Presiding over a pile of news reports featuring him, Yasin Malik asks the question he hopes we will pass on to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

"If an anti-India person like (All-Parties Hurriyat Conference leader Abdul Gani) Lone can be allowed to go to Pakistan, why can't an ordinary Kashmiri like me given a passport?"

We are in Zandferan, a village in the militancy-infested Baramulla district. From here, it is just a long walk to Pakistan. At his rambling house, Yasin is telling us his remarkable -- and most unfortunate -- tale.

"(Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader) Yasin Malik was allowed to go to America for medical treatment," he continues, "but I am not permitted to visit my ailing uncle in Pakistan!"

As you must have guessed, this Yasin Malik in not that Yasin Malik. But he does share a few similarities with his famous namesake.

He, too, is a heart patient, he says. He too has been to jail. And he too would like to visit Pakistan.

Our Yasin is 32, thin, below average height, "an engineering diploma holder." His English is halting, he has trouble expressing himself clearly even in Urdu.

He operates a small provision store in his village -- let's, for now, overlook the common tragedy of qualified youth who can find no employment in Kashmir -- that becomes a maze of slushy mud-roads every time there is rain or snow.

Yasin's saga started on January 24, 1999. With a hard-got visa, passport (A 1542660), two bags and Rs 2,000, he set out from New Delhi on the Samjautha Express. For Bawalpura in Pakistan, to visit his father's elder brother.

At Punjab's Attari border, after he had finished the customs check, he was taken for the JKLF chief and turned back. For the time being, we won't touch upon the fact that only a blind man or a complete ignoramus could have made such a blunder -- our Yasin isn't anything like the other.

Yasin was handed over to the police. They charged him with holding a fake passport. He was presented before the chief judicial magistrate. As he did not have the required bail money, he was sent to jail.

He spent the next two months in Amritsar, with hardcore criminals, "weeping the whole day." He walked free again when his father finally arrived with the security deposit.

"The police knew I wasn't Yasin Malik," the villager tells us. "But they wanted money. They asked for Rs 1,000. Unfortunately, except for Rs 500, I had changed the rest to Pakistani currency, which they refused to accept.

"I spent that night in custody. The next morning, an intelligence official arrived. I was crying. He told me a page in my passport, 27-28, was missing...

"The police must have torn it out -- if it was missing, how did the immigration official stamp it?

"They took me to Amritsar, straight to a lawyer," Yasin continues. "He first removed the Rs 500 I had in my pocket. He wanted Rs 40,000. He took my father's contact telephone number when I said I didn't have that kind of money."

Yasin, thus, landed up in the Amritsar jail. He says his bail was for Rs 10,000 and not Rs 40,000 as the lawyer claimed.

Being jailed, and that too far away from home, was frightening. Especially for an unimposing village lad who had never traveled out of his home state much.

"It was a grim place," Yasin recollects. "I gave up hope of ever getting out when I walked in. My bed was near the toilet and the stench was horrible. "In jail, I met a few others. They said the police had taken them directly to this same lawyer, who had demanded Rs 40,000 from them too!

The lawyer, meanwhile, had contacted the villager's father and demanded Rs 40,000. "If he had told him the bail was only for Rs 10,000, my father could have arranged for it more quickly," Yasin takes up the story. "It took him two months... and, even then, he could manage only Rs 10,000."

Yasin's father reached Amritsar in March. The lawyer, says Yasin, wanted more money -- first Rs 30,000, which he reduced to Rs 20,000 after heavy haggling. In any event, he arranged for bail and Yasin walked out of the jail on March 23.

"I went home and then returned to Amritsar with two Kashmiri shawls, two kilogrammes badam (almonds), one wrist watch and Rs 200 for the lawyer," Yasin says. "He insisted on Rs 20,000. I said my bail money was Rs 10,000 and I had already paid that."

Yasin says he offered the lawyer Rs 5,000 as fees and told him that he would take the matter up with the National Human Rights Commission if he insisted on Rs 20,000.

"What will human rights do for you?" Yasin quotes the lawyer as asking him. "Human rights is for the rich, not the poor!"

So it seems. Yasin reported the matter to the J&K Human Rights Commission. After a long time, he received a note saying the case was not under its jurisdiction but that of its Punjab's counterpart -- could he please approach them?

Yasin did. And is now awaiting judgment.

He also approached the National Human Rights Commission, which, strangely, transferred his case to the Tamil Nadu chief minister. For proof, Yasin produces a tattered note on an official-looking paper. It reads thus: