John Abraham meets Jaishankar ahead of release of film The Diplomat based on his ex-aide
In the film The Diplomat, John Abraham portrays a fictionalised version of IFS officer JP Singh who was the deputy high commissioner in Islamabad in 2017
NEW DELHI: External affairs minister S Jaishankar met actor John Abraham on Thursday, ahead of the release of his film “The Diplomat” which is based on an incident involving one of the minister’s former aides.
The film, being released on Friday, recounts the efforts of senior diplomat JP Singh, currently the envoy to Israel, to rescue an Indian woman who was lured to Pakistan in 2017 by a man who promised to marry her.
“An interesting conversation with @TheJohnAbraham on his new movie The Diplomat. As also on football, the North East and our respective worlds,” Jaishankar said in a social media post.
Abraham portrays a fictionalised version of Singh in the film. Singh was the deputy high commissioner in the mission in Islamabad in 2017, when a woman named Uzma Ahmad contacted Indian authorities with a desperate plea for help to return home.
Ahmad had met Tahir Ali, a Pakistani citizen, in Malaysia and subsequently travelled to his home in northwestern Pakistan with the intention of marrying him. On reaching Pakistan, however, she found that Ali had four children from a previous marriage.
Ali forced Ahmad to marry him at gunpoint and sexually assaulted her before she was able to contact the Indian high commission.
In order to trick Ali into taking her to the high commission in Islamabad, a couple working at the mission pretended to be Ahmad’s brother and sister-in-law. Ahmad also said that her “relatives” in the mission would give her some money to be handed over to Ali.
Once Ahmad reached the high commission, Singh contacted late former foreign minister Sushma Swaraj, who issued instructions to verify that she was indeed an Indian national and to make arrangements to house her within the mission till she could be repatriated.
When Indian authorities learnt Ali was planning to take legal action, they pre-empted the move by approaching the Islamabad high court with a plea that it should allow her to return home.
Ahmad was taken to the court amid tight security, and after hearing her case, a judge ruled that she was free to go back to India. Singh then escorted Ahmad to the Wagah land border crossing the very next day.
Singh, who also did a stint in Kabul, subsequently headed the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran division of the external affairs ministry and also served as joint secretary in the external affairs minister’s office.
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