Captain Rathod, who is said to be a Prisoner of War (PoW) in the same jail where Singh was lodged, belongs to Chandarni village in Sabarkantha district. But nobody knows whether he is alive or not.

For Dilip Singh Rathod, his elder brother, the quest for ending this uncertainty about his brother's fate has become an unflinching commitment since the night of December 5, 1971 when he went missing in action in the Chamb Sector of Jammu and Kashmir.

Rummaging through a mass of official communication, of copies of letters addressed to various prime ministers to the International Red Cross Society, Dilip Singh says, "The government just gave up on us. Over the years, there have been enough clues to suggest that Captain Kalyan and 53 other PoWs are lodged in various Pakistani jails. International journals and agencies have also said this. But no one takes it seriously."

In the living room of his ancestral house in Chandrani, neatly framed black and white pictures of Kalyan graduating from the Army officers’ course in 1967, the first graduating batch of divisional officers’ training course in 1969 and a proud enlarged passport size picture of the captain sitting upright with stars gleaming on his shoulders adorn the wall.

In 1979, Samrendra Kundu, Minister of State for External Affairs had acknowledged in the Lok Sabha that Captain Kalyan was one of the 54 soldiers and officers who were missing. The list comprises 35 officers and men from the Army and 19 from the Air Force who went missing in action during the 1971 war.

However, there have been evidences to suggest that the men were kept in various Pakistani jails at different times. Letters sneaked through by some of the missing men have cropped up, soldiers repatriated later have confirmed their existence but the prisoners have not been sent back nor their existence officially acknowledged.

Nathu Ram and Mukhtar Singh, two repatriated Indian soldiers from Pakistan had admitted to seeing Captain Kalyan at the Rawalpindi Interrogation Centre in November 1983 and later at the Kot Lakhpat Jail in 1988.

The relatives of the 54 missing have come together and founded an association called the Missing Defence Persons Relatives Association (MDPRA). Their persistence seemed to have paid off in June last year when Pervez Musharraf invited a 14-member delegation of the MDPRA, which included Dilip Singh, to look into Pakistani jails and records to find their missing ones.

Dilip says, "It was a hogwash, an attempt to close the chapter. The records were in Urdu and we could not make out. Also, the prisoners paraded before us were much younger. It was just a gesture to make us stop our fight."

Nevertheless, Dilip is in no mood of giving up. He says, "Out of the 54, many would have died but some may still be alive. If my brother is alive he would be around 66 years now and he would still not have given up. Time is running out, but I will not let him down."