As India and Pakistan stare each other down, people who fish around a disputed sea border find themselves caught in a trap. 

Veraval is a colourful, coastal city in western India’s Gujarat state, dotted with sand, sea and boats ready to set sail into the Arabian Sea. But for some, the colours of the boats, the roaring of the sea and the darkness on the horizon at dusk, send shivers down their spine.

Many of those in Veraval and neighbouring ports of Diu, Okha, Porbandar and Jakhau have lost their loved ones to the gambit of the sea. For over decades now Indian fishermen have been falling prey to an imaginary border over water that signals the end of Indian, and beginning of Pakistani, territory.

In February 2025, Pakistan released 22 fishermen who had been apprehended by Pakistan Maritime Security Agency from April 2021 to December 2022, while fishing near the maritime boundary in the Arabian sea near Gujarat. In 2023, Pakistani authorities had released 198 Indian fishermen who had languished in a prison in Karachi for years on charges of illegal fishing along the disputed International Maritime Boundary Line.

Pakistan and India have been in a state of hostility ever since the British Empire granted them independence in 1947 and separated the two countries in what was known as the Partition.

Since 1947 they have fought a total of four wars against each other. These days, a heightened sense of war looms over the two countries over Kashmir, a region they both claim full rights over, but control partially.

On May 7, India launched missiles targeting civilian facilities in several parts of Pakistan to avenge what India labelled as a ‘terrorist act’, which it accused Pakistan of committing on April 22, where 26 tourists were killed in Indian-ruled Kashmir.

Over decades and despite rounds of discussions and meetings, the two countries have failed to carve out who controls what part of the Creek.

For the last four years, Somabhai, a 60-year-old fisherman has been missing from Diu’s Vanakbara port. On March 17, India’s Ministry of External Affairs revealed that 194 Indian fishermen are currently imprisoned in Pakistan. Somabhai is one of them. 

“My husband went to cast his net in the sea in December 2022 and has not returned since,” said Somabhai’s wife, Laxmibai. “We were informed by authorities that his boat was apprehended by Pakistani authorities.”

Fearing a different kind of storm

While Laxmibai waits for Somabhai, many women like her also wait for their sons, brothers and husbands who they lost to their traditional occupation of fishing. Families of fishermen have been losing their loved ones to the ambiguity of the maritime border ever since the partition of India and Pakistan. 

It was one windy day in December 2022, when Dakshaben kept looking at the loosely hanging door of her brick and mud house in Diu’s Vanakbara village. She saw a storm brewing, with palm and coconut trees barely standing their ground.

“I could already feel that something ominous would happen,” she said. “A few hours later, I was informed that my husband was arrested near the international maritime border.”

For Dakshaben, her husband Jitesh Soma is her world and all that it holds within its folds. With eyes that no longer question or complain, but just wait in silence, she survives to raise her two teenagers, hoping that Soma will return one day, just like the other 22 fishermen who were recently released.

Fishermen who still gander at the biggest catch in the sea explain what pushes them and others like them to stray into unknown waters. Climate change, they say, is thinning fish activity at the coast, coercing them to stray deeper into the ocean. 

Caught in a political net

The contested estuary of Sir Creek, is known for its quality seafood, which fetches substantial sums of money to the fishermen. Warmer climatic conditions push these quality fish into deeper waters, making the quest for quality extremely dangerous. 

But while the families of these fishermen patiently await their return, losing their sole breadwinners has landed them in a cyclic condition of incurring loans. 

The eyes of another victim of the water dispute, Arati Chavdam cannot often wander away to avoid shedding tears in front of people when she speaks of her husband who has been jailed for almost four years now. She shared that she loses hope every now and then, but her son’s questions about his father steel her struggle and resolve to bring him back home. What bothers Chavda is the money she has been borrowing for the last four years, ever since her husband Alpesh Chavda was arrested. 

“Now, there is no one who would want to loan me money. Even my tears have dried up from all this anxiety,” she said.

Kantaben Chunilal, a mother whose son was barely 17 when he was arrested in 2021, was the sole breadwinner of his family. She wears a shrunken face and dwarfed posture. She feels ashamed of turning to her relatives for loans to fill the empty grain jars in her kitchen. Her son Jashvant, was and is her only hope to break this cycle of loans. 

“The government offers us a financial aid of $3 per day,” she said. “It is not even half of what our men would earn.”

‘As good as dead’

It was because of illnesses that Pakistan released the 22 fishmermen in February of this year. Ashok Kumar Solanki was among the ones who recently made it back home to Diu. Solanki has hearing and speaking impairments.

In March, Gaurav Ram, a 52-year-old Indian fisherman committed suicide at Pakistan’s Malir Jail. Arrested in February 2022, Ram was found hanging by the ceiling in the washroom of the barrack where Indian fishermen were being kept.

This shook the families of the fishermen back home in India. 

Damuben, one of the many women among the fishermen’s families, is still worried about her brother Premji Solanki. Those who have returned home informed her that her brother was alive and safe in the Pakistani prison. 

“We are uneducated, illiterate fisherfolk who know nothing but fishing,” Damuben said. “We don’t mean to cross into the Pakistani side. But it’s an estuary, it shifts naturally. Water does not have any demarcations. Yet the hostility between India-Pakistan makes us slaves of the situation.”

Pleading with the government

Damuben regularly connects with all affected families and arranges meetings with the heads of the fishermen’s union who are in touch with the local government bodies and connected at the ministerial level too. Families of jailed fishermen have been writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, but they say that they have received no response to date. 

“It is not that this is a recent happening, our brothers are arrested every few years for straying into Pakistani waters unknowingly,” Damuben said. “But the Government doesn’t make any improvement in patrolling to prevent more fishermen from being arrested. For them, we are as good as dead.”

In Diu, another local who doubles as social worker is Bharat Chavda, who engages in keeping a record of all those women who complain of their husbands not returning days after they went for fishing. Chavda has a good bond with the fishermen community and makes sure that their voice reaches the right people.

While their representative from Diu, in India’s Parliament, Umeshbhai Patel regularly highlights the plight that the community consistently and continuously faces, the seven decades worth of antagonism between India and Pakistan seems to block all efforts made towards speedy release of the fishermen, 194 of whom still sit jailed in Pakistan’s Landhi Jail. 

But for Laxmibai, nearing 60 years of age, the belligerent behaviour between the two border sharing countries doesn’t dim her desire to see her husband, Somabhai. “He must come back before I die, I don’t want to die without seeing him,” she said.

Questions to consider:

1. What makes it difficult for fishermen in India to keep to their side of the border with Pakistan?

2. How did the animosity between India and Pakistan start?

3. What do you think it might take for the two countries to make peace with each other?