Bihar: Their son vanished - then an imposter took over for 41 years

A court in India has sent to prison a man who was found guilty of posing as the son of a wealthy landlord for 41 years. The BBC's Soutik Biswas pieces together a gripping tale of deceit and delay in justice.

In February 1977, a teenage boy disappeared on his way home from school in the eastern state of Bihar.

Kanhaiya Singh, the only son of an affluent and influential zamindar (landlord) in Nalanda district, was returning from a second day of exams. His family lodged a missing person report with the police.

Efforts to find Kanhaiya came to naught. His ageing father slid into depression and began visiting quacks. A village shaman told him his son was alive and would "appear" soon.

In September 1981, a man in his early 20s arrived in a village, barely 15km (9 miles) from where Kanhaiya lived.

He was dressed in saffron and said he sang songs and begged for a living. He told the locals that he was the "son of a prominent person" of Murgawan, the missing boy's village.

What happened next is not entirely clear. But what is known is that when rumours that his missing son had returned reached Kameshwar Singh, he travelled to the village to see for himself.

Some of his neighbours who had accompanied Singh told him that the man was indeed his son and he took him home.

"My eyes are failing and I can't see him properly. If you say he is my son, I will keep him," Singh told the men, according to police records.

Four days later, news of her son's return reached Singh's wife, Ramsakhi Devi, who was visiting the state capital, Patna, with her daughter, Vidya. She rushed back to the village and, on arrival, realised that the man was not her son.

Kanhaiya, she said, had a "cut mark on the left side of his head", which was missing in this man. He also failed to recognise a teacher from the boy's school. But Singh was convinced that the man was their son.

Days after the incident, Ramsakhi Devi filed a case of impersonation and the man was arrested briefly and spent a month in jail before securing bail.

What happened over the next four decades is a chilling tale of deception in which a man pretended to be the missing son of the landlord and inveigled himself into his house.

Even as he was on bail, he assumed a new identity, went to college, got married, raised a family and secured multiple fake identities.

Using these IDs, he voted, paid taxes, gave biometrics for a national identity card, got a gun licence and sold 37 acres of Singh's property.

He steadfastly refused to provide a DNA sample to match with the landlord's daughter to prove that they were siblings. And in a move that stunned the court, he even tried to "kill" his original identity with a fake death certificate.

The imposter's tale is a grim commentary on official incompetence and India's snail-paced judiciary: nearly 50 million cases are pending in the country's courts and more than 180,000 of them have been pending for more than 30 years.

In official records, the man is curiously ed as Kanhaiya Ji - an Indian honorific. A first and second name is a universally accepted form of identification.

Except, according to the judges who found the man guilty of impersonation, cheating and conspiracy and sent him to prison for seven years, his real name was Dayanand Gosain, who hailed from a village in Jamui district, some 100km (62 miles) away from his "adopted" home.

A black-and-white photograph of Dayanand Gosain from his wedding in 1982 - a year after he entered the Singh household - shows a fair man with a thin moustache. He is wearing a flimsy decorative veil and staring into the distance.

Much of the facts about him before he entered the Singh household are fuzzy.

His official documents have different dates of birth - it's January 1966 in his high school records, February 1960 in his national identity card and 1965 in his voter identity card. A 2009 local government card for accessing food rations listed his age as 45 years, which would mean he was born in 1964. Gosain's family said he was "about 62", which would tally with his birth date in the national card.

What investigators could confirm was that Gosain was the youngest of four sons of a farmer in Jamui, that he sang and begged for a living and that he left his home in 1981. Chittaranjan Kumar, a senior police officer in Jamui, says Gosain married early, but his wife left him soon after.

"The couple didn't have children and his first wife remarried and settled down," says Mr Kumar. He also tracked down a man in the village who had identified Gosain in the court during the case. "It was fairly well known in his native village that Gosain was living with a landlord's family in Nalanda," Judge Manvendra Mishra wrote in his verdict.

Singh got Gosain married off to a woman of his own landowning caste a year after taking him home. According to a document available with the family, Gosain pursued a bachelor's degree in English, politics and philosophy at a local college, which found his conduct "satisfactory".

Over the years, Gosain had two sons and three daughters. After Singh's death, he inherited half of a nearly century-old, two-storey mansion in Murgawan. (The other half partitioned by a low wall belongs to another branch of Singh's family.)

Overlooking a large water tank, ringed by mango and guava trees, and secured by an unpainted iron gate and brick walls, the house has a decaying air about it. With three generations living under its roof, the 16-room house would have once thrummed with life.

Now there's an eerie quietness about the place. The courtyard is unkempt, and a rotting wheat hulling machine lies in a corner.

Gosain's elder son Gautam Kumar said his father generally stayed at home and managed some 30 acres of farm land. The land yielded rice, wheat and pulses, and was mostly farmed by contract workers.

Gautam Kumar said the family had never discussed the "impersonation case" with his father.

"He is our father. If my grandfather had accepted him as his son, who are we to question him? How can you not trust your father":[]}