Living in the shadows

Published : Sep 23, 2005 00:00 IST

The case of Sarabjit Singh, who has been placed on the death row in Pakistan for his alleged role in three bombings in Lahore, is a pointer to what is on offer for a suspected spy nabbed on either side of the border.

PRAVEEN SWAMI in New Delhi

IN last year's hit film Veer Zaara, Shah Rukh Khan played an Indian Air Force officer incarcerated in Pakistan on false terrorism charges. He refuses to fight for his freedom because it would ruin the life of his true love. Now, even before Veer Zaara audiences have stopped packing theatres in India and abroad, a real-life edition has started to roll.

Sarabjit Singh's story has all the narrative elements of the popular film. He has been sentenced to death for his alleged role in acts of terrorism perpetrated by India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). But the Punjab farmhand's family has succeeded in waging an unprecedented public campaign for his release. Politicians, human rights activists and film stars - including Shah Rukh Khan himself - have joined the Bikhiwind family's campaign for his release. His sister, Dalbir Kaur, a village-level politician, has succeeded in mobilising much of the Punjab unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party to Sarabjit Singh's cause.

While no one has so far asserted that Sarabjit Singh crossed the border for love, a consensus has formed that an innocent man has been sent to the gallows by a cynical system. In Pakistan and in Jammu and Kashmir, there is a counter-narrative. Islamists have been demanding that Sarabjit Singh be pardoned only if the terrorists convicted for the 2001 attack on Parliament House in New Delhi are pardoned.

To accept either story one must suspend all disbelief, for the only truth available about the Sarabjit Singh case is that almost no one knows the truth of his life - and those who do are not talking.

Pakistani authorities claim that Sarabjit Singh carried out three separate bombings in Lahore, which claimed the lives of 14 people and injured dozens. The first of these was at Lahore's Chowk Bhatti Gate on May 18, 1990. Eyewitnesses to the bombing claimed to have seen Sarabjit Singh, clean-shaven and impersonating a policeman, arrive with a bag containing the explosive device, which he left with a local shopkeeper on the pretext that he was going to visit a nearby shrine. At Bhawana Bazaar, where the next bomb went off, eyewitnesses again claimed that Sarabjit Singh had left an explosive-packed bag amidst the crowd around a fruit-juice stall. Finally, the conductor of a bus that was bombed at Nizambad Chowk on July 28, 1990, identified Sarabjit Singh as the individual who had left a bag on the bus before de-boarding.

Sarabjit Singh's confessional statements, contrary to Indian media reports, were not the sole evidence before the courts which convicted him: apart from civilian eyewitnesses, police and intelligence officials who handled the bombing investigations also deposed.

It is not hard to pick holes in the Pakistani prosecution case, which appears to have been handled with extraordinary incompetence. Sarabjit Singh never identified himself to his interrogators by his real name; nor did he disclose his identity at any stage during the trial or even in his own confessional statement. Pakistani prosecutors and witnesses described him throughout the legal process as `Manjit Singh' - an individual Sarabjit Singh's defenders point out he demonstrably is not. On the other hand, this fact is not as damning as it appears, since the Pakistani investigators did not have the opportunity to establish his real identity. All it shows is that if Sarabjit Singh was indeed a covert agent, he was unusually resilient in protecting the cover identity his handlers had invented for him.

More damning, though, are contradictions in the eyewitness testimony. One said the individual who had planted the explosives had smallpox scars, but none mars Sarabjit Singh's face. Another, with theatrical flair, claimed to have heard a clock ticking inside the bag Sarabjit Singh had left behind, something profoundly unlikely in a crowded market-place environment.

Bar a handful of top RAW officials, however, no one really knows whether Sarabjit Singh was indeed an Indian agent. What is known for a fact is that India was waging a small-scale terror counter-offensive in Pakistan at the time of the Lahore bombings to retaliate against Pakistan's support for Khalistan groups (see box). Sarabjit Singh, a dossier handed over to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs by the Punjab Police claims, was well known to Indian intelligence as a small-time smuggler. Cross-border traffickers have for decades been recruited by the covert services of both India and Pakistan, by the simple expedient of threatening to terminate their commercial activities. Perhaps the most famous example of this relationship was the bond formed between Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which squeezed the mafia baron's narcotics business until he, against his own better judgment, made his network available for the 1993 serial bombing of Mumbai.

WHY is the truth about Sarabjit Singh so hard to establish? Professional spies - like smugglers, whose tradecraft is not dissimilar - exist on the margins of civil society. Unlike the soldier, the spy inhabits a secret world, one founded on silence and denial. If apprehend, the spy cannot expect to be treated as a prisoner of war: a quick death is the best she or he can hope for; prolonged torture, physical and emotional, is the alternative. There are no records of a covert agent's employment, at least not the kind that can ever be made public, nor tribunals to hear their complaints of promises dishonoured.

"Even if you escape death," the former Indian Military Intelligence agent Kishori Lal Sharma bitterly told the Chandigarh-based Tribune in August, "you die a slow death as nobody is there to own you." He ought to know: having spent 12 years in jail after his role as a spy tasked with identifying flaws in Pakistani tanks was exposed, Kishori Lal counts himself lucky to have a low-paying job in a Ludhiana firm, his story unknown to most of those he lives and works with.

Mehboob Elahi Shamsi, who now makes a living peddling wooden handicrafts on the streets of Kolkata, met an even worse end. Working as a technician in the Pakistan Army, Elahi visited Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh to meet his mother in early 1977. By his account, the soldier was recruited by India's covert services during this visit. He was launched across the Punjab frontier later that year, but was apprehended by Pakistan's 619 Field Intelligence Unit.

In August 1980, he was sentenced to 14 years' rigorous imprisonment. Indian consular officials attempted to gain access to Shamsi without success. Finally, in 1991, the Pakistan Supreme Court reprimanded the government for keeping Shamsi in jail even though he had completed his prison sentence.

For five more years, though, the Pakistani authorities kept him in jail, hoping to secure a prisoner exchange. Then, in 1996, he was quietly pushed across the border in Barmer (Rajasthan) by the Pakistan Rangers - only to spend more time in a jail, this one Indian, until his story was corroborated.

Roop Lal Sahariya's story is not dissimilar, except that it is somewhat better known than most. In April 2000, Roop Lal, then 56, landed in New Delhi on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Lahore, in the midst of a brief period of dtente. The Pakistan Rangers had arrested him in November 1974 while he tried to cross the Punjab border under the cover of fog and darkness. Roop Lal had with him papers he was told by his handlers to hand over to a RAW cell in Lahore.

Although Roop Lal had been picked up even earlier by Pakistani authorities, he had talked his way out of trouble by claiming to have strayed across the border by mistake. This time, though, he was identified by the papers he was carrying and the operatives who had been arrested earlier. During Roop Lal's time in jail, his wife, Sashiwala, remarried. India denied all knowledge of Roop Lal after his arrest; neither he nor his family received financial support during these years.

Until the late 1980s, when Pakistan's covert war against India escalated to unprecedented levels, spies and agents could in general count on being repatriated at some point after their sentences ended. Even that small succour, however, has been rare in recent years. Reluctant to admit to the scale of its support for terrorism, Pakistan has stopped addressing the problems of what are called `security prisoners': individuals who, unlike those detained on minor charges of straying across the border accidentally or those held for visa violations, are convicted of espionage- or narcotics-related charges.

Mukhtiar Ahmad, a resident of a village near Lahore, was convicted on espionage and narcotics charges in 1989, and he completed his sentence in 1997. However, the Pakistani authorities have refused to take him back. Mohammad Yusuf, imprisoned in Amritsar on similar charges, died in jail at the age of 94 after Pakistan refused to seek his repatriation formally. Pakistan says there are 611 Pakistanis in Indian jails, while there are 576 Indians in Pakistani jails. There are no figures available on how many are held on security-related charges.

TO hundreds of people in the border districts of India and Pakistan, the story would be depressingly familiar: for many young people there, smuggling is the best career opportunity on offer, with earnings obtained from serving as a paid agent for covert organisations being a kind of perquisite. Smuggling thrived for long because of the economic policies of India and Pakistan. Large quantities of liquor, betel-nut, paan leaves and manufactures routinely made their way west across the Indian frontier, while gold, silver, Western-made electronics and high-quality textiles came back through the illegal trade channel.

For much of the 1960s and 1970s, goods brought in through Pakistan were sold openly in Amritsar bazaars, while Indian-made goods could be bought off the shelf in Lahore. After Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto proscribed alcohol to appease Islamists, the volume of alcohol trafficking rose considerably. When the regime of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao liberalised gold and silver imports, however, cross-border trafficking in these goods was plunged into crisis. Mafia groups then turned to running narcotics - and the materiel of terror.

Large gangs continue to engage in trafficking of this kind. In March 2002, for example, liquor smugglers shot dead two Pakistani customs officials near the port town of Gwadar during a full-blown gun-battle. Most small-time smugglers, however, had little to do with organised crime. Along the border, local people with knowledge of the easiest ways to avoid border patrols often carried small volumes of smuggled goods across national frontiers, to make a modest living.

The income from their cross-border journey was often supplemented by offering covert organisations the kinds of low-grade information that was easily obtained on such trips: news of the construction of new defences, changes in the military formations guarding particular stretches of the frontier, or changes in the numbers of personnel deployed to guard positions.

Most often, smugglers worked for both sides, and for multiple organisations on each side. Unlike the James Bond figure emblematic of the covert word in popular imagination, such espionage offered only limited remuneration. In border villages in the region of Jammu, for example, residents still joke that a young man will not be able to afford marriage until he works for at least half a dozen secret agencies.

Was Sarabjit Singh one of these small-time smuggler-agents? Unless he - or one of his masters - decides to write an honest memoir, we are unlikely to know.

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