Move UN court to free PoWs: HC

Pronouncing the order on Friday,a division bench comprising acting Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya and Justice J B Pardiwala came down heavily on the Union government for not making “sincere efforts” for the release of the PoWs and said Pakistan has not complied with the 1972 Simla Agreement. The confinement of the 54 PoWs is nothing but violation of their human rights,the court said.

The order came on a petition moved in 1999 by late Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora,the 1971 war hero before whom Pakistan’s General A K Niyazi surrendered,marking the end of the war and birth of Bangladesh.

Along with Lt Gen Aurora,relatives of some of the 54 PoWs were also petitioners in the matter,demanding a direction to the Union government to seek immediate release of the PoWs from the Pakistani jails. They had also demanded that the PoWs be treated as soldiers on duty and their families in India be given the arrears and adequate compensation.

Advocate Kishor Paul,who represented the petitioners,said the issue first came to light in 1998 following a news report about these Indian PoWs in Pakistani jails. The matter came to the notice of Lt Gen Aurora,who decided to be the petitioner in the matter.

According to Paul,there have been 111 hearings in the matter. “During the hearings,we produced ample evidence to show the presence of at least 54 PoWs in Pakistani jails…. We produced statements of the Union government in Parliament along with the two letters written by Indira Gandhi in this regard,” Paul said.

He said,“The court observed that the Centre had made no sincere efforts to get the PoWs released even after the knowledge that they were there in Pakistani jails.”

Two of the 54 PoWs are from Gujarat. They have been identified as Captain Kalyansingh Rathod and Pilot N Shankar from Sabarkantha and Vadodara,respectively.

After the Simla Agreement,India had released around 93,000 Pakistani soldiers while Pakistan had released 624 Indian soldiers.

HC quotes from book on Bhutto

The Gujarat High Court relied on a spine-chilling account of former Pakistan president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s days in prison before his execution while issuing orders to the Centre to move the International Court of Justice to release 54 Indian PoWs from Pakistan jails. A division bench reproduced the account from a book,Bhutto:Trial and Execution,by BBC correspondent Victoria Schofiled. Although the Pakistan authorities have been denying presence of any Indian PoW,the book recounts how Bhutto was haunted by shrieks and cries of the Indian PoWs in the adjoining cells. The judgment produced ‘facts’ in the book while concluding that till 1980 when Bhutto was kept inside the Kot-Lakhpat jail in Pakistan,the Indian PoWs were very much there.