Wife hopes to reunite with 'martyr' husband

All she was then told by the BSF that her husband could have been captured as a prisoner of war (POW) by Pakistan, or perhaps, may have even died in gunfire.
Nobody knew his fate until 1974 when the BSF officially declared him dead, a martyr in their records.

Four decades later on Monday, the unexpected happened. A phone call changed her world. Kaur was told by Pakistan’s former Federal Minister for Human Rights Ansar Burney that her husband Surjit Singh was alive and was ensuring his early return back home.
Kaur said that she is delighted that she would see her husband in her lifetime again.
For three decades, she was not sure if her husband was alive and whether she was a married woman or a widow. It was in 2004 when an Indian prisoner released by Pakistan revealed that Singh was alive in a Pakistan jail.

The BSF was informed which held a meeting with the Pakistani Rangers to facilitate Singh’s deportation.

Singh was awarded death penalty as a POW. But, his sentence was eventually converted into life imprisonment. All these decades he was kept at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. His jail term ended in December last year.

Their son Amrik doesn’t even know how his farther looks. He was just a month old when his father went missing, Kaur recalls.

Her life since then has been full of upheavals. After the incident, Kaur and Amrik returned to her parents in Faridkot town in Punjab. Kaur chose not to remarry. Somewhere she lived with a hope to reunite with her husband one day, she said.

It was in 2004 that the family learnt about Singh in Pakistan jail and approached the government for help.

The Ministry of External Affairs told Kaur in August 2005 that the BSF had taken up the matter with the Pakistan Rangers in October 2004. But nothing worked out.
The family then approached Ansar Burney, who looked for Surjit in Pakistan. It paid dividends as Burney on Monday said that he would meet Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani for the early release of the Indian from Pakistan.