by Mohanlal Bhasker (1983), translated from the Hindi by Jai Ratan (2003)
Category - Book Review
This is an original review, written and edited by Anoop Prathapan
This is the real-life tale of an Indian man, Mohanlal Bhasker, an M.A., B.Ed. graduate, born in Abohar, Punjab (India) who started his life as a newspaper boy and who later got into the teaching profession becoming a low-key operative agent of India sent to Pakistan to gather more information about Pakistan’s Nuclear Plans. He eventually gets betrayed by a double agent Amrik Singh and gets arrested in Pakistan only to rot in various jails in Pakistan for almost the next six years.
One of my dearest doctor friends suggested that I tell my readers on what made me read the book and review it on my blog. Being an avid reader of literature on Pakistan, the India-Pakistan enmity, the Kashmir issue, the Partition of British India and the like, a book of this sort that details true events that happened in true locations in Pakistan, and gives me an overview of the life of the commonalty in Pakistan, post-independence, is nothing but a joy to read (though the actual events depicted are nerve-wracking)
Mohanlal has travelled in and out of Pakistan several times in 1967-68 in the identity of Mohammed Aslam, a buffalo trader from Sarja Mirza, as part of his mission. He was arrested by the Pakistan Intelligence Agency on the 16th of September 1968. Subsequently, he was taken to various interrogation centres in Pakistan and was ruthlessly tortured to the highest extent by nefarious officers in the Pakistan Military and the Police. In this doleful narration, he has uncovered the fate of Indian prisoners in Pakistani Jails. He gives details of the importunate advances and dreadful torture techniques used by the Pakistanis to pry information from Indian spies and how the victims coped up with all those. He narrates that most of them were unlawful retributions and therefore were utterly disdainful. Borrowing medical terminology, pummelling was a thrice daily or a sixth-hourly affair on most of the days for the author as well as for other Indian prisoners. He even mentions the names of a few people who swooned and went permanently insane after such repeated mistreatment over the years.
He gives the details of a few kind-hearted men in the Pakistani Military, Intelligence, and Police who talked to him genuinely and offered him all possible support. He also details various incidents by which he cemented the fact that not all Pakistanis are bad and not all have an inflexible hatred towards India. This aspect reminds an avid reader of the 2015 Malayalam non-fiction masterpiece, "Irattamukhamulla nagaram” by noted writer Benyamin, in which he gives a myriad of interactions with Pakistanis in a socio-cultural and literary setting, after which he also comes to the similar conviction that not all Pakistanis are swamped by hatred towards Indians. Both these authors establish that much of the animosity is synthetically cultivated in them from childhood by the rulers who wish to preserve such antipathy for their survival.
He recreates verbatim, conversations, sans embellishments, with certain officers in the Pakistani Intelligence and even with some prisoners who explained to him, the basis of the ever-lasting Hindu-Muslim strife. (of that times) He details many occurrences where Pakistani prisoners rummaged and pilfered the possessions of Indian prisoners and how the officials closed their eyes to it.
Apart from the actual incidents within the jails he has also detailed the stories behind how a few of the Pakistani prisoners landed up in jail. Such narrations are intended by the author to give us an idea about the general life in Pakistan, but that is one point where the educated sensible reader can disagree with the views of the author. The author has generalized life in Pakistan as outlandish and wayward in many instances citing examples of the prisoners’ earlier life, but that need not be completely true. One cannot apply such generalizations by which the majority of the people of any nation is termed rudderless, just based on the lives of a few people – the sample size is too small for such a generalized opinion formation.
In his words, paramours are in plenty for every woman he described, even for partners of respectable senior officials, sacrileges to Hindu effects and the ensuing shibboleths are aplenty, the general populace is depraved, and to cut it short, the country is altogether depicted as to having loose edicts. This might be true to an extent as in any other country, but such generalization is unacceptable.
Finally, after six years of misfortunes, he was repatriated across the Wagah border in accordance with the Shimla Agreement signed on 2/7/1972 by Mr. Zulfikker Ali Bhutto and Ms. Indira Gandhi. Mohanlal describes in the book that it was a promise well-kept by Mr. Bhotto when he met Indian captives in one of the jails, a few years earlier.
He reached his home in the late hours of 9th December 1974, after six years, two months, and twenty-three days to be exact.
In the concluding portion of the book, he described how he toiled to find a job thereafter and how senior leaders including the then Prime Minister of India marginalized his hardships as well as that of the many people sent across the border as spies and finally end up rotting in Pakistani jails.
I read the English Translation by Jai Ratan which had rich vocabulary but had umpteen spelling punctuation and linguistic mistakes, which I assume, is due to poor editing and proofreading by the publishers.
An excerpt from the concluding chapter that I found interesting: -
“The truth is that I have not done any favour to my country. I have only done my duty. I only feel peeved when people posing as patriots fly over our heads and drive past us in limousines. They disappear after making high-sounding speeches that are no more than empty words. They smear their little fingers with blood and pass for martyrs while those who shed blood for the country are ignored and pushed aside. How long will these hypocrites keep fooling people? It is time that their bluff was called.”
Though written in 1983, this applies in its entirety in 2021 as well.
The cathartic narration is a good read for people who like to read and understand about the life of such people unheard of in the limelight, sacrificing their entire lives or at least part of it for the benefit of their motherland. It is an eye-opener on both the good and the awful in Pakistan.
I dedicate the hours I spent reading this book to the memories of those people like Mohanlal Bhasker and Mr. Ravindra Kaushik a.ka., Black Tiger, who sacrificed their lives for our normal being.
My rating 6.5/10
End Thoughts:- (may or may not be true, just my assumptions)
One of the major happenings in a 2016 megastar movie in Malayalam seems to have been inspired by a sequence in the opening chapter of this book.
This book seems to have been vetted by the Indian Intelligence (RAW) before publication.
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