Home at last!

Dr Khalil Chishty, a prominent virologist who retired as head of the Karachi University's Department of Microbiology, finally returned home after 20 years of trial and imprisonment in India as a tired, infirm 80-year-old man, who couldn't walk unaided. His personal story is part of the bigger story of hostility that for long has characterised Pak-India relations; the glacial pace at which the judicial system moves in the two South Asian countries; and of good men on both sides of the border, who can rise above all prejudices. Misfortune fell upon the Pakistani scientist when he went to see his ailing mother at Ajmer in the Indian state of Rajasthan.
In a classic case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, during his stay a fight broke out between his nephews and some other relatives over a property dispute, leading to the death of one person due to a gunshot. The other party named him, along with three others in the murder case, which took 19 long years for the sessions' court to decide, handing him life imprisonment last January. All four went into appeal against the lower court judgement in the Rajasthan High Court, which let the other accused go free on bail, but threw him in prison making the appalling observation that "no leniency" could be shown to a Pakistani national.
Creditably for him, later in June, the Indian Supreme Court justice Markandeya Katju intervened in his personal capacity, requesting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to release Dr Chishty on humanitarian grounds. In the meantime, relations between the two countries, frozen following the Mumbai attacks, started warming up. And while visiting India last month President Asif Ali Zardari, too, took up the matter of Dr Chishty's release with his host, Dr Manmohan Singh, paving the way for the release on bail and visit to Pakistan during the pendency of his appeal in the Indian apex court. Famous Indian filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt came forward to furnish half a million rupee bail bond on behalf of the Pakistani prisoner.
The case highlights the individual sufferings of the two countries' nationals on account of an uneasy, at times confrontational, Pak-India relationship. There are many others languishing in both countries' jails. It is pertinent to recall here that before Dr Chishty's return, Pakistan had released, on the appeal of two Indian Supreme Court judges, one Gopal Dass who spent 27 years in a Sialkot jail after he was arrested by the Rangers for crossing the border and sentenced by a military court to life imprisonment on spying charges. According to a press report, 32 Indian nationals who have completed their prison term, are still rotting in Pakistan prisons for lack of interest by the Indian government. The same is happening on the other side. At least 761 Pakistanis - 698 of them civilians, 45 fishermen, and 18 defence personnel - are incarcerated in Indian jails. This is a gross violation of human rights that must come to a stop. The two countries have been periodically releasing, as goodwill gesture, fishermen, but there ought to be a regular mechanism for allowing all such people proper and timely access to justice.