On the evening of Sept. 30 when an Indian soldier, Chandu Babulal Chouhan, was taken prisoner by Pakistan, a day after the Indian Army carried out surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the Line of Control between the two countries, Maryland-based Thakor G. Patel, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy, felt deeply troubled.
Not that Patel knows Chouhan, but he immediately empathized with him, worrying about his plight, and thinking if he would have the same fate as Capt. Kamal Bakshi, who was Patel’s classmate in Sherwood College in Nainiital way back in 1962.
More than 40 years ago Bakshi is believed to have been captured by the Pakistani Army, in December 1971 in Chamb in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir during the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, along with 53 other Indian Prisoners of War. Since then, there has been no news of either Bakshi, or the fellow PoWs.
There had been many official inquiries about the issue of missing PoWs by the Indian government, which has been widely reported in the Indian media. But the Indian government’s requests to successive rulers in Pakistan have been met with cold responses. Unofficial efforts to find out about them by non-governmental organization like the human rights bodies have also proved futile. About a year ago, the Supreme Court of India asked the government in response to three petitions on the issue about the status of the 54 prisoners of war. To pointed question by the court ‘are they still alive’, then Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar said, ‘We don’t know because Pakistan has been denying their presence in their country.”
At his Fairfax, Va., home last month Patel and his wife, also a former U.S. Navy pediatrician, deliberated on this issue as they have done innumerable times in the last four years since Patel along with his wife Usha, went to Nainital to attend the 50th anniversary of 1962 batch of Sherwood College students’ reunion. That is where, for the first time since leaving Sherwood, Patel and some of his friends, many of whom served in the Indian Army, came to know about Bakshi’s plight.
That visit and the knowledge that he is missing or presumed dead by authorities goaded Patel and some of the friends from Sherwood College now settled in the U.S. and across the globe, including Australia to double the efforts to locate their “sharp and smart” friend, dead or alive.
And as part of that effort, Patel and his friends, including Puspinder Singh, a retired colonel in the Indian Army who also lives now in Falls Church, Virginia, are seeking to bring the issue to the notice of the India Caucus in the U.S. Congress to put pressure on Islamabad to release the Indian PoWs, or at least part with information about their status.
“After so many decades, no one really knows for certain as to what happened to these hapless people, most of them, if alive, would be in their 70s, but whatever has happened to them, their friends and families have every right to know. They need closure on the issue,” Patel told this correspondent in an interview.
Bakshi’s father, a retired colonel from the Indian Army died a couple of years ago, waiting in vain for any news of his son as did his mother recently. The situation of friends and families of many others is no different.
But the problem is that the Pakistani government has repeatedly stonewalled any inquiry into the issue. “Their constant refrain has been: We do not have any Indian PoW in Pakistani jails,” Patel said.
What intrigues Patel and his friends is the fact that the names of Bakshi and the other 53 PoWs never figured in the Pakistani or Indian lists of people killed in the battle, nor any of their bodies were returned by Pakistan. “These people certainly could not have vanished into thin air, after all!” Patel said. “So, the question is where did these people go?”
At a recent meeting of a group of Hindu Republicans supporting Donald Trump in his presidential campaign, in Washington D.C, Patel and his friends like Puspinder Singh circulated among the participants a draft letter to the India Caucus, highlighting the PoW issue. Most people at that meeting signed that letter and agreed with the initiators that only the U.S. Congress could help bring a closure to the issue.
Both Patel and Singh agreed that Pakistan has violated the Geneva Convention by not returning the prisoners, or returning their bodies in case they were killed. What gives them, as well as Brian McMahon, another batch mate of Bakshi, who lives in Sydney Australia now, the hope that their friend is still alive and probably languishing in some obscure prison in Pakistan is occasional reports of sighting of Bakshi and other unidentified Indian prisoners in Pakistan by visitors from India from time to time.
“Pakistan has been successful in hoodwinking Indian authorities by telling them they do not hold any prisoner and even agreeing to open the jails to Indian authorities to go and check for any Indian prisoner, but could easily be done by them – any some countries actually do – is to move the prisoners in question to some obscure, distant jails temporarily and then brag before the world that no Indian was found in their custody,” Singh told this correspondent.
His argument gains credence from the fact that noted Pakistani rights activist Ansar Burney said in an interview with Press Trust of India that he had traced an Indian prisoner of war captured during the 1971 war. In an interview with NDTV in August 2012, yet another prominent Pakistani rights lawyer said that there are many Indian PoWs in Pakistani jails.
To a question if the U.S. Congressmen would agree at all to take up the issues given that it might have faded from public memory, if not from the memory of the family members of the PoWs, and would serve any practical purpose even if they do, Patel and Singh feel what they and surviving family members want is a closure.
“If anyone can help put pressure on Islamabad at this stage to come out with the facts hidden in their closets relating to the PoWs in question, it is only the Congress of the United States, and nobody else,” Singh said.
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