BHOPAL: Almost three decades after his mysterious disappearance from Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh and arrest in Pakistan, Prahlad Singh Rajput, now 58, will reunite with his family this week.
Prahlad is the seventh ‘mentally ill’ MP resident to surface in Pakistan jails, say officials. Four of his brothers and three sisters are eagerly awaiting his arrival at Ghoshi Patti village, around 45km from Sagar city.
Sagar SP Atul Singh told TOI that Prahlad was missing since 1991. “As far as we know he was arrested in POK where he was kept for more than a month and then shifted to Rawalpindi,” he said, adding that his family says he was mentally unstable.
In 2017, when India was trying bring back its former Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav from a Pakistani jail, the Indian embassy in Islamabad had made an appeal for information on 22 prisoners, including Prahlad, and posted their photographs on their official website http:// www.india.org.pk.
‘Most prisoners are mentally challenged’
They had completed their prison terms but were languishing in Pakistani jails and the Indian government had no information about relatives of these prisoners. It was becoming difficult for them to initiate their release without their actual identities. Most of them were mentally challenged and are not in the condition to tell about their families. They are awaiting repatriation,” said an intelligence officer.
In 2015, the Indian government had been given special consular access to 17 of these prisoners, but none of them could reveal any information about their families.
Since Prahlad was from Sagar, local police were contacted. “We have records of some correspondence. His brother, who is a government employee, had submitted an application about his disappearance in 2015,” said the officer.
“Prahlad may have inadvertently crossed into the neighbouring country, or he was trafficked,” he added.
SP Sagar received information on Friday that Pakistan would be handing Prahlad to India. “We are sending a team with his family to Amritsar to bring him back,” SP told TOI.
Before Prahlad it was Barilal alias Darilal. Almost 20 months after he went missing and mysteriously surfacing in Pakistan, Barilal returned to his home in Damoh district of MP in July this year. While mystery shrouds his entry into Pakistan, all Barilal remembers is that he had boarded a train for a firm that had hired him as a labourer.
Repeated incidents like this have raised suspicion of a cross-border organ trafficking ring that may be preying on poor and mentally challenged people.
Barilal’s escapade across the border seems uncannily similar to those of Jitendra Arjunwar of Seoni, Raju Laxman of Khandwa, Budhram Marko of Dindori, Anil Saket of Rewa and Sunil Uikey of Balaghat. Raju and Anil are still in Pakistan jails. Like Raju’s relatives, Bari’s family too was looking for him until they got a shocker from local police in 2019 — that he was in Pakistan police custody.
