Lucknow: It may sound like a story straight from Bollywood and even has strange similarities to Yash Chopra’s Veer Zara but unlike the 2004 blockbuster, this one has not had a happy ending.
Javed, a TV mechanic from Rampur, has spent 11 years and 6 months in jail because the police found love letters, written in Urdu, from his possession.
Narrating his ordeal to a web portal, Javed, who was recently felicitated by Rihai Manch, a social organisation, said that he was picked up by the police on the morning of August 10, 2002 just when he had opened his shop on Degree College road.
He was given third degree torture for three days and the cops asked him to accept the fact that he had been receiving letters written in Urdu from the ISI under the name of Mobina –Mobina was his girlfriend from Pakistan who had written eight letters to him in Urdu. Javed was produced before court on the third day and then began his media trial.
“The media trial was worse than the police atrocities that I faced. Later, I learnt that my friends Maqsood and Taj Mohammad had also been picked up by the cops the same day,” he said. The cops produced a map of Bareilly cantonment area which they insisted had been recovered from the possession of Javed and his friends.
It took Javed 11 years to prove his innocence. He was finally released in 2014.
“It has been two years but I still wake up in the middle of the night when I dream of the jail,” he said.
Javed recalled that he had met Mobina, a distant relative, when he visited Pakistan for two months with his mother in 1999 and the two fell in love.
The years in jail have made him lose contact with Mobina.
“She must be married by now and I do not know if she knows about my ordeal here”, he said. Javed now wants to start life afresh and refuses to be photographed for this reason. “I want to move to a new city where no one knows me so that I can begin on a new note,” he added.
