Given up for dead, Surjeet Singh gets another life

Declared a martyr by Indian authorities and missing since 1971 and his sentence ending in 2010, former BSF jawan Surjeet Singh has spent the last four decades in a Pakistani jail.

Deployed on the Indian border in Jaisalmer in 1971 during the India-Pakistan conflict, Surjeet Singh was caught by Pakistani authorities as a prisoner of war, charged with spying and thrown into jail. Charged under the stringent Pakistan Army Act, Singh was sentenced to death and was declared dead by Indian authorities in 1974.

A mercy petition to the then president Zia-ul-Haq received little sympathy, with the Pakistani Army chief rejecting the petition.

However, in a quirk of fate, soon after taking over power as prime minister Benazir Bhutto declared on 8 December 1988, a general amnesty for all condemned prisoners in the country and advised the president to convert the death sentences to life imprisonment, Pakistani Law Minister Farooq Naek was quoted as saying in a report in Dawn .

Despite the fact that he was charged under stringent laws, the Pakistani Army also allowed Singh’s sentence to be commuted to a life term.

However, there was still no word of his whereabouts and far as Indian authorities were concerned he was no more. His wife Angrez Kaur and son Amrik reportedly moved back to her parent’s house but say they never gave up hope about him being alive despite the fact that they had begun receiving pension from the Indian government.

And it wasn’t until 2004 that his family received some hope of him being alive when other prisoners lodged in the Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore spoke of having known Singh while he was lodged in the jail.

Singh’s family approached Pakistani rights activist Ansar Burney who told them that Surjit was indeed alive and in the jail. However, subsequent attempts to get Indian authorities to secure his release yielded little result.

A petition was also filed in the Lahore High Court by a lawyer Awais Shaikh seeking his release and the superintendent of the jail had said that Singh’s jail term had ended on 30 October 2010. After that he had written multiple letters to authorities seeking advice on what to do but received no reply.

However, there had been no instructions to release him until the Presidential pardon yesterday where Surjeet Singh found himself released instead of another Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh, who still continues to remain on death row.