National

“Take up prisoners’ issue with Delhi”

ISLAMABAD: Nasir Sultan, the 15-year-old Shahrukh Khan fan who crossed into India illegally in August to meet his Bollywood hero, says all it took for him to sneak across the fenced border between the two countries was to crawl through a gap in the wires.

Unwilling to believe that he could have done it so simply, the Border Security Force guards who caught him on the Indian side took him to the place where he had crossed over, and short of asking him do it all over again, asked him to show the exact gap in the wire fencing through which he crawled in.

Nasir, who is now back home with his family in Dir in the North-Western Frontier Province after the Indian government withdrew charges against him and ordered his release from prison, said he crossed the border within two days of leaving home on August 16.

Instead of going to school on that day, he took a bus to Peshawar and from there, another bus for the five-hour journey to Lahore.

“At the Lahore bus station, I asked a rickshaw-wallah how to reach the border, and he pointed to a bus that was going to Kasur [south of Lahore] and said take that,” Nasir told The Hindu.

At Kasur, Nasir asked a rickshaw to take him to the border. “The rickshaw-wallah took me to a desolate spot and pointed out in the direction from where I could cross over. As I was headed there, I ran into a policeman who told me to get lost. He asked me what I was doing there, and I replied that I was just looking. He warned me that it was a very dangerous place and that I should leave immediately,” Nasir recalled.

“I waited out of his sight and when he walked away somewhere, I ran towards the border. There were gaps between the wires in the fence and because I’m very thin, I could easily squeeze my body through,” the teenager said.

Within minutes, said Nasir, he was caught by Indian guards. “They just did not believe that I had crawled through the fence. They kept saying I must have swum through the canal [taking water from India into Pakistan]. Finally, a senior officer came and they all took me to the exact place, and I had to show them the gap through which I had come in,” he said.

His footprints were still fresh on the mud, and the BSF guards were finally convinced, said Nasir. They transferred him to a local Ferozepur police station, and from there to the Faridkot prison. Two months later, during his second court hearing, the boy asked the judge for permission to call his family in Pakistan. The judge granted the permission, and the phone call paved the way for his quick release.

Nasir is perhaps the first in the India-Pakistan prisoner saga to have been released so quickly after his arrest. He was allowed to go back four months after he was caught, and exactly a month after it became known that he was in an Indian prison.

Sultan Zareen, the boy’s father, said he was thankful to the media both in Pakistan and in India for campaigning for the boy’s release, and to two Pakistani NGOs — the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child which first took up Nasir’s case, and later the Ansar Burney Trust for pushing it vigorously with Indian authorities.

Human rights activists in Pakistan are hoping that New Delhi will also take immediate steps to send home another Pakistani, a well-known Karachi doctor who was named in a murder case in Ajmer 17 years ago and reportedly cannot leave as the trial is still continuing. The doctor, who is in his 70s, is on bail but his passport has been impounded and he has been ordered to remain in Hatundi village near Ajmer.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has written to Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi asking him to take up Dr. S.M.K. Chishti’s case during his visit to India this week. The HRCP also wants him to take up the case of Najma Parveen, who was separated from her children and sent back to Pakistan in 2006. The children live with relatives in Meerut while her husband Shahid continues in a Jaipur prison.

The Pakistan Minister is to arrive in New Delhi on Wednesday. He is scheduled to fly to Chandigarh to address a meeting of a farmers’ association that has played an active role in fostering ties between the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs.

During his visit, he will also meet External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

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