Kashmir Singh: the Indian spy who spent 35 years in Pakistan's prisons

Kashmir Singh (1941–2021) — the Indian agent at the centre of it. Ex-Army, ex-Punjab Police, captured in 1973 under the alias Ibrahim, sentenced to death, and held for 35 years. On his release he openly confirmed he had been a spy — a candour most freed agents are careful to avoid. Ansar Burney — the Pakistani human-rights lawyer and caretaker minister who is the real turning point of this story. Founder of a pioneering prisoners' rights movement, he found Singh during a jail inspection, realised how long he had been held, and pushed his mercy petition personally, later escorting him to the border. Without Burney, Singh very likely dies in prison unknown. President Pervez Musharraf — the Pakistani head of state who, on Burney's plea, commuted the death sentence and ordered Singh's repatriation in 2008. Paramjit Kaur and their three children — the family left behind in Punjab, who for decades did not know whether he was alive, and to whom he finally returned an old man. The Government of India — present in this story mainly by its absence: it never officially acknowledged Singh as its agent, offered no rescue during his captivity, and let a Pakistani activist do what his own state would not.

Kashmir Singh's tradecraft was the low-tech, high-nerve kind. Trained in Jalandhar in covert photography, he built a Muslim cover — Ibrahim — that had to survive not a border check but months of ordinary Pakistani life. That meant forged identity papers good enough to book a hotel room and obtain local cards, a memorised backstory, the right prayers and idiom, and the discipline never to slip in front of a shopkeeper or a policeman. He crossed on foot and by road rather than through any official post, timing his movements to gaps in the patrolling, and by his own account made the round trip dozens of times undetected. Inside, his job was reconnaissance: noting troop movements, mapping cantonments and military installations, and photographing what a camera could quietly capture. Getting the intelligence out was the most dangerous phase — carried back across the border in person or passed to a contact, never over a traceable line. When he was finally caught near Rawalpindi in 1973, the real test began: 35 years of interrogation and prison in which breaking cover could have meant execution, and in which he never publicly gave up the men who had sent him.

The abstract phrase '35 years in prison' hides an ordinary life stopped dead. When Kashmir Singh was arrested in 1973, he was a young husband and father; his three children were small, the youngest barely old enough to remember him. His wife, Paramjit Kaur, spent much of that time not knowing whether he was alive or dead — accounts describe long stretches, well over two decades, with no word at all. He was held across several jails, and by his own and Burney's account endured long spells in solitary confinement, in chains, and under the daily weight of a death sentence that could be carried out at any time. Reports say the isolation and mistreatment left marks on his mind as well as his body. When he finally crossed at Wagah in March 2008, the children who greeted him were middle-aged adults with families of their own, and the young man who had left in 1973 came back grey and worn. There was no state pension waiting, no official recognition of what he had given, no compensation for the decades. He had spied for India for around 400 rupees a month and been repaid with silence. He lived quietly in Punjab until his death in January 2021, aged around 80.

In 1973, when Singh was caught, a captured cross-border agent could simply vanish into an enemy prison for a generation with no mechanism to bring him out — no consular access, no prisoner lists exchanged, no independent monitor counting the years. His own government's silence and the enemy's grip could combine to erase a man for decades, as they very nearly did here. In some respects that has changed. India and Pakistan today exchange lists of each other's civilian prisoners and fishermen twice a year under a 2008 agreement, and a joint judicial committee has at times visited jails on both sides. Human-rights groups and the media are far quicker to surface names. Yet the core bargain has not changed at all. States still send deniable agents across, and still disown them when they are caught. The 2016 arrest of Kulbhushan Jadhav, and cases like Sarabjit Singh — who, unlike Kashmir Singh, died in a Pakistani jail in 2013 after an assault — show that the same trap still snaps shut. What Kashmir Singh's release proved was narrow but real: sometimes an individual with a conscience, working outside the machinery of both states, can pry one man loose. The machinery itself learned nothing.

Kashmir Singh's story matters because it strips the glamour off espionage and shows what it actually costs the people at the bottom of it. There are no gadgets or car chases here — just a Punjab villager who crossed a border for his country, got caught, and was then quietly abandoned by the very state he served, for a wage smaller than a clerk's. The lesson is uncomfortable for both nations. Pakistan held a man under a death sentence for 35 years, long past any conceivable intelligence value, which says something about how prisoners become bargaining chips and then simply forgotten inmates. India looked away from its own agent for those same 35 years, which says something about the moral debt states run up and rarely pay. And the one redeeming thread — the reason to tell it at all — is that his rescue came from across the border, from a Pakistani who decided one human being mattered more than the enmity between the two countries. That is the future worth reaching for: not more disowned spies, but the recognition that the people used by both states are human beings owed something. Kashmir Singh's 35 years should be remembered less as an adventure than as a warning about how cheaply nations spend the loyal and the powerless.