It is said of women, not always correctly, that they
seldom, if ever, say what they mean, and seldom
mean what they say. That is true at least of Pakistan
which clearly cannot tell between Surjeet and Sarabjit.
It first said that Sarabjit Singh, sentenced to death for
‘terrorism’, had been granted commutation of the sentence.
The report understandably led to jubilation in India because
there had never been a shred of evidence of his guilt. But
within five hours, a spokesman of the beleaguered President
of Pakistan, who was believed to have commuted the sentence,
clarified that it was not Sarabjit Singh but the much
older Surjeet Singh whom the government had decided to
release. International focus had all along been on Sarabjit
Singh because his family members back home had appealed
to everybody who was somebody in the quicksilver Pakistani
dispensation to commute the sentence, so much so
that nobody in India remembered who Surjeet Singh was
or for what he had been detained in Pakistan. Even so, the
release of Surjeet Singh must be welcomed in the hope that
he will be freed before the Pakistan government comes out
with another ‘clarification’ that it was not he but another Indian
who was going to be freed!
A story, true or apocryphal, had done the rounds in Christendom
some decades ago, and it may have come to mind
at least in the West after the Pakistan government’s “inability”
to decide who it was going to free. Before being ordained
priest an aspirant had, according to the story, been
asked to name one Christian saint. The young man did not
pause for a second before naming “Paul”. In the normal
course, that should have been enough to commend him to
ordination, but the too-clever-by-half youth added spontaneously:
“His other name was Saul”! But it is hard to believe
that the Pakistan government is so callow as to mix up
names of detainees, especially because Pakistanis come
from the same stock as Indians. It is clear that it developed
cold feet after right-wing Islamist groups questioned the wisdom
of its releasing Sarabjit Singh except in exchange for
the Mumbai terrorist attack operative Ajmal Kasab cooling
his heels in a Mumbai jail; probably they too had not heard
of Surjeet Singh, much less about why he was in jail.
While the release of every Indian in Pakistani prison, no
matter how he landed there, is welcome, even the proclaimed
release of Surjeet Singh raises many questions.
First and foremost among them is why he is being released
in 2012 when his prison term ended in 2004. Second, how
does the case of Sarabjit Singh compare with that of
Kasab? If Sarabjit Singh, arrested and convicted in 1991
for alleged terror attacks in Faisalabad and Lahore, had
been guilty of all the crimes laid at his door, why did the
Pakistan government not reveal details? In the case of
Kasab, on the other hand, the entire world counted the
bodies of the 166 innocent persons mowed down by him
and fellow-terrorists. Now that Abu Jundal, deported from
Saudi Arabia, has exposed Pakistan’s involvement in the
Mumbai outrage, Zaradari and Co are trying to deflect international
attention from those revelations by first naming
one Indian and then picking on another as lined up for release.
But perhaps no Indian had expected anything different
from Pakistan!
Courtesy : The Hans India
No comments:
Post a Comment