Fowl arrest

Indian Border Security Forces have again claimed to have captured a Pakistani James Bond, or is it Bird? Yet another pigeon was taken into custody by the police in Indian Occupied Kashmir for spying, according to reports in Indian media, because it had “a prominent pink patch and a tag on its leg”. The reports say that a woman in the Chadwal area caught the bird after it flew into her house and handed it over to security officials. It had a ring on its leg which had numbers on it. These numbers could simply be an identifying number, which is often used by people who race birds. But this would be too easy an explanation, so the police have launched an investigation into the pigeon’s involvement in an “espionage attempt from Pakistan”.

We can confidently say that the investigation will turn up a duck. Unfortunately, ducks can swim, which may lead Indian authorities to expand their investigations into the shared waterways originating in the Karakoram mountains, even though India is mostly upriver. Duck also rhymes with truck, and we know that truck-bombs have been used against Indian forces in the past. While this train of thought may seem far-fetched, remember that this is not the first time India has investigated a pigeon for espionage. In 2015, a “spy pigeon” with a marking on its leg was taken into custody. In 2016, another “spy pigeon” was brutally tortured by Indian forces that clipped its wings to prevent it from ever “returning to Pakistan”. Yet, Indian officials admitted that despite this torture, the bird did not give up any information.

To his credit, the SSP of Kathua actually did tell the media that tagging racing birds is common practice, but other unnamed officers still insisted that the bird was a spy. Irrational hatred leads to irrational thoughts, which lead to irrational actions, none of which are acceptable when the players are nuclear-armed nations.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2020.

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