BHOPAL: Thirty years after he strayed into Pakistan and was jailed there, Madhya Pradesh’s Prahlad Singh stepped on Indian soil on Monday. Brutal torture in Pakistan custody has rendered the mental patient unable to speak, said police.
Back home in Ghoshi Patti village, about 45km from Sagar city in MP, Prahlad’s brother Veer Singh couldn’t speak either. He just kept crying.
For 23 years, the family didn’t have a clue if Prahlad was alive or dead, let alone that he was in a Pakistan prison. Once he knew, though, Veer fought for his brother’s freedom like a man possessed. Half of Prahlad’s life had wasted away behind bars in Pakistan, Veer was determined that his remaining years should be as a free man.
The Pakistan Rangers on Monday handed over Prahlad, 58, and another Indian to BSF at Wagah Border after they were released from Rawalpindi central jail. Officials here say Prahlad was tortured after his arrest in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, with no regard to his mental condition.
“Prahlad is not in a condition to speak or recall anything. Let him be home with his family for some days. He will be alright,” said a police officer.
What makes his plight even more distressing is that he had completed his prison term but continued languish in jail, along with 21 others, as the Indian government had no information about their relatives. Battling mental ailments, they couldn’t give much information on their families back home, making it difficult for the authorities to identify them and begin the process to have them freed.
Prahlad was 28 when he mysteriously disappeared. He doesn’t know yet that his mother and one of his brothers have died. Veer, two other brothers and three sisters are eagerly awaiting his arrival.
When local mediapersons went to their home on Monday, Veer couldn’t speak through his tears at first. After a while, he said: “He is mentally unstable. We tried to look for him everywhere. It was only in 2014, when police came looking for his credentials, that we came to know he was a prisoner in Pakistan. We have no clue how he ended up there.”
Sagar SP Atul Singh had 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.
Prahlad may have inadvertently crossed into Pakistan or he may have been trafficked, say officers. He is the seventh ‘mentally ill’ MP resident to surface in a Pakistan jail, and that’s too much of a coincidence, say officials, suspecting that a cross-border trafficking ring may be at work.
