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Though her relatives were in Rajasthan, she decided to bring up her three-month-old son here, certain that her husband would return any day to Agra, his last posting. Now the proposed visit of General Musharraf to Agra has filled her and her 30-year-old son Vipul with both hope and despair.
Suman Purohit had been married to Flight Lieutenant Manohar Purohit for just one-and-a-half years before war separated them. “I stayed on in this alien town hoping my husband would return some day and look for me in the town where his last posting was,” she says.
Now, Suman and her son Vipul are calling a press conference in –Agra a day before the General arrives to make an appeal that Pakistan free the the 54 defence personnel said to be lodged in Pakistani jails.
Speaking to The Indian Express, 53-year-old Purohit said every effort must be made to make Musharraf talk about the release of the prisoners. “India and Pakistan are talking of a no-war pact and of peace and a thousand other things. But the two countries must first talk of the release of the 54 jailed defence personnel,” she said.
“Other countries take up the cause of their soldiers first. But we play it down. Release of its personnel is always an insignificant line in India’s agenda list. We hope our effort would make this the main issue,” she added.
Though Pakistan has never acknowledged that it has any Indian than prisoners of war, Suman hopes that General Musharraf will take a different stand. “He had assured a delegation of ex-servicemen in February this year that he would re-examine the matter of prisoners of wars,” says Suman.
Her son Vipul, himself the father of a two-year-old son, runs a gas agency which was donated to his mother by an Unidentified benefactor some years ago. Vipul says his father’s loss struck him most when his own son was three months old and the Kargil war broke out. “The coincidence still makes me shudder,” he said.
According, to Suman, the government
has always insisted that raising a hue and cry might harm the interests
of the prisoners. “But we have seen that caution has not helped the prisoners
‘release either,” she pointed out. The mother and son say it’s better to
tell the whole world about the prisoners rather than keep quiet about’
it.
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