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Calling, an Ansar Burney in India

When Najma Parveen, a resident of Karachi, returned to Pakistan after a four-year imprisonment in India, she had little to celebrate. Her husband Shahid remained behind bars in India, and her children in Meerut with relatives, realised only two months later that their mother had been released and sent back.

That was in 2006. Two years later, 40-year-old Najma’s suffering is still not over. Her story is as complex and dramatic as relations between India and Pakistan, and perhaps more so because of the troubled ties between the two countries, and it presents a test for the new resolve between the two sides to deal with the issue of prisoners humanely.

India and Pakistan signed a new agreement on consular access to prisoners last month, and an eight-member committee of judges — four each from India and Pakistan — is currently touring Pakistani prisons to assess the condition of Indian prisoners. Next, the judges will visit Indian prisons to find out about Pakistani prisoners. They will then make recommendations for the early release and repatriation of prisoners who have served their sentence.

Najma’s eight-year-ordeal actually began in 1987 with the Meerut riots. It involves a flight from Meerut that year, staying in Karachi illegally for some time before managing to get Pakistani papers through an influential “mohajir” relation who was later killed, and visiting India at least once before the 2000 trip on which both were arrested. It involves espionage charges and unclear nationality, but most of all it involves five innocent children in Meerut hoping to be reunited with their parents one day.

Arrested in Jaipur in 2001 along with her husband Shahid a few weeks after arriving in India, let off and then rearrested in 2002, Najma spent four years in a Jaipur jail, two more than the court sentenced for overstaying her Indian visa. Her husband was in the same jail charged with spying.

The couple had come from Pakistan to Meerut with their six children — three daughters and three sons. Soon after Najma followed her husband to jail, one of their sons died in Meerut, where they were being looked after by relatives.

Najma’s was a high-profile case, taken up by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in 2005. Angered by her prolonged imprisonment, the Rajasthan High Court ordered the state government to produce her before the court in February 2006. Days before the scheduled date, Najma was suddenly released.

Overjoyed at the prospect of the reunion with her children, Najma told The Hindu recently that she was shocked on being told by the two women escorts from the jail that she was being taken not to Meerut, but to Amritsar where she would be sent back over the Wagah border to Pakistan.

“I cried and wept and screamed to be taken to Meerut, at least to be permitted one last meeting with my children, but they did not listen to me,” Najma said, breaking down as she went over the events.

More than two years after her return, her children remain in Meerut, while there is no word about when her husband may be released.

“My loneliness is more than I can bear. You cannot imagine what I’m going through. Six years is too long for any mother to be separated from her children and her husband. Please do anything you can to help me,” she pleaded. Najma is financially not well-off. She makes a living sewing clothes, and by renting out a portion of her house for Rs 1,500 a month.

Shahid was acquitted of charges under the Official Secrets Act in 2006, but is now booked under the National Security Act. In the new agreement for consular access, India and Pakistan have committed that in cases where a Pakistani or Indian prisoner in the other country’s jail is charged, detained and sentenced “on political or security grounds,” in other words, spying, “each side may examine the case on its merits.”

It is up to Indian officials to decide if Shahid’s case will be examined on merits. But a further twist in the tale is that he wants to be acknowledged as an Indian citizen, as did Najma in her defence before the Rajasthan High Court.

Najma’s defence lawyer submitted to the court that the couple went to Pakistan in 1987. Having overstayed their Pakistani visa, and moreover, losing their Indian travel documents in a fire, they were helped by an influential uncle to obtain Pakistani passports through wrongful means, or so the defence told the court. The uncle was killed in violence in Karachi in the early 19990s. Their support in Pakistan gone, the couple wanted to return to India.

While Najma is now emphatic that she is a Pakistani citizen — she could not have returned to Karachi had the Pakistan government not accepted her as one — and wants the children sent back to her as early as possible, Shahid’s lawyer has recently filed a petition in the Supreme Court and in the National Human Rights Commission asking that the entire family be granted Indian citizenship.

In Meerut, there is utter confusion in the couple’s families about how to deal with their five children, combined with total ignorance about the procedures for sending them back to their mother in Pakistan.

Officials at the Indian High Commission said all it would take was for the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi to issue them emergency travel documents. The children were included in their mother’s Pakistani passport when they travelled to India in 2000 and have no travel documents now. The Pakistan High Commission said they had not been approached by any family member of Najma or Shahid with such a request.

When contacted, Shahid’s brother Majid, a carpenter in Meerut, said the family was waiting for his nationality question to be resolved first. “What if the court declares Shahid an Indian, and he gets stuck here and the children and mother get stuck in Pakistan?” he asked.

While the case hangs, the family is also concerned that the children could be picked up by local police as “illegal” as the records show they arrived in India on the basis of Pakistani travel documents.

The eldest daughter, Nishat, who is now 19 years old, told The Hindu that she was uncertain if she was Indian or Pakistani. But she was clear about one thing: “India or Pakistan, we want to be all together with our Ammi and Abbu in one place.”

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