Kashmir Singh, who was arrested in 1973 for spying for India in Pakistan, was awarded death sentenced but later the sentence was converted into life imprisonment. He was confined to solitary confinement in the jail where he could never see light of the day as he remained in the dark rooms for over 23 hours in a day. It was by chance that Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Human Rights, Ansar Burney spotted him in the confinement and he is trying his repatriation back home.

“We have come to know from family friends that he will be now be released shortly. This is the great news that our family could have ever heard’’, stated Paramjit while talking to The Indian Express from her Nangal Choran village in Mahalpur tehsil of Hoshiarpur. She lives in the village with her differently-abled son as her another son, Amarjit Singh and daughter Manjit Kaur are settled in Italy.

“We had searched for him a lot. We wrote so many letters to the government authorities but nothing happened. Now we have come to know that he might be freed and we are looking for that fateful day’’, she said, adding that she had taken up the issue of her husband’s release with late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi also but nothing happened. “Now for the last many years, we had accepted the fate that he might not be living anymore. But thanks to God, now the fate is smiling on us’’, said she.

A local family friend, G. S. Sandhu, stated that Kashmir, who was recruited as sepoy in the Indian Army in 1962 later resigned from the Army in 1966. “He then worked as spy in Pakistan. He worked in the police also and how he went to Pakistan is yet not clear. Only he will tell how he was trapped in the neighbouring country’’, said he adding that they would receive him at Attari border when he comes back home.

Paramjit also said that about six months ago they had received a letter from Kashmir Singh, written in Urdu, but they could not decipher much. She said earlier some prisoners, who had come, had also told them that he was alive and was yearning to come home.

“But an authentic news of his being being alive has come only now’’, she said. On his being a spy, she said that they had received a letter from him in 1976 in which he had stated that he was arrested in