54
Indian POWs Versus Sarabjit Singh
By Farzana Versey
18 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Rahul
Gandhi may have made a politically rash comment, but even if he had
not intended to reveal the truth, it hurts. "Hum jo kaam haath
mein lete hain, usey poora kartey hain...chahe woh desh ki azadi ho,
Pakistan mein batwara ho ya desh ko ekkiswin sadi mein le jana ho....
(We deliver what we promise, be it the independence struggle, dismemberment
of Pakistan or leading the country into the 21st century....),'' he
said. In effect accepting that India was responsible for dividing Pakistan.
We are back again to 1971. Too much has happened since and Bangladesh
is dealing with its own problems. But one major problem is ours. The
state of our prisoners of war.
Look at the scenario today.
One more fast unto death. One more case of emotional blackmail. Dalbir
Singh has this time decided to forgo food until her brother Sarabjit
Singh is released from Kot Lakhpat jail in Pakistan. Earlier, she had
been far more dramatic and stated, "Both Delhi and Islamabad should
know that Sarabjit will not be the only one who will be hanged. We have
prepared five nooses at home, and we will commit mass suicide."
The Indian government has
time for this case. Not for those they sent to war to divide another
country or fight for the rights of a regional group, whichever way we
choose to see it. There is always the 'trade is more important than
Kashmir' line being dished out during every Saarc summit. We keep count
of the dead (official figures only, please) that die protecting our
'porous' borders. We just don't have the time to think of those who
were still living in Pakistani jails for a cause they did not even know
about or perhaps identify with.
They just went there as Indian
soldiers 36 years ago. At that time Indira Gandhi was hailed as Durga.
The goddess was so busy playing the pugnacious deity that she apparently
forgot to ask for our men to be returned, while we handed over Pakistani
POWs. The irony is that Bangladeshis who we helped free are infiltrating
our borders while the families of those soldiers just wait.
There are many who think
it is foolish to assume they are still alive – it has been over
three decades. Why do some of us who have nothing to do directly with
the case continue to persist with it? Every few years I write about
it because suddenly when I seem to almost give up I get a letter in
the mail from some family member writing to say, "The mystery of
the missing 54 POWs should not be allowed to die a natural death. The
sacrifice of these warriors must never be seen as being in vain by the
present and future generations. If even a single politician's or big
industrialist's or media baron's immediate family member had been thus
sacrificed, am certain the 'great mystery' would have been resolved
long ago."
Someone asks if I can do
something. I cannot. I had sent an email to the Ansar Burney trust that
deals with such issues in Pakistan in January 2002; no reply. So, what
can I do as an individual? Is it therefore possible to even imagine
the extent of the helplessness the families feel?
My first involvement began
in 1992. Evidence of the soldiers were alive was produced in the form
of frayed postcards, clippings from old magazines. More importantly,
it was in the eyes of those who related the stories. Today, they are
willing to concede that their sons, husbands, brothers may not be alive.
What do they want? News. As one father, who is now dead, had told me,
"I want to see his army belt, his uniform and identification disc."
They want justice. The Pakistani
government insists it does not have any Indian defence personnel in
its custody; this has been its stand all along, and India has not pursued
to contradict it.
M.L. Bhaskar in his book,
'I Spied For India', mentioned the names of some of our defence officers
who were in jail from the information he had got from a Pakistani official
when he himself was in prison.
The Indian government is
quite certain that our army personnel are still in Pakistani prisons.
However, every Indian government
in power has only made half-hearted attempts. Morarji Desai had got
his external affairs minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to talk with General
Zia-ul-Haq, but Vajpayee got into technical details about international
ratio.
As Indira Gandhi's home minister,
Narasimha Rao had asked families of the missing personnel to visit Pakistan.
In 1983 a delegation was taken to a civilian jail in Multan. None of
the prisoners recognised them; they were shown petty smugglers, trespassers
and illegal entrants.
They have been collecting
evidence for years. As one of them told me recently, "Through my
studies on the subject, and I can only reasonably conjecture, that soon
after the war there was a deliberate 'understanding' by India and Pakistan
at the very highest levels, to keep all information on the missing POWs
absolutely out of view till the picture clears. The embarrassing disclosures
may have been 'protected' within the frame-work of larger peace initiatives
redefining boundaries within the subcontinent. After the ceasefire,
it's likely that in the confusion and anger among 'uniformed' Pakistanis
for losing the eastern wing, many POW undertrials were randomly scattered,
without proper accounting, to remote jails."
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto did hear
the cries of some prisoners when he was awaiting his hanging. He was
told they were Indian POWs. This was mentioned in Victoria Scholfied's
book 'The Bhutto Trial and Execution'. Since it was published years
after the war, we must ask why the Indian POWs were still behind bars.
There could have been a political angle that one of the family members
states, "Bhutto claimed to have been disturbed by the screams of
demented POWs sharing his prison when he was himself awaiting execution
by the military dictatorship that unseated him. That could have been
a clever ploy/red herring by him to get India involved to save his neck.
It's quite another matter that we do not know what he did as PM himself
after the war to resolve the POW issue."
Another person is more cautious.
He says, "The only and 'extremely remote' possibility of anyone
being alive is that a few may have escaped, been caught, and then forced
to convert to Islam. This may have been done out of fear and convenience,
or when they turned lunatic. This category may have been spared death.
Such information will also never be revealed. These living 'zombies'
may then be languishing in prisons, along with thousands of other Pakistani
civilian undertrials.You must know that close to 80% of all jailed inmates
in India and Pakistan are in the 'under-trial' category."
If, as Scholfied had written,
"When the time came to exchange POWs, the Indian government did
not accept these lunatics as they could not recount their place of origin.
And thus, they were retained at Kot Lakhpat," then I feel the onus
has been on the Indian government, and it has shown complete disregard.
Not one political party has included the return of our POWs in its manifesto.
Why hasn't a single government delegation gone to Pakistan? What have
our various ambassadors done? What about public opinion?
Yet, when it comes to one
individual the highest authorities in the country come out to support
an ordinary citizen who happens to be a farmer who ambled across in
drunken stupor to the other side of the border, though the Pakistani
Supreme Court has sentenced him to death by hanging for detonating bombs
five times, resulting in deaths and injuries. He has confessed to being
a RAW agent, and yet the then External Affairs minister Natwar Singh
discussed the matter with the Pakistan high commissioner in India and
reiterated the fact that this was a humanitarian matter and also that
there was a strong public sentiment in India for sparing the life of
the individual.
Does it mean there is no
public sentiment for our POWs? Indeed, except for the occasional TV
panel discussion, that too in the past couple of years, and two films
which flopped, absolutely nothing is done. Is it because these families
are trying to reason and not getting dramatic about it? What if they
started going on hunger fasts?
If Sarabjit has already spent
16 years in prison, then what about our soldiers? Were they tortured?
Did they lose their sanity? Their memory? Did they die of hunger? Almost
every family has been able to produce some evidence that they did not
die during the course of the 13-day Bangladesh War.
Yet no search was ever undertaken.
The Indian government would have to look at all possibilities. While
the popular theory is that it is merely a political issue, other reasons
can also be attributed regarding the missing people. They could be under
assumed names, or could have been mistakenly kept back as deranged,
or could have been captured a little before the actual outbreak of war,
in which case they do not qualify as POWs but as security prisoners
or spies. This means that all these categories must be checked.
Can the Indian government
be prosecuted and be later pursued in a court of law? A human rights
activist lawyer had told me that a prima facie case could be set out
if the courts feel the government has not been sincere. The case only
gets strengthened if there is evidence to back it.
This is not about false hope,
for hope is never false. It is about accountability.
(Farzana Versey can be contacted at [email protected])
--
http://farzana-versey.blogspot.com/
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