AS the African proverb goes, when two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. To be more specific, in this case it is the poor fishermen that get netted when Pakistan and India want to flex their muscles. So it was heartening that Pakistan released 220 Indian fishermen from prison in Karachi on Sunday, enabling them to return home and start the new year reunited with their families. The men had spent more than a year behind bars on the charge of trespassing on Pakistani waters. As per a report in this paper yesterday, all of them said their boats had drifted off course while they were asleep and they had been arrested by the coastguard in the middle of the night. For at least one of them, incarceration in Pakistan for the same crime was a repeat experience.

While the India-Pakistan relationship is at present going through a particularly fraught period, thanks largely to unreasoning hostility from the Modi government, the plight of fishermen from both sides being arrested for maritime trespassing is a long-standing, chronic issue. It need not, and should not, be so. This is an indigent community whose detention behind bars causes enormous suffering to their dependents back home. Their incarceration will not compel the other side to change their policies on matters that bedevil their relationship; it in fact serves no purpose other than petty point-scoring. Groups of fishermen, sometimes after having spent years in cross-border prisons, are periodically released from time to time in ‘goodwill gestures’, only for the same exercise to be repeated over and over again. At a recent news conference in Karachi on the issue, speakers highlighted how the arrest and detention of fishermen by maritime security agencies violates international law and contravenes the victims’ legal rights. For example, consular access is granted only after they serve their sentences; some have even died in prison. It is high time India and Pakistan tackled the issue of maritime boundary demarcation.

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2016