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COVER STORY: PAKISTAN
PRISONERS OF AGENDA
The families of 54 Indian soldiers missing after the
war of 1971 try to find a new voice and a broader platform for their plight
after the Agra talks
By Sharda Ugra
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DAMAYANTI TAMBAY, W/O FLT
LT VIJAY TAMBAY, spoke to a Bangladeshi officer who met her husband
in a Pakistani jail.
"The government must convince us."
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To some, cliches
do not apply. Time does not heal wounds as efficiently as platitudes promise
nor do memories and grief fade together in slow and perfect synchronisation.
Jasbir Kaur has just spent a few minutes using
her coffee table to map out the battlefield where her husband Major Kanwaljit
Singh was last seen on a winter's evening in 1971. "I am a very brave
person," she says and her voice shakes a little.
When she closes her eyes, Kamlesh Jain is 23
again, standing at Jalandhar railway station, bidding farewell to Squadron
Leader Mohinder Kumar Jain. When she opens them, she is a grandmother
and she is in tears.
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POONAM
GOSWAMI, W/O FLT LT SHEKHAR GOSWAMI, was married for 45 days before
the war broke out.
"No God tests faith without Reason."
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Ignore for a moment the well-appointed drawing
rooms, the patted-down neatness of the clothes, the careful recitation
of the facts and look for what loss and time has distilled instead. The
families of 54 Indian servicemen who are missing from the 1971 Indo-Pak
war carry within them a pool of stillness and uncertainty. The Pakistanis
continue to deny the existence of Indian Prisoners of War (PoWs) and the
Indian Government doubts whether they are alive. Time has tramped on,
but for the families it has remained frozen in an alternate reality with
the incomplete lives of their missing men.
The Musharraf-Vajpayee summit produced a public
promise from the General for the PoW families. "I am a soldier, I
would be the first man to release PoWs," he said. The prompt order
to begin looking for Indian PoWs was followed by the announcement that
there were no PoWs in Pakistani jails and two previous searches had also
failed.
Both countries have been pushed out on diplomatic
thin ice again: for Pakistan to admit to a single Indian PoW is to flaunt
the rules of the Geneva Convention which stipulate that PoWs must be handed
over at the end of a war. For India, finding a PoW after 30 years would
imply political sloth.
Colonel Raj Kumar Pattu, president of the nine-year-old
Missing Defence Personnel Association (MDPA), says, "We do not insist
that you recognise them as PoWs. In whatever capacity they are being held
in Pakistani jails-as PoWs or spies or smugglers-all we want is that they
be returned."
Damayanti Tambay went to Pakistan during a rare
diplomatic thaw in 1983 along with five others to look for her husband,
Flight Lieutenant Vijay Vasant Tambay. The warmth lasted only a few days
and the Indian delegation was shown one batch of prisoners in Multan jail.
The 50-odd men, weak and chained to pillars, told the visitors, "Aapke
log dewaar ke peechhe hain (Your people are behind the walls)." Tambay,
53, persists even today as she does not consider any effort futile. "If
my husband is there, someone has to work for his release and I would like
that to be me. If our Government doesn't believe the evidence we have
given them, then disprove it and convince us. Or ask the Pakistani Government
to be honest and say that they (the PoWs) were there and it has killed
them."
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