DELHI: Some things are better left unsaid.
That’s the reasoning former Indian prisoner Hamid Ansari offered for refusing to divulge details of his experience after spending six years in jail in Pakistan.
He was finally repatriated to India on Tuesday. For now, he says he’s just happy to be back home.
On Wednesday, the 33-year-old engineer met India’s External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, in New Delhi and narrated the trauma that he went through in the past six years.
Meanwhile, his family expressed their gratitude to Swaraj for facilitating Hamid’s repatriation to India.
“I am happy to be back in India,” Hamid told reporters after his return to Delhi. He refused to talk about his ordeal adding: “I don’t want to remember the past by talking about my experience.”
During his meeting with Swaraj, which lasted for half an hour, Hamid got emotional, saying he was “sorry” for the trouble he had caused his family and the government.
His mother, Fauzia Ansari, profusely thanked Swaraj for facilitating her son’s return. “My son has come back from the jaws of death. He has got a new life,” she said during her interaction with the foreign minister.
Swaraj, on her part, asked Hamid to “forget the past as a bad phase in your life and focus on the future”.
Hamid served three years in the Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court in 2015 for possessing a fake identity card.
In search of a better livelihood, he had reportedly left his hometown of Mumbai in India to look for a job in Afghanistan.
In 2012, however, he allegedly entered Kohat, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, to meet a girl he had befriended on social media.
Pakistan, however, said that Hamid was an Indian spy who had illegally entered the country while accusing him of being involved in anti-state crimes and forgery, prior to sentencing him to six years in jail.
His jail term ended on December 15 following which a Pakistani court gave the government a month’s time to complete formalities and deport him to India.
Hamid’s release attracted widespread media attention in India with several newspapers and TV channels headlining the story.
