June 27,
2008: One unintended consequence of
India and Pakistan establishing better relations in the last year, is a bunch
of lawsuits by former Indian spies against the Indian government. The former
spies are suing to obtain pay for the years they have spent in Pakistani jails.
That's because both countries have freed hundreds of men who had been
imprisoned for spying, but the agencies that hired these men, often will still
not admit it.
Along the
border, especially where the frontier divided Punjab into Pakistani and Indian
provinces, it was relatively easy for people to sneak across the border. This
was often done to find work or visit kin, and the intelligence agencies
recruited Punjabis to cross the border and collect information about what was
going on in the other Punjab. Most of Punjab ended up in Pakistan, when British
India was split into Indian (mostly Hindu) and Pakistani (mostly Moslem)
portions sixty years afo. Punjabis are the largest minority (45 percent of the
population) in Pakistan.
The
Pakistanis quickly caught on to this espionage scheme, and it's unclear exactly
which side thought of it first. Both nations caught spies in their Punjabs.
Some were executed, but most were put in prison, for anything from a few years,
to over thirty. That's partly because some of the spies weren't, but were just guys looking for work and happened
to look suspicious, or maybe the spy catchers hadn't hit their quota that
month.
The Indian
spies were generally local farmers or laborers, willing to risk their freedom
for less than a hundred dollars a month. Indian intel operatives gave the spies
assignments, usually simple stuff like just going to a specific part Pakistani
Punjab and collecting information on some military matter. Most apparently did
not get caught, and a few went back again and again.
Both
nations denied that they were running these spy operations, and refused to
recognize captured agents as their own. Now that there are peace negotiations
going on, some of the freed spies have been officially recognized, but most
have not. So the lawsuits are not just about money (usually just lost wages,
about a thousand dollars a year), but about recognition for the sacrifices the
spies made. The Indian government is fighting the lawsuits. There are no
lawsuits in Pakistan, where the success of such undertakings is much less
certain.
