Towards the end of November 1971, a dramatic dogfight in the skies in Boyra on the eastern front hogged the limelight. In the ensuing drama, two Pakistani Sabres were shot down by Indian pilots. The Pakistani pilots were taken prisoners by India. In Chhamb on the western front, 2nd Lieutenant Joe Swittens was manning an Indian Army observation post, about 400 metres ahead of his unit’s deployment, close to the India-Pakistan ceasefire line or border. While Swittens was at his post, Pakistani Air Force jets strafed Indian rear positions. Unknown to the young lad, his company along with the Indian Brigade had withdrawn to a position in depth to avoid being destroyed by the barrage. Joe and his two companions were isolated from the main unit. A Pakistani attack column managed to find Joe and captured him. The India-Pakistan war resulted in Pakistan’s quick defeat. However, for over a year, Pakistan kept denying the presence of Joe with them. One day, a Red Cross team visited Pakistani jails to check living conditions. Swittens, an inmate in the jail, conjured a pretext to approach a lady member of the team. He pushed a paper into her hand: it had the officer’s name, identity and father’s address. The Red Cross informed the Indian government. Exposed internationally, the Pakistani government was put under pressure. Swittens, disappeared and declared missing, returned home to India in September 1973. The war’s first prisoner, Swittens was the last to be released. August 30 is remembered as the International Day for the Disappeared: Those we neither mourned nor welcomed home. It is a day to draw attention to the fate of those individuals that exist through their absences. Their fate affects their families whose grieving hasn’t found closure in decades. Families endure an excruciating journey from the devastation of loss after the incident to the rare ray of hope amidst the heartbreak of absence. In the years that follow, they live through the trauma of abject, forlorn misery. In 1997, while on a peacetime patrol in the Gulf of Kutch, Captain Sanjit Bhattacharjee went missing. He had barely five years of service. Sanjit’s mother and family have relentlessly pursued the matter with the government for over three decades, but to no avail. In Sanjit’s case, sources say he is lodged in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail. Major Ashok Suri was declared as killed in action in the 1971 war. Three years later, his father RS Suri received a hand-written note from his son. The note read, “I am okay here. ” A year later, he received another letter: “We are 20 officers here. Indian government can contact Pakistan government for our freedom. ” Ashok was alive but the only impact of his letter was that the Ministry of Defence changed the status from ‘Killed in action’ to ‘Missing in Action’. What could have been done better?Chuck Yeager, the American who broke the sound barrier, admitted to interviewing IAF pilots in Pakistani jails on technical aspects of aircraft. The meetings were part of an American exercise to investigate Soviet technology during the Cold War. Besides, there have been eye-witness accounts and Pakistani radio broadcasts that Indian soldiers had been taken into captivity. Victoria Schofield, in her book Bhutto: Trial and Execution, refers to an Indian POW in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat Jail. After the 1971 India-Pakistan war, when the issues were still fresh, a follow up with neutral observers such as Yeager or Schofield was critical to explore possibilities of identifying the venues or clues. Major AK Ghosh went missing in that war. In December 1971, his photograph peering from inside a Pakistani jail, appeared in a Time magazine issue. His case could have been taken up with the magazine. India, after winning a humanitarian war, forgot to deal with the human rights of its own soldiers and thus failed their families. Identifying the venues of detention could have been a step towards pushing for specific prisoners. Yeager may have had an anti-India tilt, but the question is: how serious an attempt was ever made? To be fair, successive Indian governments have tried to explore diplomatic channels but to no avail. Families of POWs set up the Missing Defence Persons Relative Association and their delegation visited Pakistan in 2007. They were taken to jails in Multan, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Mianwali, Faisalabad. A haphazardly organised visit, it lacked the presence of an Indian prison expert or someone who could ask the right questions. Several Indian governments have tried bilateral diplomacy but with passage of time, the obdurate apathy of Pakistani governments has turned to outright amnesiac scorn. “No joint bilateral investigation is possible due to the “lack of human aspects of relationship” between India and Pakistan’, writes Maj Gen Jagatbir Singh, who was part of the Committee for Monitoring Missing Defence Personnel. Those few missing soldiers that came back — Swittens for instance — were a result of fortuitous events. Why has India not approached the UNHRC or Red Cross? Chander Suta Dogra explains in her well researched book, Missing in Action, that the government avoided going to the UNHRC or the ICJ since India and Pakistan resolved to discuss issues bilaterally, without third-party mediation. She adds that the government wasn’t keen to raise it in international forums and give Pakistan a chance to open up other disputes. Is it therefore reasonable to assume that the net impact of bilateral diplomacy here was always set to be a nonstarter? Why has then India repeatedly pursued the one channel that was doomed to fail forever?Major Paul Devassy, a former platoon mate of Bhattacharjee in the training academy, has made efforts to mobilise support through several channels, including legal and non-governmental means. “My heart believes Sanjit is alive,” says Devassy. A Supreme Court bench, hearing the petition for Bhattacharjee in August 2022, termed it “unfortunate” that for 25 years, the fate of two people was not known. The additional solicitor general (ASG) KM Nataraj, representing the Indian government, replied that Pakistan is yet to acknowledge the presence of this officer in their jail. Major Devassy adds that any spell of peace in India-Pakistan ties swells hope for the family, albeit briefly. Even today, Sanjit’s mother is hopeful her son will return. How India missed the plot after the 1971 warAfter the 1971 war, India could have insisted on the formation of a war tribunal to try Pakistani prisoners of war that India had in its custody. Leveraging the advantage would have been the logical move. Instead, what happened in the India-Pakistan treaty at Shimla was an inexplicable Indian capitulation at the negotiation table after winning the war on the battlefield. India released 93,000 Pakistani POWs in exchange for nothing. Behind this decision hangs an intriguing tale. After the fall of Dhaka and surrender of the Pakistan Army on 16 December 1971, Gen Yahya Khan stepped down as the President. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who replaced him, was in Washington DC and planned to return to Pakistan and take over the reins as the Chief Marshal Law administrator. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bangladeshi leader was still in the custody of the Pakistani government and sentenced to death. India wanted to know about Bhutto’s plans on Mujib. Bhutto had fiercely opposed Mujib’s political rise. Would he hang Mujib or set him free?The Indian government received information that Bhutto’s flight from Washington DC to Pakistan had a brief stopover at the Heathrow airport in London. A plan was hatched in Delhi. Muzaffar Hussain, the former chief secretary to the government of East Pakistan in Dhaka, had been taken prisoner by India and was being held under house arrest in Delhi. DP Dhar, India’s foreign secretary called Sashanka Banerjee, a diplomat in the cabinet secretariat, and tasked him with a trip to London, where he would meet Laila Hussain, Muzaffar’s wife and deliver a note in a sealed envelope. Laila Hussain was in a romantic relationship with Zulfiqar Bhutto and was about to be used for this plan. Banerjee writes about the incident in his book and recalls that Laila was so excited upon hearing her role in the mission that she even bought a bugging device to record her conversation with Bhutto. A few days later, when Bhutto landed in Heathrow, Laila Hussain met him. Laila sought Bhutto’s intervention to get her husband released from Indian custody. Banerjee writes that Laila suggested that Pakistan could build a case for the release of her husband and that of the Pakistani POWs. A wily Bhutto gathered that Laila would have been tutored by Indians to bring up the issue of POWs. He knew what the Indians wanted in return. He relayed the message through Laila that after taking over as Pakistan’s premier, he would release Mujib ur Rahman. On 7 January 1972, Bhutto released Mujib ur Rahman from prison. Five days later, Mujib took over as Bangladesh’s first prime minister. Later, on 2 July 1972, India and Pakistan signed an agreement in Shimla. As agreed, India returned all 93,000 prisoners and saved 195 of them from being tried for war crimes by Bangladesh. Pakistan, however, retained the Indian prisoners in their custody. At the entrance of the dining hall of the National Defence Academy in Pune, a special table is set for one, with the chair tilted forward. The placard on the table carries these lines:“The table set is small, for one, symbolising the frailty of one prisoner against his oppressors. The single rose displayed in a vase reminds us of the families and loved ones of our comrades-in-arms who keep their faith awaiting their return……The slice of Lemon is on the bread plate, to remind us of the bitter fate. There is salt upon the bread plate — symbolic of the families’ tears as they wait. The Glass is inverted, they cannot toast with us this night. The chair — it is empty. They are not here. ”The writer is the author of ‘Watershed 1967: India’s Forgotten Victory over China’. His fortnightly column for FirstPost — ‘Beyond The Lines’ — covers military history, strategic issues, international affairs and policy-business challenges. Views expressed are personal. 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