archive: 'We treated prisoners of '71 war very well'
'We treated prisoners of '71 war very well'
Dwarika Prasad Sharma
The Times of India
July 12, 1999
Title: 'We treated prisoners of '71 war very well'
Author: Dwarika Prasad Sharma
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 12, 1999
It is a picture of "extreme" contrast, says a retired police officer
here, how we treated 95,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) from the
1971 war, and how the Pakistanis tortured, mutilated and killed six of
our soldiers captured recently from Kargil.
The senior retired officer, who had been on deputation to the CRPF and
was in charge of a company put on guard duty at a POW camp at Namcum
(Ranchi), said that the captured Pakistani officers were allowed to
keep an orderly each (who also had been captured along with them),
their food was allowed to be cooked by their own cooks, they had
built-up quarters, with four officers sharing a room provided with a
refrigerator, each officer was given a daily pocket allowance of Rs 90
("a tidy sum considering the 1972 prices"), and there were CSD
canteens in the camp which had "almost everything" except liquor.
The former officer, who preferred not to be identified, speaking in
the context of the national out-rage at the brutal killing by the
Pakistanis of six Indian soldiers, including an officer, during the
present Kargil hostilities, said that some newspaper reports had
praised the Chinese for their "better" record. He said that it was
not "the whole truth", and recalled how, as a state police officer in
Leh in 1965, he had accompanied an ITBP commandant to receive the
bodies of eight ITBP jawans who had formed part of a border patrol
party, whom the Chinese had embushed well within Indian lines near
Nyoma.
The retired officer said that the handover ceremony, which had
followed a border flag meeting, had been marked by a "gushing Chinese
hospitality". But when the bodies, which the Chinese had wrapped all
over and put in coffins were uncovered at Leh for post-mortem, it was
discovered that they were badly mutilated. Returning to the Pak POWs,
the former police officer said that the Namcum camp had 10,000
Pakistanis, with a separate enclosure for 153 Pak officers. He said
that every Friday, loudspeakers were fitted in each enclosure and a
maulvi called to lead mass prayers by the POWs. He added that, during
the imprisonment period, there had been two Eid celebrations in the
camp, "which were probably better than the Pakistanis had ever laid
out back at home".
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