SPIES WHO CAME INTO THE COLD: (From left to right) Former spies Balwinder Singh; Mahinder Singh and Balbir Singh (top); Jagdish Lal, Sarabjit Singh and Kashmir Singh         (Pix: Anirban Das Mahapatra)       Imaging: M Iqbal Shaikh

A knock on the door 38 years ago changed Balbir Singh’s life forever. The man at his doorstep said he was from India’s secret services — and made an offer that Balbir, then a ruddy 20-year-old youth, could not refuse. He would be paid Rs 500 a month, the official told Balbir, and after three years, get a permanent job with an intelligence wing. For that, he would have to spy for India from Pakistan.

In the troubled, smuggler-infested districts of Punjab lining the international border between India and Pakistan, it was an offer considered a godsend by many. Balbir thought he was lucky to have been the chosen one.

Now, as a 58-year-old resident of Mahal village in Amritsar’s outskirts, Balbir is a disillusioned patriot, currently scrounging a meagre living as a night watchman. Known as Balbir jasoos to many of his neighbours, the former Indian spy, who spent 12 years in Pakistani prisons, is fighting a lost battle against the system in trying to salvage petty recognition for his service towards the nation.

“I sometimes feel it would have been better to die in Pakistan,” he says cynically. “That way, I would never have had to come back to such dishonour.”

Balbir is not alone in his mission. Through the past decade, as many as 35 people once employed in cross-border espionage from villages in the Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts have knocked on the doors of the law to seek justice for their alleged exploitation by local intelligence officials. The government response has been apathetic. But with the recent furore over the release of former spy Kashmir Singh from Pakistan, and the future of his colleague Sarabjit Singh, currently on death row, they are hoping their cases will get a shot in the arm.

Balbir, on his part, has drafted a letter which he plans to send to Punjab chief minister Prakash Singh Badal, requesting the politician to personally intervene in his case.

The sarkaar, predictably, is not making any admissions about Indian spies — then or now — in Pakistan. And security experts maintain it is not obliged to. “No government would ever admit carrying out espionage activities,” says former top intelligence official M.K. Dhar. “Spies are professionals, exposed to professional risk, who don’t come back home to the sounds of cymbals and horns. They return, if they return at all, quietly and live quietly, for which they are trained and paid.”

But the former spies of Punjab are not convinced. “We’ve never complained of the harrowing time we spent in jail, or the torture inflicted on us by Pakistanis,” says 58-year-old Mahinder Singh, resident of Amritsar’s Arjan Nagar Bhatta village, who now pulls a rickshaw. “All we want is some financial security in return for our services,” he says.

Their stories are hauntingly similar. Most say they were recruited in their early 20s. Nine months of intensive training in security camps in Punjab followed, which removed all traces of their identity as Sikhs. They were shorn, circumcised, and versed in the Islamic tradition.

“At the end of training, we became Urdu-speaking, namaaz-offering, cow-eating individuals, with nothing to tell us apart from Pakistanis living across the border,” recalls Balwinder Singh, sitting in his humble home in Gaunsabad village, half-an-hour’s drive from the Attari-Wagah border separating India and Pakistan.

Mostly sent on missions to carry back secret documents to India, the agents say they routinely crossed over to Pakistan in the years after the 1971 Indo-Pak war. “We would be carried out to the border in BSF vehicles at night. We would quietly wait until the call for azaan was sounded around 4 am,” says Balbir. “That’s when security across the border was relaxed temporarily.”

Sometimes, they were spotted by the Pakistani Rangers, and bullets would whiz past them as they scurried for cover. If they managed to survive, they trekked to nearby Pakistani villages where their local contacts were waiting for them.

“One of my jobs was to pay our agents in Pakistan,” recalls Balbir, who operated under the alias Muhammad Sultan, and had an account in a Pakistani bank under that name. “The intelligence people maintained a balance of around Rs 2 lakh in the account, which took care of my expenses in Pakistan,” he says.

In Pakistan, the spies say they assumed local identities, and provided false addresses while checking into hotels. “There was a proper chain of people involved,” says Balbir, “ranging from people within Pakistani security administrations who were on Indian payrolls and long-term resident Indian spies who would often lodge new spies and direct us on assignments.”

It was a job fraught with peril, but the men loved it. Until, of course, they were arrested by Pakistani troops, mostly acting on tip-offs from double agents. The Indian authorities played by the unwritten rules of espionage, leaving the arrested people on their own. Their families back home — who were unaware of their activities — were usually left in the dark. “My family only got to know about my arrest after I wrote to them from Pakistan,’ says Jagdish Lal, another ex-sleuth, now 53, who works as a construction labourer in Amritsar.

Most were handed sentences of 10 to 14 years. Then, in 1986, an entire group of spies were granted state pardon, and released near Bikaner. “We trekked back to Punjab from there,” says Mahinder. “The sarkaar didn’t even know we had returned.”

It was only in 1996 that a handful of the ex-spies moved court, suing the government for its alleged apathy. But luck was not on their side. In the absence of documentary evidence, the courts turned down their petitions. Balbir’s case, filed in the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 1996, is still dragging on.

The only document they could obtain was an affidavit filed by a former personnel of the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) who was in charge of recruiting spies in the early 1970s. His document, submitted before the office of the Oath Commissioner, Amritsar, in 2003, corroborated the villagers’ claim that spies were employed by the IB and the military intelligence wing.

“Sources are never issued any sort of identity in the interest of national security,” the affidavit said. “Their expenses are borne from secret funds allotted by the government which are never audited.”

Ranjan Lakhanpal, a High Court advocate who has represented many former spies in the past, says the system is generally averse to ruling in favour of such petitioners, since legal endorsement would mean that the government engages in espionage.

Meanwhile, the former spies of Punjab continue to live on, from one day to the other, hoping they would finally be compensated for their efforts some day.