Another impersonation incident, with the BBC reporting than an Indian court has convicted a man for posing as the son of a wealthy Bihar landlord for 41 years.
Kanhaiya Singh, the actual son, disappeared in February 1977 on the way home from school. A village shaman told his father that the boy was alive and would "appear" soon. In September 1981 a younng man arrived in a nearby village, claiming that he was the "son of a prominent person" of Murgawan, the missing boy's home. The father travelled to the village to see for himself, accompanied by neighbours (who may have been part of a consopiracy) who said that the man was indeed his son. The father reportedly said "My eyes are failing and I can't see him properly. If you say he is my son, I will keep him". The mother subsequently sighted the claimant and realised that the man was not her son; he was missing a telltale scar and failed to recognise a teacher from the boy's school. The mother filed a case of impersonation, with the man being arrested and spending a month in prison before securing bail.
The BBC reports
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. ...
[A]ccording 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. ... 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.
Once accepted by the father (but apparently not by his supposed mother) the imposter was married off to a member of the own landowning caste, had children and on the father's death inherited part of the family property. In court he stated that he had never claimed to be the landlord's lost son as the father "accepted me as his son and took me home". However, at trial he claimed he was indeed the missing person and thus "I did not deceive anyone by impersonation".
The case was heard over four decades by at least a dozen judges. Finally, a trial court held the hearings without a break for 44 days beginning in February this year and gave its verdict in early April. ... In June, a higher court upheld the order and imposed seven years of "rigorous imprisonment".
Shades of Partha Chatterjee's A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (Princeton University Press, 2002).
