Last month, he won part of his battle against the authorities, when they admitted that Harjit, picked up when he was 22 years old, was not a terrorist. However, according to the Central Bureau of Investigation, Harjit is indeed dead, killed at the hands of six policemen, who have been indicted for ``murdering'' him in a ``fake encounter'' in May, 1992.

Kashmir Singh, a junior engineer with the Punjab State Electricity Board, and his wife Manjit Kaur have fought long and hard for seeing the ``guilty'' officers booked. But they still refuse to believe Harjit could be dead, insisting that the postmortem report in the case may not be of his son as it gives inaccurate details regarding his height and weight.

Declaring Harjit a terrorist belonging to theKhalistan Commando Force (Panjwar), the Majitha police had claimed that he had been killed in a cross-fire between a police party and a group of terrorists. According to the police, Harjit was being taken for recovery of arms and ammunition when terrorists had fired at the police.

The CBI investigation has now established that the encounter never took place. The record pertaining to the alleged encounter was fudged on the instructions of ``higher authorities''. It now seems that the case was actually that of personal enmity between two families.

Besides the fact that they may never know the truth about what happened to Harjit, his distraught parents have to explain the same to his two small sons. Harjit's wife Amarjit Kaur abandoned them in 1993 to get married again, and Kashmir Singh and Manjit Kaur are bringing them up.

Says Kashmir Singh: ``I spent over Rs 5 lakh searching for my son and for battling it out in the court with the police.'' He mortgaged chunks of land in his possession in his nativevillage to raise money, besides taking loans from friends and relatives.

It were local human rights groups, assisted by advocates Ranjan Lakhanpal and Mohinderjit Singh Sethi, and international organisations which helped keep the case alive. Apart from Amnesty International, even the then British prime minister John Major had taken up Harjit's ``abduction'' with the then Indian prime minister P V Narasimha Rao. According to a letter written by then British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, Rao had agreed to set up a National Human Rights Commission, which would investigate cases similar to that of Harjit.

In 1995, the Punjab and Haryana High Court had ordered an inquiry into the abduction by the District and Sessions Judge. The judge later recommended that the matter be investigated by the CBI. In 1997, the case was referred to the agency on the instructions of the high court.

Though satisfied that the CBI has now declared the encounter a fake, Kashmir Singh is dismayed that none of the senior policeofficers who, he believes, were behind the ``elimination'' of his innocent son have been held accountable.