Pak authorities humiliated us too, says Sarabjit’s sister

The family members of Sarabjit Singh were humiliated when they went to meet him with Pakistani authorities even wiping off the ‘sindoor’ from his wife’s forehead, his sister Dalbir Kaur said on Thursday amid outrage over the treatment meted out to Kulbhushan Jadhav’s mother and wife.

Dalbir Kaur said that Singh’s family had gone to meet him in a Lahore jail in 2008. “We had no clue of the shocking things that were to unfold before our meeting with Sarabjit,” Dalbir Kaur, who hails from Amritsar district, told PTI over the phone.

Singh’s wife Sukhpreet Kaur, his teenaged daughters Swapandeep and Poonam, besides Dalbir Kaur went to Lahore to meet the Indian national for the first time in 18 years.

The ordeal was similar to what Jadhav’s family endured in Islamabad recently, according to Dalbir Kaur.

Jadhav’s mother and wife were stripped of their bindis, bangles and ‘mangalsutra’, made to change into different clothes and wear slippers by discarding their shoes.

“Even before the meeting was to take place, the behaviour of Pakistani authorities was bad. A female cop took out a handkerchief and wiped out the ‘sindoor’ from Sukhpreet’s forehead. Both Sukhpreet and I were asked to take out hair pins as well. Sarabjit’s teenaged daughters were also mistreated, and authorities were rude even after I raised objections. We were even asked to take out our ‘kadas’ (bracelets),” Dalbir Kaur said.

She recalled that as Singh loved “bharwan karela”, a bitter gourd dish, the family cooked it at their home in Amritsar and brought it for him. “However, again the they were rude. They opened the container and forcibly stuffed it into our mouths asking us to taste it first,” she said. That was not the end of the ordeal, she said.