Had the 99 Indian fishermen incarcerated in Pakistani prisons been repatriated last month as agreed, Jagdish Mangal might still be alive.
Mangal, 35, was among the several Indian fishermen arrested by Pakistan’s Maritime Security Agency in February 2020 and detained in Malir prison, Karachi. He was a resident of Nana Vada, Gujarat.
Pakistan was supposed to repatriate 99 Indian fishermen on July 3, but never did. A month later, Mangal died on August 6 of “natural causes”, at least according to the medical certificate.
Earlier this year, another fisherman, 58-year-old Soma Baraiya who was supposed to be released with 198 other Indian fishermen in May, passed away days before his repatriation. Baraiya, who was from Kotda village in Gujarat, had been languishing in prison since 2020. After he fell ill, he was taken to a hospital where he died of lung and heart complications.
But the real tragedy is that neither Mangal nor Baraiya should have been in prison in the first place.
Hard positions
Mangal is the fifth foreign prisoner to die in captivity in Pakistan, says Dawn in an editorial, due to “the hard positions taken by the two states and the erasure of humanitarian concern”.
The impoverished families of incarcerated fisherfolk struggle to survive while the main breadwinners are jailed, treated like…
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