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COVER
STORY: INDO-PAK SUMMIT
The Tales Go On
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KAMLESH JAIN, W/O SQ LDR MOHINDER K. JAIN,
brought up three daughters, including Monica (right) who was only
two months old when Mohinder's plane was shot down.
"No memory has faded. It feels like
I went to see off my husband yesterday."
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The families cling to the proof of life of their
loved ones with the tightest of grips: Jasbir Kaur, 17 when the war broke
out, has a copy of a letter written by her husband to Indira Gandhi in
1980, on the death of Sanjay Gandhi. The armyman sent his condolences
and asked the then prime minister to imagine his own mother's grief. The
letter in Punjabi has been copied so often the words are a blur and Jasbir
can hardly read them. She still doesn't know who posted the copy to her.
Ashok Suri, another soldier, smuggled out three letters to his father,
asking him to secure his release as well as that of 20 other Indian officers
jailed with him. This after Suri's family was told he had been killed
in action. A Bangladeshi naval officer told Tambay he had met her husband
Vijay in a Karachi jail. Vijay was writing his name on the wall, the Bangladeshi
said, and he remembered other Indian military men because it was the first
time he had ever seen a Sikh.
Pattu lists several independent sources which
have pointed to the presence of Indian PoWs in Pakistani jails: radio
and newspaper reports of 1971 which announced the names of captured Indian
fighter pilots, including Vijay Tambay and Shekhar Goswami; a book called
Bhutto: Trial and Execution by Victoria Schofield, in which the jailed
Pakistani prime minister was told that the cries he heard from the cell
next door came from Indian military officers who were being tortured;
and a Time magazine photo of yet another Indian officer, Major A.K. Ghosh,
in a Pakistani jail.
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JASBIR
KAUR, W/O MAJOR K. SINGH, was sent a copy of a letter written
by her husband to Indira Gandhi.
"I have
never given up hope. He is a strong man."
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The wives of the missing men have crossed into
middle-age, their parents grown old. All around them they see sceptics
and sense the unspoken demand for their personal surrenders. Jasbir's
daughter has often told her to let "Major Saheb" go-"Aana
hota toh woh ab tak aa jate (if he had to return he would have done so
by now)." Jain's six-year-old grandson Anish has never seen his Naanu
and has been shielded from the Jains' story. But the only toys he plays
with are aircraft, tanks and guns. The Goswamis had to cut short their
honeymoon and, today, Poonam holds on to black-and-white photographs of
two young people sitting close together on a bench, her husband's words-"No
news is good news"-and the fact that he left her from Agra, the same
town where 30 years later India and Pakistan tried to talk peace. "It
must mean something. No God tests your faith so much without reason,"
she says. It took her more than two years to sign a letter accepting the
"presumption of the death" of her husband-after which the air
force could begin the paperwork required for compensation. If the Indians
want to find their men, says Pattu, they should hire an independent agency
to trace them from the places where they were last reported seen.
Ever since Agra, the families have set grief
to one side and kept talking, aware of the pressure of public opinion.
"Look at Kargil. If we had this in the 1970s, we would have got our
people back. Then we believed the Government," says Jain. Her 90-year-old
father, whose eyesight and hearing is fading, sat with a radio in his
lap during the three days of the Musharraf visit. Ever so often he would
ask her the question that has echoed through 54 homes for the last 30
years, "Koi news hai?"
Pattu has sent out yet another batch of letters
to Pakistan and Jain's son-in-law Manish has begun tapping sources in
the US. The work that Poonam's father did is now being carried out by
Flight Lieutenant Manohar Purohit's son. It is no longer a campaign or
a mission. This is a vigil in which the torch has already been passed
to another generation.
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