In a heart-wrenching saga that began with a natural disaster, two families from Punjab have finally received the news they have been desperately praying for. Their sons, swept away by floodwaters into Pakistan over two years ago, are set to return home after a prolonged ordeal involving imprisonment and immense personal loss.
A Long-Awaited Phone Call Brings Hope
The breakthrough arrived this week through emotional phone calls from Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. Harwinder Singh, 26, a driver from Parjian Biharipur in Ludhiana, managed to contact his family twice. His uncle, Harpal Singh, relayed the crucial update: a judge in Lahore had ordered their release following a court hearing on December 13.
"The judge ordered the jail authorities to release them and send them back to India, as they have completed their sentence," Harpal Singh stated. The families are now anxiously awaiting official confirmation of the deportation date from the authorities. This news has ignited a fragile hope in households that have been shattered by grief and financial ruin.
The Devastating Human Cost of Separation
The two-and-a-half-year separation has extracted a horrific toll, compounding the initial tragedy of the men's disappearance. While Harwinder Singh and Ratanpal Singh, 25, from Khaira Mustarka in Jalandhar, were detained in Pakistan, their families back home were struck by a series of deaths.
In Ratanpal's family, both his parents—Kartar Singh and Pyaro Bai—and his brother, Ved Prakash, passed away during his incarceration. Harwinder's father, Mukhtar Singh, died earlier this year. His mother, Surjeet Kaur, is said to be under severe mental distress.
Harwinder's wife, Sikandar Kaur, paints a bleak picture of their struggle for survival. "My elderly father works as a laborer to support us, but he is struggling with his age," she shared. Her seven-year-old son talks to his father on the phone, but the younger child simply becomes sad. "They constantly ask when he is coming back," she added.
From Ratanpal's side, his wife, also named Surjeet Kaur, has been the sole breadwinner for their two young children, Shalu and Gurdeep, performing manual labor for the past two years. She now shoulders the responsibility for a family that lost almost all its senior members during this period.
Diplomatic Channels and Geopolitical Hurdles
The two men were among six Indians arrested between July and August 2023, after the monsoon-swollen Sutlej River breached its banks and carried them across the border. While Pakistani border rangers initially arrested them and authorities raised allegations of smuggling, their families have consistently maintained that they were innocent victims of the devastating floods.
Ludhiana's deputy commissioner, Himanshu Jain, confirmed that the families' pleas for help have been forwarded to the NRI department to expedite the repatriation via diplomatic routes.
However, the scheduled return comes at a tense time in India-Pakistan relations, with diplomatic channels largely frozen due to longstanding disputes. While the release of such "flood-drift" prisoners is often a humanitarian act, the process is notoriously slow, bogged down by meticulous nationality verification and limited consular access.
The initial allegations by Pakistan's ISPR in 2023—accusing the men of smuggling arms and drugs—added a layer of geopolitical complexity to what was essentially a natural disaster. In the current climate, such individual cases risk becoming pawns in broader tensions. For the families in Ludhiana and Jalandhar, the fear persists that any sudden escalation on the border could stall the administrative process at the Wagah-Attari border, turning their judicial relief into a diplomatic deadlock.
