Sarabjit Singh
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Contents |
A profile
Sarabjit was just 28 when he strayed into Pak. 23 years later, he came back in a coffin
From the archives of The Times of India
May 03, 2013
A timeline:
Born | Mar 19, 1962 Studied in Government Sr Sec School, Bhikhiwind -From poor family, worked on farms, often in fields close to Indo-Pak border
-Was a good mechanic
-Played kabaddi
-Married Sukhpreet Kaur in 1984 Two daughters Swapandeep and Poonam
Aug 1990 | Arrested near Kasur border. Charged with illegally crossing into Pak. Later charged with involvement in 4 blasts in Lahore and Faisalabad that killed 14 Oct 1991 | Convicted of spying, carrying out the blasts. Sentenced to death
Aug 23, 2005 | Pak supreme court upholds death. Over 5,000 rally in protest in Amritsar, demand clemency
Aug 29, 2005 | Alliance of militant groups, United Jihad Council, reportedly tells Pak govt to talk to India about Afzal Guru in exchange for Sarabjit’s pardon
Aug 30, 2005 | India gets consular access. Two diplomats meet Sarabjit in Kot Lakhpat jail outside Lahore. Sarabjit’s wife and daughters hand over letter seeking Presidential pardon to two Pakistan National Assembly members in Amritsar
Sep 2005 | Pak supreme court rejects mercy plea
Mar 2008 | Pak PM Pervez Musharraf turns down mercy plea
Mar 16, 2008 | Urdu newspaper Daily Express reports he will be hanged on April 1. Pak govt delays execution after appeals from family and Indian government
April 2008 | Family meets him in jail. Pak puts off hanging for 21 days. Death indefinitely postponed
Dec 2009 | International campaign launched by UK-based lawyer Jas Uppal for Sarabjit’s release
May 2012 | Sarabjit files fifth mercy plea
Jun 2012 | Media reports say Pak law ministry has asked interior ministry to free Sarabjit as he had served his sentence. A few hours later, Pak govt clarifies the prisoner to be released was Surjit Singh, 72, from Phiddey village in Ferozepur in Punjab
Apr 26, 2013 | Savage assault on Sarabjit with bricks inside jail by inmates; admitted to Lahore’s Jinnah hospital. His family calls for his transfer to India for treatment. Pak refuses
Apr 28, 2013 | Wife, daughters and sister see him in hospital
May 2 | Sarabjit declared dead at 1 am
Won kabaddi game, but lost his life
From the archives of The Times of India
May 03, 2013
On August 8, 1990, the bets were high for a group of 16 enthusiastic men playing their routine kabbadi match in the Bhikhiwind village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran close to the Indo-Pak border. Sarabjit, then 28, scored 13 points that day for his team. Overjoyed, they celebrated over drinks in the evening. “Every evening, each win at the kabbadi match would be celebrated with collective joy,” recalled Bitta Singh, Sarabjit’s now 42-year-old nephew. But matters turned grim soon after. An inebriated Sarabjit crossed over to Pakistan territory across the unfenced border in the Khem Karan sector. It was the last time Bhikiwind residents saw him.
The masterchef of Kot Lakhpat
Omer Farooq Khan
From the archives of The Times of India
May 03, 2013
Lahore: Sarabjit Singh, who died in Jinnah hospital a week after a deadly assault by fellow convicts, spent more than two decades in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat prison. Over time, he grew friendly with many of the inmates. Some of them swore by his cooking skills. He could make a mean dish of handi chicken. Sarabjit was in his late 20s when brought to Kot Lakhpat, a prison plagued by corruption and inefficiency that dealt with more than 6,000 prisoners when it had space for just 1,800. In prison, Sarabjit met hardcore criminals, prisoners of high-social status and petty goons from poor backgrounds, all packed into the Cclass confinement that had virtually no amenities. Sarabjit spent long years in Cclass until he was shifted to B-class around six years ago. The condition of B-class prisoners is a shade better as two to three inmates are housed in each cell that had its own bathroom, though in poor shape. A high-profile prisoner or one who faces threat from other inmates can be kept alone in a separate cell. According to jail officials, Sarabjit was given a separate B-class cell for security reasons and got a C-class prisoner named Akram as ‘helper’ (usually called a mushaqatti in jail jargon), a provision available to all B-class inmates in Pakistan’s jails. C-class prisoners normally prefer to serve prisoners in B-class, hoping for reprieve from their own class’s bland food. According to Akram, Sarabjit was a chain smoker, Gold Flake his favourite brand. “He was jolly but also sensitive and emotional. You just had to say a few words against India to make him angry. He remained a die-hard Indian nationalist until his last day,” a jail source said, quoting Akram. Akram, also tasked with cooking food for another, some say rich, Bclass prisoner was Sarabjit’s friend. According to prison sources, Akram and Sarabjit got along well and shared meals. They also say the unlettered Sarabjit would ask Akram to write to top government and jail authorities about his fear that he would be poisoned. “I cannot confirm whether or not Akram wrote the letters but he was always very helpful,” sources added. Another fellow inmate some eight years ago told TOI that Sarabjit, then a C-class prisoner, was given to him as chef. “An excellent cook, chicken handi was his special dish. He had a good sense of humour and always shared Punjabi jokes. I used to call him “sardarji”, the ex-prisoner had said then. Sarabjit’s main problem was financial. Being a chain-smoker, he always had difficulty buying cigarettes. His threat, in jest, was always: “Paaji, get a packet of cigarettes for me or I’ll not let you eat good food.” Pakistani authorities insist Sarabjit Singh, murdered on April 26, was a saboteur. He was sentenced to death in 1991 for planting explosives in a passenger bus and a cinema theatre in Lahore and Faisalabad which killed 10 people and left more than 66 injured. He was arrested in August 1990 with a fake Pakistani identity card and confessed to planting those bombs at the behest of India's Research & Analysis Wing (RAW). Suraj Singh, a Delhi-based lawyer who fought for Sarabjit's release, calls the case against him "a bunch of baloney" and says he was mistaken for someone named Manjeet Singh, the real saboteur.
What emerges from the accounts of these former spies is that Indian intelligence agencies employed two types of operatives: Spies and saboteurs. Sawhney and Khadotra do not publicly admit it but some among them may have worked as part of a shadowy cell within RAW called the Counter Intelligence Team-X. CIT-X, as it was called, was set up in the late 1960s for operations inside Pakistan. It was headed by an additional secretary but kept away from RAW's Pakistan desk. The 'X men' reported directly to the agency's chief even as they infiltrated trained saboteurs across the border into Pakistani cities to plant explosives. "Low-grade bombs, no plastic explosives," says a former RAW official, "just to raise the cost of Pakistan's covert war against India."
CIT-X was revived by Indira Gandhi and continued later by Rajiv Gandhi in the early 1980s when Pakistan fanned the flames of Khalistani insurgency in Punjab. X operatives were used in retaliatory strikes inside Pakistan.
The existence of this secret branch was first revealed in former RAW official B. Raman's 2007 book The Kaoboys of R&AW. Raman credits the three-year tenure of A.K. Verma, a suave risk-taking chief, for 'covert action', for reviving RAW. "It was Verma who gave the RAW the strong teeth which it was missing since 1977, and made it bite again," Raman writes.
CIT-X was dismantled in 1997 by then prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral who felt covert action violated his 'Gujral doctrine' of peaceful resolution of disputes in South Asia. Since then, intelligence agencies say they use field agents only for espionage in 'humint' or human intelligence operations. Despite the proliferation of technical intelligence gathering methods like spy satellites, there has simply been no substitute for such agents on the ground, "whether for physically verifying intelligence on troop movements or for collecting soil samples to see whether battle tanks can move along a particular stretch", says a senior intelligence official.
Others like Sarabjit Singh
Hundreds of youngsters were recruited through safe houses strung along border towns by recruiting agents from RAW who operated using fake names. The rented safe houses were frequently changed. There were entire villages that worked in intelligence-gathering, including one named Dadwan in Punjab's Gurdaspur district.
Spies were trained for more than a year in spycraft: Mastering Urdu, reading maps and visually measuring distances. Recruits were given fake names, identities and Pakistani id cards. Agents who stayed for long underwent circumcision. Two Indian spies pretending to be Pakistanis were caught outside a Lahore cantonment in 1988 because they were not circumcised. They were moved to a local hospital after being injured in an auto-rickshaw accident inside Lahore Cantonment. Spies were taught Urdu and how to say their daily Islamic prayers to blend into the crowd. Crossing the border, say former spies like Balwan Singh, was child's play in the absence of a fence. All one needed was bravado and a salwar-kameez.
The recruits knew the consequences of capture: Torture, interrogation and solitary confinement. But they may not have been told of the cruel twist if they were released: A lifetime of painful anonymity and broken lives spent on the impoverished fringes of their own soil.
Swarn Lal Khadotra
From the archives of The Times of India
Asit Jolly and Sandeep Unnithan
Thirty minutes past midnight on a moonless September night in 1986, a platoon strength of Border Security Force (BSF) troopers peered through the darkness straining for any signs of activity across the international border from Khowra, a bop (border observation post) in the Samba sector. It was the perfect night-impenetrable darkness and the enemy lulled into a deceptive sense of security by deliberate inactivity along the India-Pakistan frontier.
Sarabjit Singh arrested by Pakistan's Military Intelligence Battalion in Kasur district in August 1990. Accused of planting explosives in Lahore and Faisalabad on August 30,1990, which killed 10 people and injured 66. He was entenced to death by a Pakistani court in October 1991 and murdered by fellow inmates at Kot Lakhpat prison, Lahore, on April 26.
One man quietly scurried across the then vaguely demarcated 'zero line', taking advantage of the profuse sarkanda (elephant grass). Minutes later, he was 'in' and briskly heading for Lahore.
That was how Swarn Lal Khadotra, now 50, crossed over on 61 espionage missions to spy on Pakistani military installations across the border. He was captured in August 1992 and spent the next 15 years enduring hellish torture in a Pakistani prison before being released in 2006.
The Punjab government gave a state funeral to Sarabjit Singh who was murdered in a Pakistani prison. This unprecedented recognition to an alleged former spy, now hailed as a martyr and national hero, has revived hope among others like Khadotra. Once the epitome of what intelligence agencies call a burned spy, discarded by handlers and disowned by governments, they see a flicker of hope in Sarabjit's sad tale.
Khadotra walked into a RAW safe house in Samba to volunteer for exactly such a perilous vocation. "I always wanted to be a spy," he says. He was weary of the drudgery of his job as a sheet metal worker at a box factory in Jammu's Gangiani industrial estate and his fantasies were fuelled by countless two-penny spy thrillers in which 'Colonel Vinod' was invariably the good guy racing against time to save his country from the evil machinations of the villain 'Captain Hamid'.
K.L.Bali
From the archives of The Times of India
As a former BSF sepoy,he was enlisted as a RAW agent in 1968 and sent on espionage missions to Myanmar,Pakistan and Bangladesh. Arrested in June 1975, he was released in 1989 after spending 14 years in Pakistani prisons.
Vinod Sawhney
From the archives of The Times of India
"Were we not launched as part of a secret war?" asks Vinod Sawhney, 60, deeply offended by the Government's refusal to acknowledge them. "To kya hum Lahore aur Islamabad mein mungphali bechne gaye the? (So did we go to Lahore and Islamabad to sell peanuts)?" asks the former spy, who runs the Ex-Sleuths Association in Jammu's Bakshi Nagar.
Sawhney spent 11 years in a prison. The association battles to rehabilitate a legion of former spies, once key in a secret war against Pakistan. Set up in 1992, it has 60 members on its rolls. Over the years, Sawhney, the hawk-nosed former spy, has painstakingly tracked down hundreds of burned agents like him scattered across the border districts of three states, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan-their bodies scarred from being strung to ceiling hooks in prisons, knees and ankles hammered with cobbler's nails, genitals numbed by electric shocks. For others like Sawhney, the recruitment pitch was leavened with appeals to patriotism and financial rewards. Sawhney, then a taxi driver in Jammu, recalls meeting a Kashmiri man who introduced himself only as 'Dhar' in August 1977. "Would you like to earn better money while serving your country?" Dhar asked. Sawhney leapt at the offer of a secure government job. He was taken to a BSF camp in Jammu's Gandhi Nagar locality and later asked to sign several forms before he was literally pushed across the international border at Suchetgarh in the Ranjit Singh Pora Sector in the company of an unnamed 'guide'. An obvious double agent, the guide betrayed him and led him straight into the waiting arms of the Pakistan Rangers while crossing back five days later on August 23, 1977.
Raj Kumar
Son of a farmer in RS Pora,J&K,he was recruited by RAW/Military Intelligence in the mid-60s.Arrested in 1974. He was emotionally unstable because of torture over 14 years in Pakistani jails. Released and repatriated in 1988.
Ram Raj
A worker at a local flour mill in Budhi, a village dotted with half-built brick houses in Kathua district, was hired in 1988 as a 'RAW regular' for Rs.6,500 a month. For 16 years he staked out Pakistan army cantonments in Gujranwala, Jhelum, Wazirabad and Khadiyan returning from every mission with secret documents: Phone directories, copies of signals from army exercises, photographs of newly acquired military vehicles and hardware and troop movements. An army doctor in Jammu, he remembers, circumcised him before he was infiltrated for intelligence-gathering inside Pakistan. He was arrested by ISI at a hotel in Gujranwala in September 2004 Spies like Ram Raj were recruited by RAW talent spotters who fanned through border villages looking for physically fit, educated, unemployed youth willing to undertake risky missions. These low-level operatives were seen as disposable assets: To be used for missions considered too risky for serving intelligence officials.
