Long before Jyoti Malhotra, Pakistan had honey-trapped diplomat Madhuri Gupta: Held in 2010, found guilty in 2018

NEW DELHI: The arrest of Jyoti Malhotra, the face behind popular YouTube channel ‘Travel with Jo', for allegedly sharing sensitive military information with Pakistan came as a chilling reminder of a similar case involving another woman, Madhuri Gupta, who stood accused of secretly serving Pakistan's interests.

The difference between the two women is that Gupta wasn't an influencer but a diplomat who held the position of second secretary (press & information) at the Indian high commission in Islamabad. Gupta was done in by a complex honeytrap when a Pakistani intelligence official, Jamshed, wooed her with promises of eternal love, cleverly manipulating her emotions to further his agenda.

It was in the spring of 2010 that Delhi Police's Special Cell arrested Gupta under the Official Secrets Act for passing on sensitive information pertaining to defence to Pakistan's ISI spy agency. The probe revealed that two Pakistani intelligence officials — Mudassar Raza Rana and Jamshed — liaised with her. The two men got in touch with her through a woman journalist and helped her get a book she was searching for, the one written by Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar. This marked the beginning of a dangerous friendship.


The probe revealed that Gupta, then 52, stayed in touch with Jamshed — who had the code name Jim — half her age, and Rana using the computer installed at her residence in Islamabad and a Blackberry phone. She was so infatuated with Jim that she allegedly wanted to convert to Islam, marry him, and go on a trip to Istanbul, the probe revealed. Her conversations with Jim involved her work and were often about Sufism, Rumi and the Urdu language, which she was fluent in.

Around six dozen mails were retrieved from the IDs **lastrao@gmail.com and **arao@gmail.com, both of which the Pakistani agents had created for her. The transcripts revealed a chilling strategy: Jamshed and his superior Rana, a batchmate of Pakistan's then-interior minister Rahman Malik, skilfully exploited Gupta's professional grievances, manipulating her emotions to compromise her loyalty. She claimed before her interrogators that she bore a grudge with the Indian govt because her sabbatical of two years hadn't been given approval and her pay was withheld.

The police report also said that Gupta visited Jammu and Kashmir in March 2010 on Rana's instructions apparently to procure the Annual Plan Report of that state. Rana, it was alleged, also wanted information on the proposed 310MW hydro-electric power project to be set up in the state by 2020.

The diplomat attracted the attention of her seniors in Islamabad when she started showing interest in matters outside her domain. This, coupled with inputs of an Indian intelligence mole in the high commission probing a domestic plot there, sounded an alert. Gupta was abruptly recalled to Delhi on the pretext of needing her assistance in the preparations for the SAARC summit and arrested after the suspicions were corroborated.

In 2018, a city court convicted Gupta under Section 3 and 5 of the Official Secrets Act, noting that the emails "passed on by the accused were categorically sensitive information which could have been useful to the enemy country, which were strategically very important for the foreign policy of the country and its secrecy was of utmost importance".

After her conviction, Gupta lived a life of seclusion, residing alone in Bhiwadi in Rajasthan when out on bail. She died in Oct 2021 at the age of 64 years. She had appealed against her conviction and it was pending in Delhi High Court at the time of her death.