Sarabjit Singh
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Sarabjit Singh is an Indian from Punjab accused of carrying out three separate bombings in Lahore, which claimed the lives of 14 people and injured dozens.
He has been sentenced to death for his alleged role in acts of terrorism. But the Punjab farmhand's family has succeeded in waging an unprecedented public campaign for his release. Politicians, human rights activists and film stars - including Shah Rukh Khan - have joined the Bikhiwind family's campaign for his release.
Sarabjit's sister, Dalbir Kaur, a village-level politician, has succeeded in mobilising much of the Punjab unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party to Sarabjit Singh's cause.
While no one has so far asserted that Sarabjit Singh crossed the border for love, a consensus has formed that an innocent man has been sent to the gallows by a cynical system. In Pakistan and in Jammu and Kashmir, there is a counter-narrative. Islamists have been demanding that Sarabjit Singh be pardoned only if the terrorists convicted for the 2001 attack on Parliament House in New Delhi are pardoned.
To accept either story one must suspend all disbelief, for the only truth available about the Sarabjit Singh case is that almost no one knows the truth of his life - and those who do are not talking.
Pakistani authorities claim that Sarabjit Singh carried out three separate bombings in Lahore, which claimed the lives of 14 people and injured dozens. The first of these was at Lahore's Chowk Bhatti Gate on May 18, 1990. Eyewitnesses to the bombing claimed to have seen Sarabjit Singh, clean-shaven and impersonating a policeman, arrive with a bag containing the explosive device, which he left with a local shopkeeper on the pretext that he was going to visit a nearby shrine. At Bhawana Bazaar, where the next bomb went off, eyewitnesses again claimed that Sarabjit Singh had left an explosive-packed bag amidst the crowd around a fruit-juice stall. Finally, the conductor of a bus that was bombed at Nizambad Chowk on July 28, 1990, identified Sarabjit Singh as the individual who had left a bag on the bus before de-boarding.
It is not hard to pick holes in the Pakistani prosecution case, which appears to have been handled with extraordinary incompetence. Sarabjit Singh never identified himself to his interrogators by his real name; nor did he disclose his identity at any stage during the trial or even in his own confessional statement. Pakistani prosecutors and witnesses described him throughout the legal process as `Manjit Singh' - an individual Sarabjit Singh's defenders point out he demonstrably is not. On the other hand, this fact is not as damning as it appears, since the Pakistani investigators did not have the opportunity to establish his real identity. All it shows is that if Sarabjit Singh was indeed a covert agent, he was unusually resilient in protecting the cover identity his handlers had invented for him. [1]
More damning, though, are contradictions in the eyewitness testimony. One said the individual who had planted the explosives had smallpox scars, but none mars Sarabjit Singh's face. Another, with theatrical flair, claimed to have heard a clock ticking inside the bag Sarabjit Singh had left behind, something profoundly unlikely in a crowded market-place environment.
The Jammu and Kashmir People's Democratic Party president, Mehbooba Mufti commented that the Centre should pardon Mohammad Afzal if Pakistan accepted the clemency appeal for Sarabjit Singh. [2]
Ms. Mufti, who is also an MP, said that if clemency appeals were made for Sarabjit citing his Indian nationality, voices should also be raised for Afzal for "he too is an Indian citizen." Two citizens of India cannot be treated with different yardsticks, she had said.
