Ashvin Kumar’s Oscar nominated short film The Little Terrorist is being screened across the theatres in Mumbai, India. The story is about a young Pakistani boy, Jamal, who accidentally crosses the mine-strewn border into India, in pursuit of his cricket ball.
He and his friends are very aware of the barbed fenced border, the border security personnel and the consequences of crossing it. Indian security personnel are aware of someone having crossed the border. Scared of being caught Jamal runs into a border village and is sheltered by a Hindu family. The father-daughter duo, lead Jamal to the Pakistani side of the border in the middle of the night to safety and is reunited with the family.
Well Jamal of The Little Terrorist is lucky. But in the real world there are thousands of other young and old Jamals who aren’t that fortunate. The innocent trespassers on both sides of the fence, once caught are at the mercy of the security officials. “And the worst part of it is that politicians from both sides barter them to score a political point by saying to each other: ‘You release 100 of them and we will release equal numbers on the Republic Day. These prisoners are human beings, not animals to be bartered around!” says an agitated Ranjan Lakhanpal, one of few unsung lawyers, based in Chandigarh, fighting for the human rights of Pakistanis, spending days in Indian jails.
But this lawyer-activist alone can’t wage the huge battle for these hapless prisoners who number in their thousands. As per an official report, just 90 cases of human rights violations were instituted in the Punjab State Human Rights Commission (PSHRC) in 1997, the year when the organization was set up and started its work. By 2000, the number of cases taken up by the PSHRC had gone up to 4,926. And the true story unfolds from the figures between 2001 and 2003.
In 2001, there were 7,520 prisoners. By 2003 that figure had crossed the 11,500 mark. Last year, sources in the PSHRC say, the number was around 13,000. According to a report prepared by the PSHRC, a whopping 13,407 complaints were still pending disposal at the end of 2003. The number may have gone up now, say human rights activists. And with cricket matches, bus services and the recently concluded visit by Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf, the number may increase still further as more and more Pakistanis will come to visit the country.
In many cases the visitors err while in others the greed makes the officials err. The greed manifests when the erred visitors belong to the well-to-do families from the Punjab of Pakistan. The crossovers either mistakenly or deliberately overstay their permitted period of stay or jump a city-specific visa to visit friends in other cities, with the hope that their presence in the mass of humanity present in India would go unnoticed by the officials concerned. But the officials know how and when to get their bread buttered. Once the rich get caught, the negotiations between the families and the officials begin.
Then there are cases of besotted fans of film stars like a young Pakistani who had crossed the border 16 times just to watch Amitabh Bachchan films. Though the CBI found him innocent he still had to languish in a jail for four long years.
Majority of the people, who stray across the border, are generally booked under the Passports Act and sometimes under the Official Secrets Act and given jail terms ranging from three to six months. Sadly, even after that they are not released until someone comes to their aid, files a case and pursues it.
The worst part of these detentions is that the prisoners are kept under inhuman conditions. There are too many of them in too little space. Agreed that living conditions in many ordinary jails across the nation too have sub-human living standards. Every jail doesn’t have a Kiran Bedi, the first woman IPS officer from India who changed the lives of the inmates of the most dreaded Tihar Jail by improving the living conditions and also treating the inmates as human beings.
If this could be accomplished, then living in jails wouldn’t be so much of a torment. But majority of the jails on the Indo-Pak borders don’t come under this category.
Lakhanpal himself has been instrumental in getting more than 200 Pakistani prisoners released from jail. Last November thanks to the intervention of Lakhanpal, ten kids, aged between 10 and 17, were freed from Faridkot jail. Then there was Fida Hussain and four others lodged in the Patiala jail. For no reason they had been detained and after a legal battle, they too were released after more than two years, awarded a compensation of Rs25,000 each and put on the Samjhuata Express at Wagah.
Bola who had walked across the border was sentenced to jail for six months but was kept for more than eight years as there was no one to plead his case. Freed, he was paid a compensation of Rs50,000 and sent home. Bashir Sajid, another victim, was a journalist detained in Jaipur jail.
The problem manifests when there are no claimants from the Pakistani side for these detainees. Once in the jail, they become a forgotten lot. Inmates who are able to send a word to their people in Lahore, Punjab or the mafia, are the affluent ones whom the police fleece. In fact, they buy back their freedom. Last year Yash Raj’s film Veer-Zarra, tried to deal with a case which could happen to anyone from India or Pakistan. There are many lawyer-activists, a’ la Rani Mukherjee of the film, who are trying their best to fight for the cause of these prisoners of ill-fate. Asma Jehangir from Pakistan, Ranjan Lakhanpal of Chandigarh, Jammu based lawyer activist, Aseem Sawhney and many are doing their best.
Aseem and Ranjan fought the now famous case of Shahnaz Parveen Kausar, 32, of Haryan village in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, who threw herself into the Jhelum River in 1995 to escape her husband and in-laws who regularly tormented her for failing to bear a child! Picked up by BSF and handed over to the police, she was jailed for seven years for entering the country without proper documentation and then failing to pay $50 as a fine. While in jail she was raped and gave birth to a baby girl. Though the lawyers got her released, she couldn’t go back to Pakistan as she was asked to leave her young daughter behind who was born in India and so was a citizen of India.
Kausar herself wasn’t too keen on going back as she feared that she will be “punished for the existence of Mobin, her daughter” if she returns to Pakistan, where many women are victims of “honour killings” each year. She is willing to forgive her rapist and marry him, even though he has been suspended from his job, just to get the citizenship of India.
There are many cases and these require real help from both the countries as well as citizens of Pakistan and India who become aware of such prisoners only when the time of ‘bartering of prisoners’ comes from the politicians.
“We are in touch with the human rights activists in Pakistan. And we know that the condition of prisoners’ here is a mirror image on the other side too. Even our prisoners too face the same problems. Now hopefully with improved relationships between both the countries, lives of these detainees will also improve!” hopes Ranjan Lakhanpal.
Ashvin Kumar’s Oscar nominated short film The Little Terrorist is being screened across the theatres in Mumbai, India. The story is about a young Pakistani boy, Jamal, who accidentally crosses the mine-strewn border into India, in pursuit of his cricket ball.
