A strong voice for innocent cross-border offence victims

The premier show of Javed Jabbar’s “Ramchand Pakistani� provided the people of Islamabad the other day an opportunity to watch an excellent movie.
“Ramchand Pakistani�, based of a real story of a Pakistan’s Hindu Dalit family of Bhimra village, lying close to the Indo-Pakistan border in Sindh, is certainly the depiction of the heart rending corollary of politics of enmity between India and Pakistan.
The story begins with a child, approximately six or seven years old, namely Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussain) who after picking a row with his mother, Champa (Nandita Das), over not giving him full cup of tea, leaves his home and in anger moves, as if swept by the air, knowing not where he was destined for. He ultimately crossed the Indo-Pakistan border simply demarcated by whitewashed stones hardly visible in the desert area of Sindh.
His father, Shankar (Rashid Farooqi), while desperately chasing his son to stop him from crossing the border overstepped the border line.
Both the son and the father were caught by the Indian border security forces and ultimately put into a jail of Indian Gujerat District where Shankar was subjected to torture on the suspicion of a Pakistani spy.
 He was undressed even to verify whether or not he was circumcised to establish his faith. No one was ready to understand the fact that no spy could cross the border with a minor son. He had to bear the agony of more than four years of jail for cross-border ‘misdemeanour’. The jail culture for a boy of six or seven years age was also abominable.
The family of Shankar, particularly his wife, on the other side of the divide in Pakistan, too, underwent worst form of emotional and economic disaster. She remained a captive of the memories of her husband and son with a conviction that they would come alive.