Apathetic govt no hope for kin of Indians held by pirates

With her dupatta covering her head, Nirmal, 25, watches her three-year-old son Abhimanyu play with toys in the courtyard of her husband’s home in Sherpura village in Haryana’s Ambala district.

Abhimanyu’s toys — barks of eucalyptus trees — are scattered in the courtyard of the small concrete house, indistinguishable from other homes in the village.

The tragedy for Nirmal is that Abhimanyu does not remember his father. He is too young to spell ‘pirate’ and too small to understand that his father Jaswinder Singh, 26, is held hostage 4,000km on an island off the coast of Somalia. Singh has been away from Nirmal and Abhimanyu for over two years now.

Singh, a strapping young man, left home in 2010 and headed to the sea to make a living. He was set to return after a short stint after the ship docked at its destination. However, on a balmy day in March 2010, Somali pirates hijacked his ship, MV Iceberg, near the Gulf of Aden.

Since 2010, Singh’s and 12 other families are caught between hope and despair. They have been forgotten by authorities and anyone and everyone who could have helped bring their men back home. Singh and 12 others continue to be held hostage by Somalians for holding an Indian passport. Ironically, an Indian passport records an unequivocal order from the president of India to offer them “every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need.”

But the order has been reduced to empty rhetoric by babus who man various Union ministries responsible for bringing our men back home. Instead, hiding behind platitudes, officials have left the fate of the hijacked Indians to various ship-owners, stubbornly insisting that India does not negotiate with pirates.

So, not only will the officials not offer “every assistance and protection”, but they will also keep issuing missives so that the issue does not rake up ever. Bearing witness to this apathy are families of the kidnapped men.

K Mohandas, who retired as shipping secretary on February 29, 2012, told DNA that “the government cannot negotiate with pirates”. It is left to the ship-owners to negotiate and get the men back, he said. In the case of MV Iceberg, the Dubai-based owner of the ship has “withdrawn from negotiating with the pirates”.

With the Indian government maintaining a convenient “hands-off policy” and the ship-owners pushing off, there is little hope that the 13 hostages will return home. Nearly two years ago, when the Somalian-pirates menace hit international headlines, the Indian navy launched a campaign to protect the sea lanes stretching from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean. A few run-ins with the pirates ensured that any Indian national found on any ship became their prime target.

While the MV Iceberg, with Singh and six other Indians, was hijacked in March 2010, another ship, MV Asphalt Venture, with 15 Indians was hijacked in December 2010. Initially, the ship-owners made all the right noises. In the case of MV Asphalt Venture, they even managed to get the ship back, minus seven of the 15 Indians. Today, they have disappeared after securing the release of one ship and hostages of other nationalities.

The Indians, the government says, serve a special purpose for the pirates - as a bargaining tool to secure the release of pirates picked up by the Indian navy during patrol. Even as the government turns a blind eye to the crisis, a former hostage and his wife are trying to keep the matter alive.

Ravinder Gulia and his wife Sampa Arya are so desperate to help the hostages that they turned to noted Pakistani human rights activist Ansar Burney for help. Earlier this year, Burney went to Somalia to figure out what can be done for the release of the ship and hostages. Last week, he also visited families of the six Indian hostages on board MV Iceberg. 

The Delhi-based Cassad Foundation is also trying to secure the release of the hostages. “The families of the sailors are very poor, so we are trying to see what can be done to help them,” said Jyoti Cassad, a trustee of the foundation. 

Director-general of shipping Satish B Agnihotri refused to divulge what was being done to get the kidnapped Indians back home. “This is an ongoing case. I refuse to reveal what we are doing,” he told DNA. Gulia and Arya are not impressed. “We heard the same arguments when Ravinder was a hostage. If there is no policy to deal with pirates, why hasn’t the government prepared one?” the couple said.