JOIN USCut the red tape
The Supreme Court’s directive to the government to give top priority to the release and repatriation of 21 Pakistani prisoners, 16 of them deaf and dumb and mentally unsound, touches a very sore point. These prisoners have completed their sentences for offences which they themselves are not aware of but are still held for reasons which show our sense of justice and fair play in a poor light. The Supreme Court’s observations and the directive came a day after another Pakistani, Khalil Chishty, was granted bail by the court after he had spent 20 years in Ajmir jail, facing a murder charge. Chishty was on a visit to India to be with his mother in 1992 when he got embroiled in the murder case. He maintains that he was only a witness to a murder committed in a group clash, but after 18 years he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He is now 80 years old. The sentences of three others convicted along with him have been suspended but Chishty did not get the benefit because the judge felt he did not deserve leniency, being a Pakistani.
Chishty’s case has been raised at high level meetings between India and Pakistan but still official and legal problems have stood in the way of his release and return to Karachi. He was once supposed to have been released in exchange for an Indian prisoner, Sarabjit Singh, who is in a Pakistani jail. But he was not. There are Indian prisoners in Pakistani jails also who have become victims of the politics of suspicion and tit for tat policy between the two countries. Most of them are innocent people who do not even know the charges levelled against them.
The Pakistani prisoners about whom the Supreme Court felt strongly, and their counterparts in Pakistani jails are all paying the price with their lives for the callousness and inhumanity of the establishments of both countries. Earlier this year some Indians were released from Pakistani jails with some fanfare. What should have been in the natural course was made a political event. The official procedures that should enable the repatriation of Pakistani prisoners to their country should be gone through immediately, as the court has suggested, and they should be allowed to go home. Pakistan should also reciprocate in kind.