Fisherfolk caught in the web amid bilateral tensions
Those arrested treated as spies, held without trial
Jati His hands wrapped tightly around the frayed rope he uses to steer his skiff, Lutf Ali is visibly on edge as he scans the horizon. He keeps looking to the left, from where the speedboats always pounce.
"The Indian boats are big and noisy, so when we hear them, we try to get away," the 50-year-old Pakistani fisherman says of the dreaded coast guard vessels.
In the cat-and-mouse game played out every day in the Arabian Sea and in the channels carved into the mud flats of the Indus River delta, Ali is the mouse.
When fishermen from either country are hauled in for questioning, they're interrogated by intelligence agents convinced that the men are spies. The fishermen are often held for years without a trial.
Officials with the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, a human rights non-governmental organisation, or NGO, that focuses on the plight of Indus River delta fishermen, say Indian prisons now hold 175 Pakistani fishermen.
The organisation's counterpart in India, the National Fishworkers Forum, says 550 Indian fishermen are jailed in Pakistani lock-ups.
Stepped-up vigil
Fishermen and activists with the NGOs say India's border enforcement in the Arabian Sea and nearby channels has stepped up sharply since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, which killed 166 people.
Since Mohammad Saleh, a 37-year-old Jati fisherman, was arrested more than a year ago and jailed in India, his wife, Zeenat, and two of his older daughters have had to work picking tomatoes and peppers for less than a dollar a day.
A 12-year-old son, Sajjad, scours mounds of trash for paper and plastic recyclables. All that still doesn't bring in enough to live on, so every day Zeenat sends her three little boys into Jati's dirt lanes to beg.
Sir Creek, a channel between the Pakistani and Indian borders, is prime fishing territory for Jati fishermen. The demarcation of the channel's waters, however, has been hotly disputed by India and Pakistan for years.
Indian and Pakistani fishermen are arrested either in Sir Creek or in the Arabian Sea, where fishermen have no way of knowing what separates India's territorial waters from Pakistan's.
— Los Angeles Times
