Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  It was in the second week of February 2014, nearly a month after the driver was held, that Pakistan resumed trade on humanitarian grounds. Before that, the Indian side had already decided to resume bus services every Monday. Trade and movement of people across the LoC were an important way of ensuring peace, but suspicions cannot die overnight. If a driver has been arrested with contraband, then there must be a mechanism to tackle the situation instead of freezing any movement and leaving people in the lurch. Even a relatively simple situation like this took a month to defuse and there was discussion on the need for a joint mechanism for scanning the vehicles and reviewing standard operating procedures. Banking facilities were also important as the trade presently functions on the basis of barter. At least, a joint scanning mechanism was discussed!

  The fisherfolk saga

  If you are a fisherman from India or Pakistan and stray into each other’s waters even by mistake, you can be arrested and jailed. You may never return home alive and if you die in jail, it can take months for your nationality to be verified while your dead body freezes in a morgue. There has been no civilized mechanism to deal with this, typical of the lethargy, red tape and ill will between the two countries. Apart from the proxy war, the visa mess, the other real horror story is how fishermen from both countries suffer.

  Karachi is said to be named after a fisherwoman, Mai Kolachi, and its origins lie in the 400-year-old village of Ibrahim Hydari, right on the sea. On the beach, large nets were being repaired and some fishermen hammered out planks for new boats. Its small, winding lanes buzzed with activity, large cooking pots sat outside an eatery, fish was being chopped at another stall, children were doing odd jobs or driving donkey carts. Its 100,000 inhabitants spilled out on the roads and life was busy and colourful. An old cobbler sat in a corner while opposite him there was a boy dipping dupattas into coloured vats. There was much excitement that day we visited in November 2011 since everyone was setting out for a political rally and piling on to trucks and minivans.

  But in this bustling fishing village, many families waited for news of their men, without much hope.

  When we met Sugra and her mother, Janna, they were airing large colourful dhurries or rillis outside their shanty with a single cot outside. Sugra, now a teenager, was a three-month-old baby when her father left on a boat, never to return. She and her mother sell rillis for PKR 200 each and also work as domestic help in the housing colonies nearby. They are fed up with curious visitors who take their pictures and go away. Sugra has seen only a photo of her father. The last they heard of him was that he was in an Ahmedabad jail. He has been gone for over seventeen years now. The Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, formed in 1998, takes up their cause, and over 200 fishermen have been in Indian jails for nearly fourteen to fifteen years. Meanwhile, more than 300 Indian fisherfolk are rotting in Karachi prisons and dying.

  Sugra and her mother keep their hopes alive even though people around them say there is no hope of her father, Achar, ever returning. Janna, who seeks refuge in tears and stitching those dhurries, feels that she has become a tamasha and an object of curiosity.

  Some of the other women in a nearby village have husbands or relatives in jails for over a decade and they get letters from them once in a while. It is a dire situation. Janna was married for only two years when her husband went missing. She was thrown out of his house and returned to Ibrahim Hydari. Both mother and daughter are illiterate and the first few letters from Achar were read out by a community representative. Every time there was news of fishermen released from India, Janna’s hopes would be raised, only to be disappointed. It is incredible that two ostensibly civilized nations cannot deal with this issue in a more humane manner, but in their short history, though there are exceptions, there is little evidence of humaneness. It is ordinary people who have to suffer the indignities of official hostility and paranoia.

  Some 300-odd Indian fishermen and crew members were released in August 2013 after intense lobbying. It was also that time when a report ‘Fishing in Troubled Water: The Turmoil of Fisherpeople Caught between India and Pakistan’, published by Dialogue for Action, an initiative of Programme for Social Action, New Delhi, was released. The issue of fisherfolk being arrested by the Indian Coast Guard and the Maritime Security Agency of Pakistan dates back to Partition. The number of people arrested almost reached 1000 in the 1990s.

  Under the agreement on consular access signed in 2008, both the countries have to give a list of arrested persons of the other country on 1 January and 1 July each year, which is duly being followed. While an economic cooperation agreement aimed at sharing marine resources and the implementation of ‘Release at Sea’ is a long way off, the report demanded political will from the leadership of India and Pakistan, and a permanent resolution of the Sir Creek issue.

  The other pending matter is the need to release the confiscated boats of fishermen from both sides. There are close to 765 Indian boats in Pakistan and around 200 Pakistani boats in India. All the boats from India are owned by the fisherfolk from Gujarat and Diu, with the boats being bought after taking loans. In Karachi, in 2011, Jatin Desai, an Indian journalist and activist, who has been working for the release of fishermen alongside other campaigners, had met Mai Bhagi whose son, son-in-law and two other relatives were arrested in 1999; their boat was also destroyed. She found out that her son-in-law died in 2012 in the Ahmedabad civil hospital; it took twenty-five days for his body to reach Karachi. Similarly, Rambhai Wala, an Indian fisherman, died in Karachi jail and his body was sent back after forty-five days of wrangling.

  In February 2014, an Indian fisherman, Bhagwan, died in Karachi’s Landhi Jail. He had been arrested a year earlier with fifty-four others by the Maritime Security Agency. After escaping from jail, he was rearrested in December 2013 when a police patrol found him loitering on the streets near the PIB Colony in Gulshan-e-Iqbal in Karachi. He did not have any identity proof and told the police he was a fisherman who had run away from jail. He used to live on the street and eat at charities. He was a drug addict and had escaped to find some drugs. Jail authorities said it was a natural death from a heart attack.

  Thirty-five-year-old Bhikha Lakha Shiyal, an Indian fisherman from Garal village of Junagadh district in Gujarat, passed away in Malir Jail in Karachi on 19 December 2013. He and his other colleagues had been arrested on 25 October 2013 when their boat entered Pakistani waters. A month after his death—attributed to asthma—his body was lying at the Edhi Home in Karachi’s Sohrab Goth. His nationality had not been verified till the time of his death. Under the agreement on consular access, within three months of arrest, the fisherman should have at least been allowed to meet an Indian official; but then, paperwork is never-ending in our countries. Finally, the Indian high commission verified that he was an Indian. Shiyal’s wife had passed away and he had a son and a daughter.

  In 2012, Nawaz Ali, a Pakistani fisherman, died in an Ahmedabad hospital. His body reached Pakistan twenty-five days after his death. In July 2013, Dadubhai Makwana, an Indian fisherman from Junagadh district, passed away in Malir Jail. His body came to India after twenty-one days. The arrests continue and the delay too in solving the issue.

  While lists of fishermen arrested are exchanged between the two countries, there is an unconscionable delay in ensuring that they are released. Every transgression is treated with suspicion by both sides and innocent people are forced to suffer. But this is an issue that cannot be addressed piecemeal without the main reasons for our inimical relations being resolved.

  10

  Voice for Missing Balochis

  Rose petals welcomed ‘Mama’ Qadeer Baloch and his small band of marchers on a rainy evening at Faizabad Junction. The next day he would wheel a small cart with framed photographs of the dead young men and women of Balochistan to the Islamabad Press Club. Rose petals covered their faces. The province which was annexed from the erstwhile Kalat state wants freedom from Pakistan, and the army has been repeatedly crushing the so-called miscreants
there in large numbers. The young men are insurgents or rebels depending on which side you are on, and the Pakistan government is fairly convinced that India has a role to play in fomenting trouble in this massive province bordering Iran, and has submitted a dossier to this effect to the UN. The excuse for the many detention camps, and torture and the army being sent out to crush rebellion is fear of another secession. Pakistan is clear that India is doing what it did to support the Mukti Bahini in the war for Bangladesh all over again. The popular belief is that Balochistan and its aspirations are being melded by a RAW conspiracy to unsettle Pakistan. And the arrest in 2016 of Kulbhushan Jadhav, who, the Pakistanis alleged, was an agent of RAW, was shown as proof that its charges were right. I was repeatedly asked on TV about India’s role in Balochistan—it is a recurring theme in the pantheon of accusations. I tried to tell people that I wasn’t sending agents into Balochistan and that I worked for an independent newspaper which was not the government. But conveniently, my Indian-ness would morph into being a representative of my government when it suited some, while otherwise I would be just another ordinary Indian to be loved or hated.

  The turmoil in Balochistan is often compared to Kashmir. If I as an Indian wrote about Balochistan and its situation and/or interviewed a person like Mama Qadeer, then why didn’t I write about the freedom or azadi aspirations of Kashmir and its freedom fighters? If I didn’t, I was given to understand that I had no right to write on Balochistan. But we are getting ahead of the story. It was Geo TV anchor Hamid Mir who first compared ‘Mama’ Qadeer Baloch to Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, Qadeer’s arduous exercise was inspired by Gandhi’s 390-kilometre Dandi march, only he walked longer than Gandhi—the distance from Quetta to Islamabad is about 3300 kilometres. The cause was just as searing. It was a long march to the capital to demand justice for the thousands of missing persons in Balochistan. Death threats, generous bribes and attacks did not deter Qadeer who founded the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons in 2009, and his small band of followers. He was seventy-two then (March 2014) and the youngest marcher was eleven-year-old Ali Haider.

  In the morning when Qadeer started from the Faizabad Junction near Islamabad, the roadside was full of young Baloch men wearing kerchiefs across their faces. If identified, they could be picked up for questioning or worse. Eagle-eyed spooks and police were everywhere and I thought at one point they would outnumber the marchers. I was to see some of them at the site of the suicide bombing in the district court. The march was unique in many ways. It highlighted the problem of the detention camps, and the demands of the people whose family members were missing were amazing—they wanted the UN and even the NATO to come to their rescue, apart from independence for the province. It looked a little out of proportion at first but they seemed determined, and later, they did meet representatives of the UN and the EU in the capital.

  The cases that Qadeer filed led to the Supreme Court establishing that it was the security agencies—the ISI, the Frontier Corps and the military intelligence—that picked up the young men and women. There have been so many orders to produce the missing persons but no one does anything. The security forces defy the orders and it is of no use, Qadeer said. For instance, in the case of one of the marchers, Farzana, the court had ordered her brother, Zakir, to be produced in court. He was picked up in 2009 and his whereabouts were unknown. The twenty-six-year-old was a student leader of a Baloch group, and the family did once get a message from another person who had been released from a detention camp that he was there. But later, there was no news about him.

  Farzana said her toenails fell off and she lost weight during the march. A holder of a master’s degree in biochemistry with another master’s in Baloch literature, her life was disrupted after Zakir was picked up by security agencies some years ago. Among the marchers were nine young women and three children, all of whom have a member of their family missing.

  The walk was the least gruelling experience, as another young participant told me. I spoke to them when they were camping outside the Karachi Press Club in December 2013 after walking 700 kilometres. Sixteen-year-old Sammi’s father was picked up from a hospital four years ago. She could march again if it meant bringing her father back, she said. Her family was in penury. But the real dread is that many of the missing persons could be dead. People are picked up by security agencies and many of them don’t come back for ten years; sometimes they never do; and their bodies are dumped here and there with slips of paper in their pockets.

  Most of the children who took part in the protest, like Samina, a seventh-class student, and her younger brother, Ali Haider, had left school to take part in the protest. Their father, Mohammed Ramzan, was missing. During the march, people would abuse and threaten them, and in some instances some people even fired at them from moving vehicles. A truck hit two of the supporters, injuring them.

  Qadeer said he had requested a meeting with the UN working group when it visited Balochistan in 2012. ‘We were invited to meet them in Islamabad and we decided to walk the over 3000 kilometres from Quetta in a bid to highlight our situation and seek UN intervention,’ he said. The group set out on 27 October 2013, and would cover forty kilometres a day; finally, it took them 100 days to get to the capital. Mohammed Ali Talpur, a senior activist, who was part of the march from Karachi, said that this was a message of defiance to the government and by bringing the march to the heart of the establishment, the people of Balochistan wanted to publicize their plight.

  I walked with Qadeer from the Faizabad Junction as he said he could give me an interview on the way. There were many people vying for that and my turn came just before we reached Islamabad. Garlanded with roses and wearing a traditional cap, Qadeer, a former bank employee, was friendly and told me he wanted to visit India, a wish that was granted just when I was leaving. He has documented over 19,200 cases of missing persons and recovered 2006 bodies. The issue of missing persons began in 1947 when Balochistan was forced to join Pakistan after it was freed from the Kalat state, he said. His thirty-year-old son Jalil Reki was picked up because he was the Baloch Republican Party’s (BRP) central information secretary. His body was dumped in a village bordering Iran. His son’s death fired his zeal to set things right and he founded this organization dedicated to focus on the tragedy of the people in Balochistan, wracked by struggles for independence, counter-insurgency, terrorism and action by security forces. He said it was the intelligence agencies who killed his son because they called and said so to someone who was with him at that time. His grandson, too, was part of the march.

  In 2012, his organization filed two cases in the Supreme Court on the missing persons; the petitions asked for these persons to be produced in court. He said the conditions in the detention centres were terrible. People could not even stretch their legs, the rooms were tiny, and the prisoners were blindfolded. And in some of the bodies that the group recovered, there were holes drilled in the legs. He said there were also bodies with the vital organs removed. Sana Sangat, a senior leader of the Baloch Students Organization (Azad) who later joined the BRP, was pumped with twenty-eight bullets. And there were women missing from the Marri and Bugti tribes. They had been kidnapped so that pressure could be put on their families to make sure their sons didn’t join the various Baloch groups. Among those documented as missing, there were about 170 women. In one instance, a schoolteacher, a mother of a one-year-old son, was picked up. At times, children, too, were taken away.

  In another case, after much insistence, the government produced before the Supreme Court some among the thirty-five missing persons who had been reportedly detained at the Malakand internment centre. But none from Balochistan were produced despite court orders. The government had earlier admitted that two among those thirty-five were dead.

  According to a 2012 report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s fact-finding mission titled ‘Hopes, Fears and Alienation in Balochistan’, Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province, its least populous and the most troubled. The most domin
ant feature of the province is a violent insurgency in the Baloch majority districts that started in 2006 after the killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti in a military operation. From the year 2000 till 2012, the HRCP recorded 198 missing persons from Balochistan. It also gathered evidence of fifty-seven bodies, some of them unidentified, that were found in the same province.

  I met an activist, a former professor, who told me about ‘things’ happening in Balochistan. Young boys, it seems, were allegedly pressured by Indian agents to go across the border for arms training and they were given lots of money. I was not in a position to verify any of this as it was in Quetta. She, too, had to move out to the capital for her safety and was very critical of India. If this is true, then proxy war is the motto of the two countries and both bleed each other slowly. A grievous tit-for-tat situation.

  I honestly don’t know if Qadeer is a RAW agent, but the fact remains that young men are missing, there are detention centres and dead bodies are surfacing with great regularity. The highest court in the land has established the wrongdoing and yet its orders are repeatedly flouted. Once, Qadeer called me to say he was going to India. And he called me again the day before I left in May. The spooks didn’t leave my side that last day, suspecting a conspiracy; anyway, I didn’t have the time to meet him. Alas!

  It was after my interview with Qadeer, carried on the op-ed page of The Hindu in March 2014, that I was summoned for a grilling at the external publicity office for an hour. Without my asking, Qadeer had denied he was funded by the RAW. (This was one of the sentences highlighted in yellow when I was questioned by the external publicity official.) He said families contributed money and there was no reason to seek funds. Now the tricky quote which became the headline for the interview: ‘After I formed my organisation I got a lot of support from people. If there is a referendum in Balochistan, people will vote for independence.’ Are you sure, I asked him, a little surprised. He nodded vehemently. The interview with Qadeer was not a secret, subversive activity on my part. I was among the many journalists who walked with him after he entered Islamabad and that was the only time he agreed to give me an interview. In any case, he did say this to others before me, so I didn’t see the need for this grilling. The official’s take was that I should be writing on art and culture and not on political movements. Did I write on Kashmir, for instance, he snarled at me over tea, which was meant to soften the blow.