Mr Modi's Selective Outrage

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi may be blowing hot and cold over Sarabjit Singh’s gruesome death in a Pakistani jail but his own government has done precious little for an Ahmedabad based family whose brother has been languishing in the same Kot Lakhpat jail for almost 20 years now.

Dilip Yadav and his family have run from pillar to post.  “We have touched every conceivable pillar and beseeched every post holder from the Chief Minister to the Prime Minister and President for our brother, Kuldeep Kumar, who has been branded an Indian spy and has been in the same jail as Sarabjit. This country could not save Sarabjit but at least save Kuldeep before he too meets the same fate”, says an upset Dilip, adding: “We have been trying to meet the Chief Minister, but that is also not working out. No one is talking to us.”

Yadav’s family has been settled in Ahmedabad since 1972. Rekha, Kuldeep’s sister says that her brother who was practicing as an advocate would frequently go to Delhi and remain out for months at a stretch. In 1989, he went out and has never returned ever since. The family kept searching for him all over for almost five years before it got information that he was in Kot Lakhpat jail in Pakistan on charges of spying for India. ”I gave up my job with a para military organization to take up cudgels on behalf of my brother for I knew it would be a long, endless fight for justice against limitless odds,” points out Dilip. Kuldeep had also once written to say that he was in a Pakistani jail.

The family points out that there is no way of knowing about the wellbeing of Kuldeep except by word of mouth. ”We expectantly wait for some prisoner to be released to get some information about the well being of our brother,” says Rekha.

According to information trickling in to the family, Kuldeep is reported to have been sentenced to 25 years imprisonment on charges of espionage of which he has spent 19 years languishing in prison. Arrested on June 22,1994, Kuldeep was reportedly put through 30 months of excruciating torture and thereafter sentenced to a quarter century in jail by a military court on 12 December 1996. 

In 2007, Kuldeep’s mother Mayadevi sought judicial intervention at the high court level through a writ petition seeking the central government’s intervention for his release. The centre informed the court that it had moved Pakistan government through its high commissioner representing that the Pakistani army had kidnapped Kuldeep. By an interim order of the High Court , the centre had paid a sum of Rs 5 lakhs as assistance to the family .

The family is now apprehensive because there has been no letter or information of their brother’s wellbeing for the last three years. Kuldeep’s father passed away in 1999 waiting for his son’s return and his mother ten years later. The remaining members of the Yadav family now wait with bated breath. “There is too much of bad blood accumulating on both sides of the border. We fervently hope that we get to see our brother alive”, the family says