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To some, cliches do not apply. Time does not heal wounds as efficiently as platitudes promise nor do memories and grief fade together in slow and perfect synchronisation.
Jasbir Kaur has just spent a few minutes using her coffee table to map out the battlefield where her husband Major Kanwaljit Singh was last seen on a winter's evening in 1971. "I am a very brave person," she says and her voice shakes a little.
When she closes her eyes, Kamlesh
Jain is 23 again, standing at Jalandhar railway station, bidding farewell
to Squadron Leader Mohinder Kumar Jain. When she opens them, she is a grandmother
and she is in tears.
Ignore for a moment the well-appointed
drawing rooms, the patted-down neatness of the clothes, the careful recitation
of the facts and look for what loss and time has distilled instead. The
families of 54 Indian servicemen who are missing from the 1971 Indo-Pak
war carry within them a pool of stillness and uncertainty. The Pakistanis
continue to deny the existence of Indian Prisoners of War (PoWs) and the
Indian Government doubts whether they are alive. Time has tramped on, but
for the families it has remained frozen in an alternate reality with the
incomplete lives of their missing men.
The Musharraf-Vajpayee summit produced a public promise from the General for the PoW families. "I am a soldier, I would be the first man to release PoWs," he said. The prompt order to begin looking for Indian PoWs was followed by the announcement that there were no PoWs in Pakistani jails and two previous searches had also failed.
Both countries have been pushed out on diplomatic thin ice again: for Pakistan to admit to a single Indian PoW is to flaunt the rules of the Geneva Convention which stipulate that PoWs must be handed over at the end of a war. For India, finding a PoW after 30 years would imply political sloth.
Colonel Raj Kumar Pattu, president of the nine-year-old Missing Defence Personnel Association (MDPA), says, "We do not insist that you recognise them as PoWs. In whatever capacity they are being held in Pakistani jails-as PoWs or spies or smugglers-all we want is that they be returned."
Damayanti Tambay went to Pakistan during a rare diplomatic thaw in 1983 along with five others to look for her husband, Flight Lieutenant Vijay Vasant Tambay. The warmth lasted only a few days and the Indian delegation was shown one batch of prisoners in Multan jail. The 50-odd men, weak and chained to pillars, told the visitors, "Aapke log dewaar ke peechhe hain (Your people are behind the walls)." Tambay, 53, persists even today as she does not consider any effort futile. "If my husband is there, someone has to work for his release and I would like that to be me. If our Government doesn't believe the evidence we have given them, then disprove it and convince us. Or ask the Pakistani Government to be honest and say that they (the PoWs) were there and it has killed them."
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.
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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