PILGRIMAGE TO PRISON
Daniel Robinson, 38 years old, left England for China over a year ago. Since then he has prepared for and undertaken a magnificent and sacred journey, the like of which few men have even dreamed of in a lifetime, and fewer still attempted. His pilgrimage has taken him, firstly in the company of a group of Tibetans, along the ancient Tea Caravan Trail from China to the Holy city of Lhasa in Tibet. From there he continued alone, on foot, with only the company of his two horses, down through the mighty Himalayas, towards the source of the Holy river Ganga. On this epic trek he covered over 3000 kilometers (over 1,800 miles).
But on such daring journey, things can not always go to plan. Delayed, because one of his horses was ill and one exhausted and in foal, he lingered a month in the high mountains. With the onset of winter, as icy winds and snow on the high slopes of the Himalaya made the landscape uninhabitable, he was forced to leave quickly and move downwards. This is where his pilgrimage went horribly wrong. Daniel did not have an entry visa for India and no way of applying for one either, from the slopes of the mountains. Instead of abandoning his horses, his pilgrimage or both, he decided to move down the mountains and over the border into India. Indeed, as his journey progressed and conditions became increasingly difficult, he ran out of food for himself and his horses in the vast empty borderlands, and was eventually glad to hand himself over, exhausted and starving, to the military authorities in the second encampment he encountered, just above Josimoth. That was at the end of October.
At the encampment he was arrested and his horses taken into military custody. He was transported to Pursari Jail, outside Gopeshwar, where his pilgrimage was brought to an abrupt end. There he sat for over two months, enduring intensive interrogation from four different security services, treated like a common criminal while he awaited the long and arduous process of his case being brought to trial. His health was, and is, broken. He suffered a bout of pneumonia and a kidney infection and, since he is also asthmatic, prison conditions are inevitably and inexorably effecting his health. He shares a cell with over twenty other prisoners, most of whom smoke, and has been refused alternative prison accommodation, even though it has been requested on by the British High Commission on humanitarian grounds.
The magistrate of Gopeshwar did not allow Daniel Robinson to have a lawyer until his daughter (19 years) visited him with a family friend [the author] on 15th December, nearly 60 days after his arrest. His widowed mother and his friends in England have had no means by which to contact him, or indeed, to discover how his case is proceeding. They have been frantic with worry. In prison he was found to be emaciated, subsisting a near- starvation diet, and constantly reliant on the daily use of an inhaler just to breathe, giving new grounds for concern. The latest news is that he has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for entering India without a visa. His daughter, Justina, his mother and friends are distraught.
Daniel has indeed been both naïve and foolish. By entering Indian territory, over a disputed border, and without an entry visa, he has undoubtedly committed a crime. Yet there are thousands of people living quiet lives in both India and England who also possess no valid entrance visa, or visa of residency. Daniel, in contrast to many, gave himself up to the Indian authorities and entered India with no criminal or evil intent. He has never previously committed a crime. He is not an ordinary soul: he has been foolish, but always honest. He has undertaken a magnificent and epic journey, over some of the hardest terrain known to man. It seems a crime to those who have witnessed his integrity that he must pay such a heavy price for his foolishness: a year of his life, and the inevitable break down of his health. Who knows what may befall him in jail, if all appeals fail and he is indeed kept for 12 long months?
India is a country with a magnificent spiritual tradition of pilgrimage, based on an enduring respect for faith and belief that appears to many in the Western world to override the empty materialism that now runs rampant across the globe. Daniel should not stand outside the law, of India or of Britain, but in sentencing him so harshly is the Indian legal system paying due respect to its own lineage of spiritual leaders, such as the Buddha Himself? Compassion, love and peace are the earmarks of true justice in any democratic country. Justice must be even-handed and embrace spiritual as well as material concerns. Daniel Robinson made his journey in service to a common spiritual humanity that goes beyond the bounds of borders and of politics and terror. Readers who hear this news and hold spiritual values dear, are gratefully urged to assist Daniel by signing an online petition against his sentence [].