Found Hell On Earth

I read this story of Kashmir Singh today who was freed from a Pakistani jail after spending 35 years without a single visitor. Following the 1973 war between India and Pakistan, he was given a death sentence and had spent the last 35 years on the death row. He was a former Indian policeman and had become a trader of electronic goods and then was arrested in Rawalpindi for spying.

There are some good and bad aspects to this story. I recently noted in a post that resolution to big conflicts first need a decent dose of goodwill gestures. These gestures could be prisoner exchanges, movement of people across the border etc. The one example I quoted in the earlier post was the failure of Camp David summit to come up with a solution because people on the ground were not ready. A lot of people blame Yassir Arafat for that missed opportunity and many have noted that Palestine after its best efforts would never be able to get the amount of land that was offered in those negotiations personally supervised by Bill Clinton. I contend that there is more to the failure of those talks than just the instrangience of Arafat. The ground reality was that there was so much mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians that it was impossible to come up with a solution and sell it to people on the ground who would be affected by it. Not only Arafat but even Ehud Barak would have faced significant problems taking out settlements from some of the territories.

So coming back to this situation of Kashmir Singh. India and Pakistan have done a good job trying to lay the groundwork for an eventual settlement of the Kashmir issue. There have been prisoner exchanges, people can move across the border in Kashmir and meet their relatives on the other side, cricket is no more a battleground and contingents of parliamentarians and other sort of folks frequent often across the border. This presidential pardon for Kashmir Singh is another good news for the two countries. The bad news is that this took 35 years!!! Probably, it makes for a good case of Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied!!! Remember the Tolstoy story or the movie Shawshank Redemption?