular India and the belief of Indian leadership in freedom of press and freedom of expression. In the 62 years of the history of Pak-India relations, The Daily Mail is the first ever victim of this kind of aggression from the Indian government."