Lahore -
India has decided to send Karachi’s runaway boy, Mohammad Ramzan, as a ‘return
gift’ to Pakistan for returning Geeta nearly 15 years after she accidentally
crossed over to their territory.
Ramzan, the 15-year-old Karachi
boy, was separated from his mother at age of 10 when his father took him to
Bangladesh and remarried. After being tortured by his stepmother, the boy crossed
the border alone in 2011 with the hope of coming back to his mother in
Pakistan.
He is currently staying at a
shelter home ‘Umeed’ run by an NGO ‘Aarambh’.
India’s Foreign Minister Sushma
Swaraj assured on Monday that an official would be sent to Pakistan to
facilitate the return of Ramzan. “I am going to send our official to Pakistan
tomorrow to facilitate Ramzan’s return to his homeland,” she told reporters,
after meeting the teenager who has been stranded in India for over two years.
Addressing the media at her
official residence, where Ramzan was also present, Sushma said she was set to
meet Geeta, the deaf and mute Indian girl who recently returned to India from
Pakistan after a decade. “I am going to meet Geeta in Indore (a city of Indian state
Madhya Pradesh) tomorrow,” the India’s foreign minister said.
Ramzan had traveled to many
states before landing in Bhopal where he was spotted at the railway station by
the government railway police (GRP) on September 22, 2013, and shifted to a
shelter home run by ‘Child line’ an NGO. He has remained there since then. In
September this year, a student from Bhopal traced the boy’s family in Karachi
by sharing pictures via social media.
Ramzan’s mother, Razia Begum,
after learning that her son is in India, contacted Pakistani human rights
activist Ansar Burney with a request for her child’s release and return. She
also uploaded a video appealing to the Indian government to send her son home.
Burney had mailed a copy of the passports of Ramzan’s grandparents to the
Indian embassy and ‘Childline’, an NGO, for help to no avail until Geeta safely
returned back to India.
No comments:
Post a Comment