KARACHI, Pakistan — August 24, 2014 — Fishermen bustled through a ramshackle harbor, a knot of narrow streets and one-room houses on the edge of Karachi, as they prepared to set out to sea for the summer fishing season. But one man was going nowhere. As other fishermen mended their nets in a field, Abdul Shakoor hunched outside his front door, weaving a rug.
After 15 years on the boats, Mr. Shakoor said, he was seeking a new profession — a decision his wife, Zahida, heartily endorsed. “He’s getting into a boat again over my dead body,” she said firmly. “I won’t let him go.”
Mr. Shakoor, 34, returned to Karachi recently after a two-year spell in an Indian jail. He is one of several thousand fishermen, both Pakistani and Indian, who have been arrested at sea in recent years by the opposing countries’ navies. The fishermen are accused of crossing a border they cannot see and whose exact location is in dispute.
The quarrel goes back to the 1960s, when Pakistan and India first disagreed on the status of Sir Creek, a channel of water that separates Sindh Province in Pakistan from the Indian state of Gujarat. Since then, the argument has broadened into a wider dispute over how the land borders should extend into the Arabian Sea.
Over the years, in a bid to break the impasse, the two governments have commissioned surveys, held talks and proposed compromises. When Gen. Pervez Musharraf ruled Pakistan, he claimed to have come close to a settlement during secretive talks with his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh. But General Musharraf was ousted in 2008, and, like so much between India and Pakistan, Sir Creek remains unresolved.
Today, the two governments cannot even agree on which map to use when discussing their sea borders, lawyers say. And where diplomats have failed, fishermen are paying the price.