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The Pakistani and Indian foreign secretaries are meeting for another round for peace talks today in Islamabad. Even if there is no headway in these talks, they are kind of therapeutic for the two governments if nothing else.
But the question is how do they affect the common man across the border? How do they affect the prisoners incarcerated in each other’s prisons for years and years without any justice? How far have these talks helped families divided by the LoC? What urgent steps are taken to relax visa restrictions to allow people to meet their long lost family across the border?
Incidentally, coinciding with these peace talks, the Indian government has released eleven Pakistani prisoners, five of them children. According to media reports, most of these prisoners had been arrested on charges of mistakenly crossing the border; having fake currency or for living in India after expiry of their visas. These prisoners are the lucky few who were ‘exchanged’ between the two countries as a goodwill gesture every time they engage. Apart from such goodwill gestures, a majority in both countries reap very little benefits for these talks, since they see nothing changing in their lives.
The common man on both sides wants to be able to move freely between the two countries. This is mainly because a large number of people in both countries have family living across the border that they have never met and will probably never meet because there are too many issues in procuring a visa. They are wary to travel across the border since they have all heard the stories about citizens from their countries being arrested on charges of mistaken identity, or visa issues or other small offences.
There are still hundreds of people from both countries living as inmates across the border. In some instances their families are not informed, and the governments take no notice of the ‘disappearance’ of their citizens and make no headway to retrieve them. In some instances there have been people who were caught for over stay after their visas expired or because they mistakenly crossed the border. Sometimes they spend most of their lives behind bars because either they can’t get out or justice is denied to them, and their mother country doesn’t seem too pushed to get them out.
Unless their stories make it to the media, they have to wait for the next round of peace talks or some agreement between their countries to be released. Smaller issues like mistaken border crossing need not be dealt at the foreign secretary or foreign minister level, but they need to be looked into to facilitate the lives of citizens of both countries.
Steps should be taken so that people from both sides of the border don’t spend nineteen years (as in the case of 78-year-old Pakistani citizen, Dr Saiyyad Mohammad Khaleel Chishty, who has been languishing in a prison and now prison hospital in Ajmer, India for the past nineteen years) nor for 27 years (as in the case of Indian citizen Gopal Das who was imprisoned in a prison in Kot Lakhpat, Pakistan for 27 years). The governments of both countries should prioritise such cases and they should be expedited on humanitarian grounds as in the case of Dr Khaleel Chishty.
As important as the resolution of issues like Kashmir and water are for the people of the region, issues of visa extension, punishment for crossing the border by mistake and fishermen floating into foreign water should also be taken into account, and measures be taken to provide relief to the ‘culprits’ on both sides. Movement between the two countries should be made easier with softer borders, so that people don’t have to be imprisoned for small offences and if they are, they should be provided with justice immediately so that they don’t waste their lives behind bars.
It is hoped that this round of talks will actually improve the relationship between the two countries not only at the government level. Most importantly, the talks will improve the situation between the people of the two countries, especially those languishing in prisons across the border.
Annie Sibtain Rizvi is a freelance journalist and tends to ponder over the socio-political happenings with an empathetic outlook.
