A familiar ritual results from the announcement of any high-level India-Pakistan talks. Does the visiting Pakistani dignitary plan to meet the Kashmiri separatists? Will India arrest and release the separatists and rail at Pakistan for having expressed the wish to do so? Will there be threats to call the talks off? Yes to all.

And, of course, will the Indian media once again try to track down the fugitive criminal Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar at his alleged residence in Clifton in Karachi? Of course.

It has not been any different this time either ever since it was announced that the National Security Advisers of India and Pakistan were due to meet in Delhi.  First came the reports that the Indian NSA Ajit Doval had prepared a dossier to hand over to his Pakistani counterpart, Sartaj Aziz, on the question of Pakistan giving shelter to a man formally widely recognised as a global terrorist for his involvement in the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai that claimed 257 lives.

Pakistan High Commissioner in Delhi Abdul Basit denied this, but then the Hindustan Times newspaper on Saturday published a report on the Indian dossier, with an April 2015 telephone bill in the name of Dawood's wife, Mehjabeen, with D-13, Block-4, Karachi Development Authority, Sch-5, Clifton, as the address.

Dawood allegedly has three known Pakistani passports and two more residential addresses (6A, Khayaban Tanzeem, Phase 5, Defence Housing Area and Moin Palace, II floor, Near Abdullah Shah Ghazi Dargah, Clifton) in Karachi, according to this report, which also carried details of his passport.

It even had a new purported photograph showing how the dreaded gangster looks now:

The consensus on Twitter is that he has not aged well.







While the nation had many questions on what its government was doing about getting the dreaded gangster back to India, the intrepid TV channel Times Now put in a phone call to the alleged number of Ibrahim’s wife in Karachi and asked whether she was indeed his wife Mehjabeen Shaikh.

A woman’s voice on the other line said that Ibrahim was asleep, before the conversation ended abruptly.

Another reporter from the channel called the number again, but found that this time, the woman at the other end was evasive and asked the reporter to call again later.

The nation has heard the evidence and pronounced its verdict on Twitter.













Meanwhile, the only real expert on Indo-Pak relations had earlier summed up the sound and fury signifying nothing in a series of tweets over the past few days: