The Waiting Game: Invisible prisoners of a visible conflict

Every year, dozens of Indian and Pakistani fishermen are arrested for allegedly straying across maritime borders in the Arabian Sea - a region where the territorial lines are as murky as the politics surrounding them. The stakes are especially high near the disputed Sir Creek region, where families are routinely torn apart by a few invisible miles. Yet beyond the headlines of cross-border tensions and stalled diplomacy lies a quieter, deeper story - one of indefinite waiting, absent fathers and fractured communities.

The Waiting Game, a new documentary by journalist and filmmaker Kanika Gupta, brings that story to light through the voices of women in India’s coastal Gujarat region, whose husbands, sons and brothers were picked up at sea and vanished into Pakistani prisons. Shot with patient intimacy and journalistic precision, the film foregrounds the ripple effects of a geopolitical conflict that is often measured in military terms, but lived most painfully in domestic ones.

In this interview with FairPlanet, Gupta discusses the roots of the film, the human cost of politicised maritime arrests and the environmental degradation that is pushing fishermen further into dangerous waters.

As she recounts, the project began not with sweeping policy analysis, but with a simple impulse to listen, and a desire to reframe the conversation around borders and justice through the lens of those left behind.

You can watch the full documentary here. 

FairPlanet: How did you first come across the issue of Indian and Pakistani fishermen being arrested for crossing territorial waters? How much attention does this issue receive in mainstream Indian media today?

Kanika Gupta: I became acquainted with this issue while researching peace efforts between India and Pakistan. A documentary highlighting the work of cross-border activists involved in securing the release of fishermen arrested at sea caught my attention.

I decided to dig deeper and found that while the issue has been widely reported in both India and Pakistan, I wanted to bring all perspectives together on a single platform. I proposed a collaborative piece to the Pulitzer Center, involving a Pakistani journalist and publishing the story on a neutral platform to provide a 360-degree view of the problem.

The report was eventually published in Nikkei Asia Review and went on to become one of the most-read stories.

Cross-Border Arrests: How Fishermen Become Collateral in India-Pakistan Tensions

For readers who haven’t seen The Waiting Game yet, can you briefly summarise the crisis and its impact on the local communities in Gujarat?

I would like to stress that this issue is pervasive not just in India but also Pakistan. However, due to inaccessibility, I covered this issue only from the Indian side. 

The Arabian Sea is shared by India’s Gujarat and Pakistan’s Sindh provinces. At the center of the issue is the Sir Creek dispute, a territorial conflict over a 96-kilometre marshy strip in the Rann of Kutch, which has made it difficult to clearly demarcate the maritime boundary and affected fishing rights.

As a result, fishermen from both sides often end up crossing into disputed waters and get arrested for alleged illegal fishing. Many fishermen I spoke to during my reporting said they didn’t even realise they had crossed the border but were immediately picked up by the Pakistani Maritime Security Agency (PMSA).

Ideally, they should be released once their identities are confirmed, but this process alone can take years. In the meantime, they end up languishing in jails across the border and are often used as political bargaining chips.

The Waiting Game tells the story of the families they leave behind, who wait endlessly for their return - often the only earning members of the household.

How did you go about structuring your investigation? What helped you decide which aspects of the story were most urgent to focus on?

I reported along the coastal belt of Gujarat and Diu for a week, meeting as many people as I could to find a common thread in their stories. What stood out most was that it was the women who were paying the highest price.

They were the ones left behind with young children, many of whom had to drop out of school either due to lack of income or because there was no adult at home to care for them. This reality struck me deeply, especially because I hadn’t seen anyone report on the issue from this perspective before.

We often talk about the political and diplomatic fallout, but we forget that the cost of these actions is not shared equally - some bear a far heavier burden. That’s when I decided I wanted to shift the narrative and tell this story through the lens of the women who spend years in waiting, whose lives are upended and whose children’s futures are pushed into uncertainty.

The Unseen Toll of Maritime Detentions

Could you share a bit about the process of connecting with the affected women and families? Were they open to sharing their stories from the beginning or did it take time to build trust?

I met these women through people who have been actively involved in securing the release of their family members, which made it easier to build trust. Fortunately, during my first visit, I didn’t have a camera with me. I was just there to listen and understand the issues they were facing. That helped them open up and become comfortable sharing their experiences.

When I returned a few months later to film, they recognised me immediately and were willing to speak on camera about their struggles, how they were managing their households and expenses without any additional income or news of their husbands, fathers or sons. I spent an entire day with them, and after a few hours, they forgot the camera was even there. They simply wanted to be heard and were eager to share what they were going through.

Pollution, Overfishing and a Broken System

The film also touches on industrial pollution and the degradation of aquatic environments.
Can you explain briefly how these environmental issues are affecting local fishermen and how they may be making the phenomenon of arrests even worse?

The unchecked industrial development along Gujarat’s coastal belt and the dumping of untreated waste into the Arabian Sea have severely affected the marine environment. Fish stocks close to the shore have reduced drastically because of pollution, overfishing and destruction of marine habitats.

As a result, fishermen are forced to go further into the sea to find a decent catch. This takes them dangerously close to the disputed border with Pakistan, and sometimes they unknowingly cross it. Many of them told me they are aware of the risks, but they have no other option. If they don’t catch enough fish, they won’t be hired again for the next season. So they take the risk, and if they get caught, they end up in jail, far from home and family.

In the documentary, journalist-activist Jatin Desai mentions the India-Pakistan Joint Judicial Committee on Prisoners, which last convened in 2013. Has there been any effective pressure from activists to revive the committee or push for more proactive measures by the governments?

The India-Pakistan Joint Judicial Committee on Prisoners has been inactive since 2013. While India reconstituted its panel of retired judges in 2018 and proposed reviving the committee, Pakistan has yet to nominate its members, leaving the mechanism dormant. As a result, efforts to address issues related to prisoners, including fishermen detained on both sides, have stalled.

Although both countries exchange lists of prisoners every six months, the lack of an active committee has caused significant delays in verifying identities and repatriating detainees, leaving many to languish in prison even after serving their sentences.

With recent escalations in hostilities between India and Pakistan, such bilateral mechanisms now face an even greater risk of remaining inactive and unresolved.

How do you hope The Waiting Game can support activists’ efforts to drive change for the prisoners and their families? Have you taken any steps to circulate the film among influential circles in India to help spark action?

The Waiting Game is an effort to humanise a deeply political issue. While India and Pakistan may not have the best of relations, we share thousands of kilometres of borders and resources. These issues, where innocent people are caught in the middle, are bound to arise. My hope is that this film will encourage policymakers to view the arrests of fishermen through the lens of human rights rather than through the lens of geopolitics.

This film has taken on even greater significance now, as India and Pakistan find themselves on the brink of tit-for-tat actions that could unravel the carefully crafted bilateral agreements, which once helped resolve conflicts in a fair and systematic way. I have organised screenings of this film at colleges and universities to ensure that the policymakers of tomorrow keep these issues in mind as they shape both domestic and foreign policies for the India of the future.

Looking back, what are some of your key takeaways from working on this project?
How has the experience shaped you as a journalist and documentarian?

The one thing I’ve learned and come to embrace as a documentarian is the uncertainty that comes with filming a documentary. Things can change in an instant, and we have to adapt and roll with the punches. When we started filming The Waiting Game, the fishing season was off, and we couldn’t capture the sea visuals we had hoped for. So, my DoP and I had to think outside the box and find creative solutions.

I also learned that as a documentarian, your inner journalist sometimes has to take a backseat in the interest of showing, not just telling. I had to remind myself to let the visuals speak for themselves instead of feeling the need to get everything on record. It’s a slow process of learning, but one I hope to refine with each new film.

Image by Anirudh Ganapathy.