Wife, son confine man for 9 years

In a shocking instance of the extreme lengths some people can go to for availing themselves of the government’s welfare measures, a woman in Bihar kept her husband in confinement for nine years, having declared him dead, and received the widow pension. When Dhankeshri Devi, 50, from Bhojpur district, began carrying out the enormity in collusion with her teenage son in 2004 after fraudulently lodging a mission person’s complaint about her husband with the police, the mother-son duo hardly expected their dark secret to be out one day. But a disgruntled neighbour spilled the beans and a police raid on Thursday led to the rescue of Jagat Narayan Singh, 58, from prolonged confinement under distressing conditions. “Singh, who was serving as a peon in the united Bihar government’s animal husbandry department and posted in Dumka in Jharkhand till 2004, was found in a very unclean condition and appeared to have lost all interest in life and relationships,” said Shyam Deo Singh, SHO of Sandesh police station who led the raiding team. “He faintly kept uttering ‘Dumka, Dumka’ at the time of his recovery,” he added. The raid was ordered by Bhojpur SP Satyavir Singh after he received a complaint about the man’s confinement from Asha Devi, a neighbour who had had a tiff with Dhankeshari Devi and her 18-year-old son Sunil. The mother-son duo, according to police, hid Jagat Narayan Singh in a room in their house in Deuwar village and even procured a forged death certificate for him after lodging a missing person’s report. While Dhankeshari Devi allegedly wanted the widow’s pension for herself, Sunil wanted his father’s job under compassionate grounds. The job, however, eluded him because he was a minor. Sunil fled home soon after his father’s recovery, and the police are looking for him after registering an FIR, which, strangely, did not name his mother as an accused because, as officials believe, Sunil played a “leading role” in the whole matter.