The spy who came back

He points to the palatial houses that loom lifeless and empty on both sides of the road and remembers,“From the Jalandhar region,young men would go away to Europe,but migration was less noticeable nearer my village. In the adjoining Batala region,they went mainly to the Middle East.” Twenty-seven years ago,before he was arrested 2 km from the border inside Pakistan,25-year-old Gopal Das was also all set,passport and all,to go to Jordan. “A relative was working there,and I thought I would go for a few years,work as a driver,earn some money. There were no cars in the village at that time,but I knew I could drive any vehicle I sat in,” he says.

He permits himself a small exclamation a little while later when the car crosses a bridge. “Is that the Beas? There used to be so much water…” And again,inside Jalandhar city brought to a halt by the frenzied Ram Navami celebrations,when he sees a girl on a scooter weave expertly in and out of the traffic jam. “She’s smaller than the scooter she drives. At that time,there were no traffic jams…”

By the time the car comes to a stop near the small stage set up by the traders’ association on the edge of the busy New Railway Road,Gopal Das has lost his look of slight bemusement,he looks prepared for the world once more. It’s a collected-ness he maintains through the next five hours as he waits for the former minister,who is scheduled to honour him.

Through the day,speakers on the small stage hail him as the man who spent 27 years in Pakistan in “service of the nation”—one of Us captured by Them. But to everyone who asks about his arrest and long captivity,Gopal Das himself repeats a story stunningly bare of euphemism. “I became a spy for R&AW after I joined it as an unemployed 18-year-old,” he says. “For seven years before I was caught,I would cross into Pakistan,twice a month,on a salary of Rs 1,500. They told me they would get me back within a month or two if I was caught. And that they would look after my family. They did nothing. And now they have disowned me. When my brother petitioned the Supreme Court in 2007,they told the court that I’m not even an Indian. I will fight them. I was charged and sentenced for spying,not because I was a smuggler or a thief.”

He will file a case,he says,and seek an appointment with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “I will ask the PM,is the R&AW a private fief,a law unto itself,or does it work for the country’s government? How can it say it owes me nothing?”

Twenty-seven years. Back in Bhaini Mian Khan,you can almost touch the two words that hang in the air. But Gopal Das seems not to notice them,much less wallow in their overwhelming poignance.

“The only time I felt jolted by the fact that it has been 27 years”,he recalls,“was when I saw the headlines in the 3 p.m. news on the TV inside Lahore jail,the day they announced my release. ‘27 saal ke baad’,they said.” In that moment,he says,he felt like he had thrown off a huge bodily weight.

He remembers a similar feeling in 2003 when the heavy iron chains that had been strapped around his waist,legs and feet since 1990,were removed after 13 years. At that time,it took him time to adjust to chain-lessness. “For almost a month afterwards,I felt as if I had no legs”.

Now,settled in his brother’s house—his own house was devastated by the flood that swept through Bhaini Mian Khan in 1988—or sitting in his nephew’s furniture showroom in the market where he receives a constant trickle of people from surrounding villages,apart from media persons,Gopal Das doesn’t seem to be taking any time off to adjust to his freedom. He is immediately the centre of every circle that forms around him.

Bhaini Mian Khan has changed since Gopal Das left in July 1984. At that time,in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar in Amritsar,about 80 km away,the village was still under curfew. Houses,almost all kachcha,were interrupted by large open spaces and there was no market worth the name. There was only one government middle school—“it had two rooms of Baba Nanak vintage; when it rained,we all got wet”,he remembers—and only three motorcycles in the entire village.

Today,the market bristles with shops,pucca houses have swallowed up all the open spaces and cars slow down movement in the narrow lanes. Bhaini Mian Khan has 13 schools today,11 of them private. Now,people talk of rising prices,not Bhindranwale.

Almost the same age as Gopal Das,nephew Madan Lal remembers his uncle as the young man terribly fond of clothes,his green bicycle with a chain cover the envy of boys in surrounding villages. “He would wear a white shirt with a Bobby collar,and white bellbottoms. A comb would jut out fashionably,two inches above the trouser back pocket.”

His hair has thinned,say family members and friends,and his skin has darkened. But apart from that,they insist,the man who has come back after 27 years is just the same. “Of course,I would have recognised him. How could I not? He is our own,” says neighbour Mahinder Kaur,a young mother of two small sons when he left,now a grandmother.

“I had not seen him before,” admits Manish,18,son of Gopal Das’s nephew. But he would still have recognised him,he says,because Gopal Das’s face “matches” that of his brother Sardari Lal who lives in Mukerian. “So much has changed,but Gopal Das is the same,” affirms elder brother Charan Das.

With drumbeats and firecrackers,Bhaini Mian Khan gave its long lost son a hero’s welcome when he arrived from Wagah on April 7. It is almost as if for villagers and family members,it would be an act of treacherous disloyalty to admit that there could be anything unrecognisable or strange about this man who has already lost 27 years of his life to jail.

Not all the days and months of those 27 years were the same,says Gopal Das. The first 35 months of interrogation in Sialkot were followed by about four years in Multan jail. Then,a long stretch of about 18 years in a jail in Mianwali in the farthest corner of Punjab,and finally,the last few years of incarceration in Lahore.

He remembers the first months of interrogation as being the hardest to bear. There were brutal beatings,broken joints,and the inability to move or lift the lightest of things because of the constant pain.

With each prisoner interrogated and locked up alone,for those 35 months,Gopal Das didn’t speak to anyone. “I would hear many prisoners screaming into the night.” That was the time I could have gone mad,” he says.

In those long days and months,Gopal Das recalls an act of kindness. “One (Pakistani) officer,I don’t remember his name,brought me two Hindi novels to read. A detective novel called Hong Kong ke hatyare and a family drama,‘Meri maang saja do’’.

In Multan jail,Gopal Das met other Indian spies—Roop Lal,also from Gurdaspur district,released after 25 years in 2000; Kashmir Singh from Hoshiarpur,released after 35 years in 2008. And Ravinder Kaushik from Ganganagar,whose death sentence was converted to a life sentence,but who died of TB,and most of all of a broken heart,after the Agra summit failed in 2001.

On a small Japanese radio,“the size of a mobile phone”,the Indian prisoners in Pakistan tracked the high diplomacy in Agra. Gopal Das remembers the BBC news reader declaring that “the keys of the cells of prisoners hang between Vajpayee and Musharraf”. Feeling their release was imminent,India’s spy-prisoners gave away their bedding and other belongings to other prisoners,he remembers. When the talks broke down,Kaushik,already gravely ill,lost the will to recover,he says.

It was also from Multan in 1987 that Gopal Das wrote his first letter home. “We arranged for a pen and paper,and sent it off,without a ticket,” he remembers. The letter reached and,miraculously,he got a reply. From the tone of the letters,he could sense that his father had died. “Though the letter would be written in his name,I knew he was no more.”

After a few months,however,Gopal Das’s letters received no replies. The long period of silence was broken when he got a reply to a letter he wrote from Mianwali jail in 1999. The reply came in 2006,and with that belated response began an uninterrupted communication with his brother Anand Vir,formerly in the army,now working for the Punjab government in Mohali. It was to Anand Vir that Gopal Das was later to send his jail warrant,specifying that he had been arrested on the charge of spying. Armed with the warrant and his brother’s school certificates,Anand Vir petitioned the apex court in 2007,leading to the court’s appeal for Gopal Das’s release a few months ago.

There were small victories in jail. “In Multan,there were no fans for Indian prisoners. I mobilised the other spies,told them we are army prisoners,we can petition the GHQ.” Fans were installed in Indian cells a few months later. Then,in 2009,Indian prisoners asked for and got their own TV sets; now,it became possible to watch not just three Pakistani channels,but Doordarshan too.

As he looks back,there is nothing to keep from those 27 years,says Gopal Das. There is justice to be wrested,of course,but no plan for the future. “I never thought about what I would do if I was set free” he says. “I only wanted to be free”.

Nine Indian spies are still in Lahore jail,says Gopal Das,of whom two have finished their sentence but continue to languish in jail. Among the seven yet to complete their sentence is Ashok Kumar,arrested in Pakistan in 1997 when he was 20 and sentenced the following year to 14 years in jail.

Six days after Gopal Das’s release,Ashok Kumar’s father and brother have taken the bus from village Ahmedabad in the same district to Bhaini Mian Khan. They have come holding Ashok’s passport-sized photo and a blue envelope bearing Pakistani stamps in which he last sent them a letter from Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail two years ago.

“He was studying and working as well when he went away. He didn’t tell us anything about going to Pakistan,or we would have stopped him,” says father Swaran Das. “Ashok was so fond of being photographed,” says brother Suraj Kumar,as he holds up the colour photograph of a young man,clean shaven,looking away from the camera,a half-smile on his lips.

Ashok still has one and a half years of his jail term left,Gopal Das tells his brother and father,because his undertrial period will not be counted in the sentence. Since the past year,Ashok has also taken to drugs,he says.

Old Swaran Das crumples visibly. “But he was such a good,hardworking boy…” Ashok is the eldest of four brothers and a sister,he mumbles,and there has been no celebration in the house after he left. “Could you please come to our home and talk to Ashok’s mother about her son once you are free?” he asks Gopal Das.

The case

Gopal Das’s brother Anand Vir,a resident of Chandigarh,filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in 2008,alleging that his brother was arrested in July 1984 when he strayed into Pakistan territory. He sought the court to intervene with the government for the release of his brother detained in Lahore Central Jail for 27 years. On March 15,2011,a Bench of Justices Markandey Katju and Gyan Sudha Misra took the uncharacteristic step of directly appealing to the Pakistan government to release Das. “We cannot give any directions to Pakistan authorities because we have no jurisdiction over them. The Indian authorities have done all that they could in the matter. However,that does not prevent us from making a request to the Pakistani authorities to consider the appeal of the petitioner for releasing him on humanitarian grounds by remitting the remaining part of his sentence,” Justice Katju wrote in his order.