It is not every day that one is branded an intelligence agent by the military of an adversarial nation. When it does happen, the consequences can range from bad to burial without as much as a warning.

When it happens to a journalist, it is almost never good news. For this writer, it has already happened this week leaving behind a mix of unease, disbelief, and a lingering stench of malevolence.

As ridiculous as it was, it was a difficult pill to swallow: my public initiation as an alleged R&AW agent by the principal public relations face of the armed forces of an adversarial state – Pakistan.

The Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations, (DG-ISPR) Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, deemed it appropriate to display, at a press conference, the names of two Indian journalists’ X accounts – WION’s Sidhant Sibal and mine – among several others, falsely identifying them as accounts operated by India’s external intelligence agency, R&AW.

A seemingly innocuous tweet reporting on External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s remarks in New Delhi to Afghan Taliban’s foreign minister Amir Muttaqi, was highlighted under a banner reading ‘India and Afghan Taliban terror nexus’. Pointing to it, Lt Gen Chaudhry said: “Yeh RAW ke account hain (these accounts belong to RAW)."

This is serious business coming from a military-intelligence complex that views its enemy with utmost malevolence and whose reputation is marred by the use of terrorism as........

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