IUD, India -The sweet boxes are passing when the cheers and the joy surround the brick house of Rajeshwari Rama, isolated from tin sheets, in the town of Diu de Vanakbara, an island controlled by the federal government throughout India -odjagistán.
Rama’s relatives and friends are talking at the top of their voices while celebrating the release of her husband, the fisherman Mahesh Rama, from the Landhi prison in the largest city of Karachi of the neighbor of Pakistan, in February of this year.
Among the attendees are Laxmiben Soanki, 36, standing in silence in a corner. She doesn’t prove sweets. She is only marking her presence there, but is still worried about the thoughts or her husband, Preji Solanki.
Premji, 40, also has a leg in the Landhi prison in Pakistan since December 2022, along with several other Indian fishermen. His crime: crossing a border in dispute into the Arabic Sea, which divides the nuclear powers of southern Asia and the jury enemies, for fishing.
In February, Pakistan launched 22 Indian fishermen who were imprisoned by the Maritime Security Agency of Pakistan between April 2021 and December 2022, while fishing on the coast of Gujarat, also the native state of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Three of those released are from Duu, 18 years old from Gujarat, and the person who dates back to the north of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
They thought that India and Pakistan share a persecutically militarized land border, their line of international maritime limits in the Arabic sea is also largely disputed, especially in an area called Sir Creek, a 96 km (60 mile separations.
It is in this patch that the fishermen of India and Pakistan roam in deeper waters, often without realizing that they have entered into foreign territory. Due to the field of the territory in dispute, there are no border fences, with a swamp that acts as a natural limit between the two nations.
Several years and rounds of diplomatic conversations between India and Pakistan have not been able to solve the dispute, which has such military equal tensions between them. In 1999, India knocked down a Pakistani plane that transports 16 naval officers for the alleged violation of Indian airspace near its maritime border. The incident occurred only one month after the two countries fought a war in Kargil, a snowy district in Kashmir administered by India.
On March 17, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs revealed that of 194 Indian fishermen currently imprisoned in Pakistan, 123 are from Gujarat. According to the Indian government, he has 81 Pakistani fishermen in his custody. The families in both say that their loved ones have been imprisoned for a crime they committed “without knowing it”, because they did not know that they had ventured within the waters claimed by another country.
Trapped in debt
Pakistan liberated Mauji Nodhubhai Bamaniya, 55, in February, his osteoporosis had Gods worse. “I still can’t believe I am sitting in my house, in my country, with my family. My bones in decomposition brought me back to my homeland,” Bamaniya tells Al Jazeera in the village of Vanakbar.
Another fisherman, Ashok Kumar Solanki, is also back at home in the town of Ghoghla in Duu. It has auditory and speech disabilities and was one of the 22 fishermen released in health fields.
But they are the families of those who still imprisoned in Pakistan are trapped in a recurrent debt cycle and weakening anxiety.
In another house, hidden in the midst of palm trees in Vanakbara, Kantaben Chunilal, 60, looks with eyes tired on the dusty road that leads home. She has been waiting for her son, Jashvant, since December 2022.
Jashvant was just 17 when he was arrested by the Pakistani forces. It was the only support of the family.
Kantaben says that he is too embarrassed to ask his relatives more loans to fill the empty grain bottles in his kitchen. She has reduced to almost 500,000 rupees ($ 5,855) of several relatives per livelihood. “The Government sacrifices us a financial aid or $ 3 per day. It is not just half or what our would be,” Al Jazeera tells.
For despair, Kantaben says that sometimes he visits randomly to the relatives of the food, hoping that they will house her as a guest and that she can some money that day.
In the same town, Aratiben Chavda married fisherman Alpesh Chavda in 2020. Less than a year later, Alpesh was arrested by the Pakistani forces while he was fishing in the Sir Creek area.
Aratiben tells Al Jazeera that his son Kriansh, 3, was born about four months after Alpesh’s trial, has never seen his father. “We make him see his father’s photos, so that one day, when Alpesh returns, my son can pick it up,” he says, sobbing.
The house of Aratiben is shaded by the palm and the coconut trees, isolating her from the scorching heat of India. But you can’t escape poverty that has grabbed home. Selling the refrigerator that her parents had given her as a wedding gift supported for about two months the winter of 2023.
Aratiben and its mother -in -law, Jayaben, also sell vegetables in the local market, winning around $ 5 to $ 7 in good days. But she says there are too many days in the middle when they can’t pay two eels.
Indian activists and fishermen unions have been campaigning for the launch of all fishermen imprisoned by Pakistan.
Chhhaganbhai Bamania, a social worker in DUU, points out under the Pakistani law, fishermen who deviate in the waters of that country should not be sentenced for more than six months.
“But due to the hostility between India and Pakistan, citizens are trapped in a crossfire without their fault. Their jail time increases with the world they know or understand it,” he says, and adds that some spend years.
Bamania says that imprisoned fishermen families have been writing to the senior Indian officials to beg their release, but accuses the government of moving to a “snail rhythm” to try to address their concerns.
‘As if we were terrorists’
This judgment pattern followed by a long wait for liberation is not new. Some, like Shyamjibhai Ramji, 50, are repeated visitors from Pakistani prisons.
Ramji was arrested three times between 2000 and 2014. When he was released for the third time from a Karachi prison, his son made an oath that he would never venture in the sea, “not only in his dreams or rather, nightmares.”
“Catching the fish is all I know,” he says. “We follow the movements of the stars while we throw nets into the sea at night. Once, I wandered through the port, once from the port of Porbandar. There is like me that has bones imprisoned more than one than one.
Ramji says that he now prefers to look at the sea from a distance to avoid the review of the “horrors” he faced under Pakistani custody. “They would keep us separately, far from the Pakistani prisoners, and continued asking us the investigation questions, as if we were terrorists or as if we were hiding something. When we said we are vegetarians, Athy gave the water water with water water, water water, Ightme Foryte, he says.
Shekhar Sinha, a retired Indian Navy officer, says that “the greed of a larger capture drives fishermen to go beyond that image line in the water, or lose the trail of their position exactly.”
“Even Pakistani fishermen are arrested in similar circumstances. Generally, they are exchanged, except for those who fail in interrogations and cannot answer questions,” he tells Al Jazeera.
As efforts to free civilians on both sides of the continuous border, women like laxmiben cling to hope, making a new promise to their children every day. Her eyes shouted with tears while she and her three teenage children, an 18 -year -old son and daughters who are 14 and 13 years old, expect the launch of Preji.
“I still count my children that” your father will return tomorrow. “
Beyond the waters is Pakistan. And Premji.