Winners and more winners

The fact that the ICJ upheld the authority of Pakistan’s military court is enough for Islamabad to declare victory


Editorial July 18, 2019

The verdict of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the case of Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav is finally in, and predictably voices on both sides are claiming both victory and defeat. For the lay observer though, the resulting cacophony is bewildering and befuddling. Who should we believe and what should we make of the international jurors’ judgment? Surely one side must have won and the other, lost?

For the most part, this quandary arises because, for the uninitiated, there are no clear parallels with which to compare such complex matters. In the absence of any clear frame of reference, we end up relating them to something all of us universally understand — sport.

This has been evident from media coverage and social debates concerning Jadhav’s case. For Pakistanis, all hope has been pinned on an ultimate comeuppance against ‘bully’ India. For Indians, the ideal victory would have been total humiliation for Pakistan.

As it stands, the ICJ verdict is one that allows the governments and media in both countries to claim victory. For New Delhi, the fact that the judgment calls on Islamabad to review Jadhav’s case and allow consular access as it had demanded is reason enough to claim success. In fact, the Indian media is already framing the case as a total victory since the judges did not agree with Pakistan’s argument that the matter was beyond the jurisdiction of the international court.

At the same time, the fact that the ICJ upheld the authority of Pakistan’s military court, which convicted Jadhav, and did not call for the convicted spy’s release is enough for Islamabad to declare victory. After all, India’s key demands before the ICJ were the annulment of the military court’s verdict and directions that Pakistan release Jadhav, both of which the international tribunal clearly rejected.

Even so, various quarters in both India and Pakistan will continue to interpret the verdict one way or the other in the days to come. Amid the noise from both sides, it should do us well to remember that politics and court proceedings, like life, seldom work in such simplistic binaries as winning or losing.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 18th, 2019.

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