Bengaluru: A boy left Mysuru in search of a job, trusting his friends, only to disappear nearly a decade ago. Now, his parents say he is in a Pakistani prison.
The parents of P K Yashwanth, now probably a 28-year-old man, have been running from government offices to courts, unable to understand why their son disappeared and how did he land up in Pakistan.
“He had been sent to Mysuru for some training for 6 months by his college principal Gowrishankar. After he completed the training he was eager to work, so he left with someone, we don’t know who. We got a phone call saying, “we will bring your son back to you”, but they didn’t tell us where our son was," said Meenakshi, Yashwanth's mother.
She and other family members then went to Mysuru to search for Yashwanth and filed a missing complaint with the police. They looked up every lead over the next 20 days frantically and filed a kidnap case against a trader from whose number Meenakshi had received the first call. Nothing worked.
“They could trace the alleged kidnappers, but they couldn't trace where Yashwanth was,” said their lawyer C H Srinivasa Rao.
She along with husband P M Kushalappa, have now approached the Karnataka High Court with a plea to repatriate their son.
For the farmer-couple who had educated their son in a polytechnic with big dreams at a time when the IT revolution was yielding rich rewards, what happened is confusing.
"For a long time, we didn’t think we’d ever get our son back. Then in 2015, a story appeared in a Mysuru newspaper about an Indian boy named Ramesh who was in a Lahore jail. We went to the police station and told them this is our son. It was forwarded by the Bengaluru ADGP," Meenakshi said.
The couple wrote to the Prime Minister, even went to Delhi last February to see if they could get an audience with him. Finally, in July 2016, they filed a writ in the Karnataka High Court.
"Nothing has helped. All this has caused us so much distress. We believe our son is the same one in Lahore jail. We believe he was fooled by those people. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to go so far. He is not the type to travel so far by himself, for no reason. Why would anyone do that," she asked.
The case is listed to be heard again in four weeks, but the lawyer and the family are gritting their teeth for a long battle ahead. Rao, for instance, has been working with human rights groups on how to bring back Yashwanth.
But there are reports of others claiming that 'Ramesh' is their kin.
"His parents have given some identification marks like he used to stutter a bit. And he had scars of an old wound near his neck. His photo was shared, other features have been explained. We believe officials from the Indian Consulate there have tried to meet him, but they only say he couldn't talk as he was a bit mentally unstable," Rao told CNN-News18.
"But of course he would be a bit unstable if he has been there all this while. Who wouldn't be?" Meenakshi asked.
Though they have sought details of the FIR against him, all they got in the form of documents was a photograph. The other bit of information he has is that Yashwanth was apparently sentenced to two years in prison -- possibly for not having valid travel documents -- and he has already served those two years, but continues to be in jail.
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