Lahore Namah!

As things look up between India and Pakistan again, the Chandigarh and Lahore  press clubs resume a series of annual media conferences

Most Indian journalists travelling to Lahore would be interested in the fate and current state of Sarabjit Singh from Tarn Taran who is on death row there and lodged in Kot Lakhpat Jail. While India claims Sarabjit is a poor villager from Bikhiwind in Punjab who strayed into Pakistan accidentally, a Pakistan court convicted him for bomb blasts and awarded him a death sentence. Despite his mercy petition being rejected, Sarabjit’s hanging has been deferred a few times. Human rights activists in Pakistan say that public opinion is slowly tilting towards releasing him. On the third day of our visit, an update on Sarabjit walked up to our hotel—The Ambassador in Lahore—in the form of his lawyer, Awais Sheikh.

Now, Sheikh is an interesting man. His business card says he is a ‘Peace Ambassador’. Ask the local legal fraternity, and they will tell you that they had heard of Sheikh only as a tax lawyer before he took up Sarabjit’s case. But the case has made him famous. He is busy writing a book, Sarabjit: A Case of Mistaken Identity, his second on Indo-Pak relations; the first one, Samjhauta Express, has been translated into many languages, he tells us. Sheikh has filed several petitions in court. One says Sarabjit’s solitary confinement has led to clinical depression and various other ailments. In another, he has sought permission to teach Sarabjit yoga and meditation. “So that he can have a more positive outlook towards life,” he explains. “It is because of the confrontation between the two sides that such cases are blown out of proportion,” he says, adding that the Pakistan government had a good mind to release Sarabjit on 14 August this year: “The Prime Minister was to announce his release on Independence Day. I was asked to be prepared for it, but then they suddenly changed their mind.”

“Take everything he says with a pinch of salt,” a criminal lawyer practising at the Lahore High Court warns us later. To verify Sheikh’s claim, I ask the Law Minister of Punjab Province Rana Sanaullah, host of a dinner for the Indian delegation, whether the government plans to release Sarabjit. “Public opinion is building in that direction,” he replies. The government, in its reply to the court on a petition filed by Sheikh, has said there was no move to pardon Sarabjit. So what exactly will Sarabjit’s fate be? The answer depends on who you ask and where.

From the time we crossed over into Pakistan territory, we felt, well, ‘secured’. Our two mini buses, with us members of the Chandigarh Press Club and some of our hosts aboard, were part of a convoy that sped along routes marked in advance through the streets of Lahore. A motorbike riding cop of the Lahore Traffic Police led the way, with a sarkari siren blaring and beacons flashing, clearing the traffic. A stationwagon full of Elite commandos of the Punjab Police was our pilot vehicle, and another one our escort. All our journeys were traffic-signal free, on strict orders from the interior ministry, we were told. Regular visitors were flushed out of even crowded touristy spots like the Shalimar Garden and Lahore Fort for our visits, which became pretty boring because it was hard to find Lahoriyas who were not designated to talk to us. “If you want to meet someone, call them here to the hotel rather than try and go out to meet them,” our team leader was told by our hosts. It was never specified on whose behalf the hosts spoke, but it wasn’t hidden either. The establishment, we were told, wanted the trip to be a success (and an incident-free one), yet no agency wanted to take the blame for any mishap or attack. Specific intelligence inputs suggested a ‘heightened security threat’. Big words, those. But simply put, our movement was completely restricted and we were nearly quarantined.

So the first icebreakers we had were with policemen, other than with the journalists who were hosting us. On the very first evening of our visit, as I stood outside the shrine of Mian Mir waiting for others in the group to return, a young, talkative, police officer—an assistant sub-inspector—in his early twenties approached me. The first usual questions, which had been asked of most of us delegates who were not Sikh several times over by now, were in Urdu. Are you Indian? And, do you speak Punjabi? With a ‘yes’ on both counts, the third question was sure to be in Punjabi. Is there any difference between the two Punjabs? They are more similar than I thought, I told the uniformed policeman. He was thrilled that an Indian thought his Punjab was quite like the one he had seen across the border. I told him the culture and people of Amritsar were more like Lahore’s than Chandigarh’s. That thrilled him even further. He shared with me the news that he would soon be promoted and posted as an in-charge of a police station. Then he took out a visiting card from his pocket—someone else’s card—and wrote his name, rank and phone number behind it and handed it over to me. And just as I was giving him my number, a constable told him that “Janaab” wanted to see him.

Janaab was a young, shabbily dressed-in-civvies 20-something slunk in a chair next to the uniformed inspector. As I pretended to look around, I could see him talking down to the young officer. The crestfallen ASI came back and slid past me muttering something about rushing to oversee security elsewhere. After a while, I asked another policeman, pointing at the shabbily dressed man, casually enquiring about him. “He is from the special branch,” the policeman said with some degree of reverence. I told him I thought the man was a journalist. “Ji ji (yes, yes), he is also a journalist,” the policeman answered. It was rather dark out there, I am not sure if he blinked while saying it.

Sikhs in our delegation received the warmest welcome in Lahore. Punjabis on that side of the Radcliffe line were strangely sure that the turbaned visitors were all from Punjab. Some were even surprised that Sikhs live in all parts of India. Then, at the Gurudwara Dera Sahib in Lahore, we met some Sikhs from Pakistan. The historic shrine is being maintained rather well. In the late 1990s, the government even added 50 rooms for visitors. One such room is allotted by the shrine’s management to Rawinder Singh, a 22-year-old engineering undergraduate from Nankana Sahib who studies in Lahore. Warinder, a third-year student of petrogas engineering, hopes to be the first Sikh engineer in Lahore. The first Sikh graduated here in 1998, more than half a century after independence. The Pakistan government evidently takes better care of Sikh shrines than of Sikhs themselves.

About The Author

Jatin Gandhi

Jatin Gandhi has covered politics and policy for over a decade now for print, TV and the web. He is Deputy Political Editor at Open.