AGRA: For over a month, Sawal Singh, 62, remained in bondage. The driver with the UP Roadways had been asked by his three sons to give them his six-bigha land. He said he would not. Unhappy with his call, they put him away in a room of his house in Mathura’s Sihora village, bound in chains. Singh was freed on Saturday after the senior citizens’ helpline checked up on him to find him captive.
In a video, purportedly shot moments before his rescue, the emaciated man can be seen sitting on a cot in a small room, his feet bound in chains, a pitcher of water, a steel platter and a mug beneath his cot. “I had to defecate and urinate right here … They are making me lose my sanity,” he says in the video.
The case had been on the senior citizens’ helpline radar for a while. “On June 25, we received a call from Singh. He told me that he had escaped from the house after cutting off the chains with help from his grandchildren. We reached the house with the police. The matter was resolved with verbal assurances from the family,” Pramod Solanki, field response officer of the senior citizens’ helpline in Mathura, told TOI. “Following up on the case, when I asked about him, someone told me that he had been chained again. His mobile phone had been broken by his family … We visited the house with police and social welfare department officials and freed him on Saturday.”
His sons did not deny they kept him in chains but said they were doing this to “keep him out of trouble”. Rajesh, his son, said, “All of us brothers are truck drivers. We stay away from home for long periods of time. He creates problems for others because he gets abusive after drinking. He threatened to sell the six-bigha land. He would not give it to us.”
Mathura’s social welfare officer Ramashankar Gupta said it was a property dispute. He added, “His children can’t hold him captive over that. It is inhumane.”
