India has faced yet another embarrassment in the international arena as a court in Qatar handed a startling ruling on 26 October, sentencing to death eight former Indian Navy officers. This verdict is the continuation of a case that occurred last year in Qatar when eight Indian citizens were jailed on suspicion of espionage relating to Israel’s submarine development. Captain Navtej Singh Gill, Captain Birendra Kumar Verma, Captain Saurabh Vasisht, Commander Amit Nagpal, Commander Purnendu Tiwari, Commander Sugunakar Pakala, Commander Sanjeev Gupta, and Sailor Rajesh are among those detained and now facing death sentences. They were accused of gathering intelligence on Qatar’s secret efforts to get cutting-edge, stealthy submarines from Italy that are difficult for opponents to detect.
This problem is part of a larger attempt in which the Qatari government and an Italian shipbuilding business agreed to collaborate on submarine development. These submarines are a smaller version of the ambitious Italian submarine project known as the U212 Near Future Submarine, which was created in collaboration with a German corporation. The finding signals that Qatar aims to deploy submarines in the Persian Gulf, making it the region’s second possessor of this technology. Qatar’s cooperation with the Italian shipbuilding business ‘Fincantieri’ extends beyond submarines to the creation of naval bases and the procurement of military vessels.
It’s worth noting that when these people were apprehended in August 2022, no formal charges were made at the time, but it was commonly believed that they were spying for Israel. This episode adds to a long history of Indian Navy officers being exposed as spies in various countries.
The Indian government has expressed shock at the Qatari court’s decision and has committed to investigate “all legal options.” India is now expected to use a double-pincer of diplomatic clout and lawfare to coerce Qatar. This is not a rare event; in the past, other Indian nationals, including military personnel, have been jailed on espionage-related allegations. RAW, India’s intelligence service, is well known for recruiting Indian people and former personnel under various guises to engage in espionage activities aimed at undermining international enterprises.
In 2014, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) detained and jailed two Indians for disclosing Indian intelligence secrets about the UAE. These convicted spies were discovered to have contact with staff of the Indian embassy in the UAE. In another example, in 2019, a German court convicted an Indian couple living in Germany guilty of spying. They claimed to work with India’s RAW and confessed to gathering and exchanging intelligence data on Kashmiri and Sikh residents of Germany.
Notably, in March 2016, Pakistani authorities apprehended a serving Indian Naval officer, Kulbhushan Jadhav, in the Pakistani region of Balochistan on suspicion of aiding terrorism and acting in espionage for the Indian intelligence organization RAW. Jadhav admitted in his confession that his objective in Balochistan was to carry out anti-state actions relating to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project and to target Chinese people.
The available information strongly implies that the Indian officers apprehended in Qatar were certainly Indian spies, and there is evidence of Indian government involvement in this espionage effort. This issue has the potential to strain Qatar-India diplomatic relations and call into question India-sponsored operations in Qatar. It also raises concerns about India’s regard for other sovereign nations’ sensitive national interests, as it continues to transfer spies to Israel and other states. Indian RAW has been actively involved in criminal activities across the world which is poisoning
India’s diplomatic relations with other countries. Recently relations between Canada and India also deteriorated due to the involvement of RAW in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. These developments are a clear indication of India’s diminished strategic importance globally. Stern actions taken by Qatar and Canada prove India’s lost relevance both in Eastern and Western blocks. Such decisions are only taken after strategic calculations in cold logic. Hence both Western and Middle Eastern countries have concluded that India is not even a middle-weight country but rather an evil that needs to be straightened. Both these incidents are a slap on the face of so called “Shining India”, exposing her self-acclaimed false strategic value on the international stage.
