Gajananad Sharma near the Wagah border in Attari Monday.
Seventy-year-old Gajanand Sharma has returned to India after 36 years via the Attari-Whaga border with 28 other prisoners, who were released by Pakistan as a goodwill gesture ahead of its Independence Day.
Sharma’s family members await his return at his Jaipur home. For the 36 years that Sharma, a labourer, was locked up in the Lahore central jail, his family had no clue about his whereabouts after he went missing from his home in 1982.
On Monday, he had to spend two-and-a-half hours for clearance at customs and immigration check points at the border and was briefly questioned by intelligence agencies. Sharma, clad in a Pakistani Salwar Kamiz, black chappals and holding his belongings in a white plastic bag, appeared to be very calm during all this.
Holding a banner to welcome Sharma, activists of Vipra Foundation from Jaipur were waiting at the border with flowers and sweets. “We have come to receive him with honour. It is our responsibility to take him to his house,” Said Sahdev Sharma of Vipra foundation.
At his Jaipur home, his wife Makhni Devi’s long wait for her husband to return home is near its end. Devi says the hours have grown longer after she was told that he was being released. She says she still does not know when he will return — if it will take a couple of days, or more.
An old photograph of Gajender Sharma.
Family members have been exchanging sweets, while Devi has been mostly laughing, but has broken down several times.
“I am very very happy. I would like to thank everyone, all those who have been working hard to help bring Gajanand back. For 36 years, mere ghar ka maalik nahi tha (the owner of the house was not home). Mere ghar ki kadar nahi thi (My home wasn’t held in esteem). We lived without kadar (esteem) all these years,” she said on Monday.
Sharma’s son Mukesh, who was 12 years old when his father went missing, now has three children and is 48.
“We had assumed he was dead. Then on May 7, we were told that he is lodged in a Pakistan jail. Then on May 9, we completed some formalities and it was officially confirmed (to the agencies) that he is an Indian citizen,” Mukesh said, thanking “social organisations, politicians, and the media” for their efforts to bring back his father.
The family members say that all these years, they only had memories and his three photographs to remember him.
“We don’t know anything about his arrival in Jaipur. We were told that he will be back after completing formalities, but it may take a day or two,” Mukesh said.
Earlier, Jaipur MP Bohra had said that Sharma had been sentenced to two months incarceration, but due to lack of consular access, he continued to remain in jail and that the family does not know the circumstances or Sharma’s alleged crime for which he was lodged in jail.
It was only this May, following an inquiry via the External Affairs Ministry, Jaipur police contacted his family and submitted Gajanand’s documents attesting his identity, with the family being told that he was alive and lodged in Lahore central jail.
With Gajanad, 26 fishermen and 2 more civilians have returned. Indian authorities also released seven Pakistani prisoners on Monday.