How Mohanlal Bhaskar spied in Pakistan and returned from its jails

Bhaskar's cover was built on the body as much as the papers. To pass as a Pakistani Muslim named Mohammad Aslam he was circumcised — a step that let the identity survive the most intimate inspection — and, by his account, kept even his own family in the dark about what he had become. Unlike a deep-cover 'illegal' who settles permanently, Bhaskar was a crossing agent: he moved in and out of Pakistani territory repeatedly through the porous Punjab frontier, blending into bazaars and mosques, gathering what he could and carrying it back. His handlers' priority, he wrote, was Pakistan's early nuclear ambitions, alongside routine military detail. The work depended on a chain of couriers and contacts on both sides — and that chain was also its weakness. Bhaskar names Amrik Singh, a double agent working for both services, as the man who sold him to Pakistani authorities. Once betrayed, tradecraft could not save him: he was arrested around 1967, interrogated and, in his telling, tortured to extract the network behind him. The very features that made a crossing agent cheap and deniable — no diplomatic cover, a thin support line, reliance on locals — are what left him exposed the moment one link turned.

Mohanlal Bhaskar (born 1942) — the Abohar schoolteacher who became the agent 'Mohammad Aslam', and later the memoirist who alone kept his own story alive. Amrik Singh — named by Bhaskar as the double agent who worked for both Indian and Pakistani intelligence and betrayed him to Pakistani authorities; the identification comes chiefly from Bhaskar's account. Jai Ratan — the noted translator who rendered Bhaskar's Hindi memoir into the English 'An Indian Spy in Pakistan'. Khushwant Singh — the writer who supplied the preface to the 1990 English edition, lending the book credibility and noting the interrogation involved 'torture of the worst kind imaginable'. Harivansh Rai Bachchan — the celebrated Hindi poet, then posted in Switzerland, who reportedly helped untangle a bureaucratic knot: India had asked for the release of a 'Sohan Lal Bhaskar' while Pakistan held records for a 'Mohan Lal Bhaskar', and Bachchan helped establish they were the same man. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi — the prime ministers whose 1972 Simla Agreement created the prisoner exchange that eventually freed him. Gaurav Sagar — Bhaskar's son, who years later voiced the family's grievance that India has no policy to rehabilitate or even acknowledge such agents.

Strip away the intrigue and what remains is a body kept in cages. Bhaskar's own accounting is precise in a way that only lived time can be: he reached home on 9 December 1974, he wrote, after six years, two months and twenty-three days away. Those years were not quiet. His memoir describes interrogation and torture at the hands of army and police, the kind Khushwant Singh called almost unimaginable; it describes fellow prisoners who broke down, and at least one who took his own life. He was shifted between Pakistani jails — Kot Lakhpat in Lahore, Mianwali and others — and from Mianwali, by his account, he glimpsed history: the 1971 war overhead, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman held in the same prison system before Bhutto released him. Whatever cannot be verified in those pages, the cost is not in doubt. A man in his twenties and thirties lost the better part of a decade to confinement, fear and pain, then returned to a country that struggled to place him. He put his surviving years into a school he ran and into the book — turning the one thing no one could take, his testimony, into his only lasting reward.

By his own account, Mohanlal Bhaskar's story reduces to a handful of stubborn figures — most of them drawn from his own memoir, so read them as testimony, not archive. He was born in 1942 in Abohar, a border town in Punjab, and trained not as a soldier but as a schoolteacher, taking an M.A. and a B.Ed. before the classroom. In the mid-1960s he began crossing into Pakistan under the name Mohammad Aslam — not once but several times, by his telling. Around 1967 he was arrested; he wrote that he was held for what he counted as six years, two months and twenty-three days, sentenced to death and later commuted. He reached India on 9 December 1974, freed in the prisoner repatriation that followed the 1971 war and the 1972 Simla Agreement. A decade later he published his memoir, 'Main Pakistan Mein Bharat Ka Jasoos Tha', translated into English as 'An Indian Spy in Pakistan' by Jai Ratan, with a preface by Khushwant Singh. One caution on the common label: India's RAW was formally created only in 1968, after his crossings had begun, so 'RAW agent' is imprecise — 'Indian intelligence' fits the record better.

Bhaskar matters because he is the exception that proves the rule about how nations use, and forget, their spies. Ravindra Kaushik shows what happens when the agent dies in silence; Bhaskar shows that even survival and a published memoir do not buy justice. Here was a man who came home able to say 'this happened to me' — and still had to fight for work and recognition, still watched his own country hesitate to own the mission it had sent him on. That is the lesson worth holding: the debt a state owes its human agents is not settled by whether they live or die, but by whether it is honest about having used them. His book endures for a second reason too. Because so few Indian operatives ever tell their own story, his memoir is a rare first-person window into a hidden world — and its very unverifiability is part of the point, a reminder of how much of this history can only ever reach us as testimony. To read Mohanlal Bhaskar well is to hold both truths at once: to honour a real man's real suffering, and to resist turning his account into a legend it was never able to prove.