New Delhi, May 2: Most famously they used to walk across Berlin’s Glienecke Bridge, immortalised in John le Carre’s Smiley’s People.

Swapping spy for spy was always the done thing, repeated even at the peak of the Cold War on that bridge, from where US and Russian troops took home their own secret soldiers.

They have not heard of the Berlin bridge in either Bhikhiwind or Fidda, two villages 70km apart in Punjab near the Pakistan border. A son of Bhikhiwind has just been killed and one of Fidda got plain lucky.

What makes the story so different for India and Pakistan?

The bruised and battered body of Sarabjit Singh will be given a funeral in Bhikhiwind tomorrow, flown in by a special aircraft that makes a mockery of the official care he lacked in his lifetime.

Surjeet Singh of Fidda walked across the Wagah border after 30 years in Pakistan’s Kot Lakhpat prison — where he occasionally met Sarabjit — last July.

Officially, India does not acknowledge that they were spies. Sarabjit the farmer, the official and the family version goes, strayed across the border in a drunken stupor on August 28, 1990. Pakistani police arrested him and accused him of engineering blasts in Lahore and Faisalabad in which at least 14 people were killed.

His lawyer Awais Sheikh says Sarabjit’s was a case of mistaken identity. The Pakistani police called him Manjit Singh and, Sheikh says, there wasn’t adequate evidence against him after a witness retracted his statement.

In July last year, Pakistan first announced a presidential pardon for him but at night said it was Surjeet, not Sarabjit, who was being returned to India. On his return, an angry Surjeet told ABP News that he had crossed over to Pakistan to spy for Indian forces no less than 85 times. Sarabjit has not lived to tell his tale.

The desperation of poverty and the accident of geography have often collided in border villages to script similar stories — in Punjab, in Rajasthan and in Jammu and Kashmir. They are names like Roop Lal Saharia, who returned in 2008, Kashmir Singh, who spent 35 years in a Pakistan jail, and, of course, Surjeet Singh.

The Indian Army, Border Security Force and the Intelligence Bureau — to name just a few agencies — have recruited villagers to spy on Pakistani forces, to drop dead letters and to hire Pakistanis as spies.

Pakistan and its “non-state actors” have done the same, maybe even worse — like sending Ajmal Kasab and his gang to Mumbai.

Former spymaster Maloy Krishna Dhar, who died last year, wrote a fictionalised account of such a spy in his book Mission to Pakistan. It was based on the life of Ravindra Kaushik of Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan.

Kaushik was hired by the IB, trained, sent to Dubai where he was given a fake Pakistani passport, and sent to Pakistan. He joined the Pakistani army as an officer known as Nabi Ahmed till his cover was blown by another Indian spy. At the age of 50, he died in a Multan jail in 2002, the year Dhar’s book was published. After Kaushik’s death, his brother Rajeshwar told journalists about receiving a letter from him in which he wrote: “Had I been an American, I would have been out of this jail in three days.”

Dhar often lamented, in his own writings and also in conversations with this correspondent, the raw deal that India gave its spies.

Commenting on the Cold War spy swaps that the Glienecke Bridge — also called the “Bridge of Spies” — represented, a political analyst based in the US, Chris Lapetina, writes: “I think most Americans understand we spy on Russia and Russia spies on us and if we get caught it’s better if we have our own people back and they get theirs back.”

The killing of Sarabjit shows India and Pakistan are afraid to get as real. If there are hundreds of Indians in Pakistani jails and vice versa — not all of them are spies, or terrorists, of course — and swapping spy for spy (or prisoner for prisoner) is an old practice, Sarabjit’s is a story of bad timing.

Both India and Pakistan have returned prisoners in the past — even as recently as six months ago, fishermen from Gujarat who had strayed into Pakistani waters were returned. Sarabjit’s fate was sealed in the season of the hangings of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru and the beheadings of soldiers on the LoC.