‘Jayain tau jayain kahan’

Idrees, stranded for 13 years in an Indian jail has been disowned by his family and by Pakistan.

The title of this editorial, lyrics from a classical Indian song by Talat Mahmood, seems appropriate for Mr Muhammad Idrees, a man who is disowned by both, his home country, India and his country of nationality, Pakistan. Mr Idrees moved to Pakistan from India for marriage. Thirteen years ago, his father, who resided in Kanpur, India, became ill and Mr Idrees went to visit him. Amid the grief, he overstayed his visa for three days. Those three days cost him thirteen years of his precious life which were supposed to have been spent with a beautiful family in Karachi — including a wife who now claims that Mr Idrees does not exist for her anymore.

During his jail term, Mr Idrees’s Pakistani passport expired and he has been entangled in a host of official problems since then. A senior-most official in Kanpur, when questioned about Mr Idrees’s case, sounded uninterested in providing Mr Idrees his due justice; typical behaviour of many government officials when it comes to aiding the helpless citizens of either country. A man, essentially belonging to both countries, is being denied both justice and a home in his country of origin and in his country of nationality. For ten years, the Indian government slept on Idrees’s exoneration after suspecting him of being a Pakistani spy. When this prolonged headache was over, the Pakistani Interior Ministry claimed that there is no record of Mr Idrees being a Pakistani citizen and that his family has disowned him. It is rather ludicrous that a person’s family deciding to disown him or her should affect a person’s citizenship once it has already been granted and that the Interior Ministry should even be concerned with this.

Today, he is 40 years old and has already missed out on his children’s youth. Once a modest leather salesman, he has been a homeless man for years. His attempts to come back to his family in Karachi have been futile; if he had known the justice system would be this cruel, he could have invested his time in establishing himself elsewhere.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2012.