In a twisted tale of criminal impersonation, cheating, and conspiracy, a man from India's Bihar state's Jamui district has been found guilty of impersonating the missing son of a wealthy landlord for 41 years.
The imposter, identified as Dayanand Gosain, not only pretended to be Kanhaiya Singh, the missing son of an affluent family from Murgawan village, but also used his fake identity to go to college, get married, and raise a family, a BBC report has revealed.
He gave biometrics for a national identity card as Kanhaiya Singh, cast his votes, paid taxes, bought a licensed gun, and sold 37 acres of Singh's property.
Entry of Imposter
It reportedly all started in September 1981, when Gosain, in his early 20s, arrived in a village barely 15 km from where Kanhaiya lived. He told the locals that he was the "son of a prominent person" in Murgawan village, and that he now sings and begs for a living.
The news of the return of the missing son spread like wildfire in the village and reached the ears of Kanhaiya's father Kameshwar Singh, who rushed to see for himself. Singh, as well as some of his neighbors, reportedly believed that the imposter was indeed Kanhaiya and he was brought back 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 them, according to police records.
Identity Theft Suspected
The story took an interesting turn when Kanhaiya's mother, Ramsakhi Devi, told people that the man was not her son, but an imposter trying to cheat everyone and get the inheritance.
Devi revealed that Kanhaiya had a "cut mark on the left side of his head" which was missing on this man. In another incident, Kanhaiya failed to recognize a teacher from the boy's school.
Days after the incident, Devi filed a case of impersonation against the imposter, after which the man was arrested briefly and spent a month in jail before securing bail. After he was out on bail, the imposter continued to pretend to be Kanhaiya and also tried to "kill" his original identity with a fake death certificate.
Gosain steadfastly refused to provide a DNA sample to match with the landlord's daughter Vidya to prove that they were siblings.
Under the false identity, the criminal pursued a bachelor's degree in English, politics, and philosophy at a local college, which found his conduct "satisfactory". A year later, in 1982, Singh had Gosain married off to a woman of his own landowning caste and had two sons and three daughters.
In 1991, Kanhaiya's father, owning, by one estimate, more than 60 acres of land, passed away, after which the imposter inherited half of a nearly century-old, two-story mansion in Murgawan.
Shocking Detail Revealed During Investigation
Kanhaiya was only 16 when he went missing and "returned" after four years.
During the court trial, when Judge Manvendra Mishra asked Gosain where he had lived all these years, the imposter reportedly said that he had stayed with a holy man in his ashram in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh's Gorakhpur city.
However, Gosain couldn't provide any witnesses to back up his claim.
Chittaranjan Kumar, a senior police officer in Jamui, dug up details of Gosain's background and revealed that he was the youngest of four sons of a farmer in the Jamui district in Bihar who had left his home in 1981 and sang and begged for a living.
Gosain had earlier been married, but his wife left him soon after and got remarried and settled down.
The investigation team noticed that Gosain's official documents had different dates of birth - January 1966 in high school records, February 1960 on his national identity card, and 1965 on 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 on the national card.
Kanhaiya's childhood friend and relative, Gopal Singh, a senior Supreme Court lawyer, remembers Kanhaiya as a "timid, shy and amiable" boy. But when he saw Gosain, Gopal said that he didn't resemble Kanhaiya at all.
Gosain Busted After Three-Decade Court Trial
The imposter's fraud was busted after more than four decades, when a trial court held hearings without break for 44 days in February 2022.
According to Indian media, the court found all seven defense witnesses unreliable. The defense produced a death certificate declaring Dayanand Gosain dead, but it was dated May 2014, and said that Gosain had died in January 1982.
The court charged Gosain with forgery and also questioned the defense why a death certificate had been made 32 years after the person's death.
"To prove himself as Kanhaiya, Gosain killed himself", Judge Mishra reportedly stated.
Moreover, Gosain's refusal to provide DNA samples for more than eight years made the case even more suspicious, with the court stating that a DNA test would expose Gosain's false identity.
Judge Mishra found Gosain guilty and in June, a higher court upheld the order and imposed seven years of "rigorous imprisonment".
The court believed there was a wider conspiracy involving several people from Murgawan who had helped "plant" Gosain into Singh's family as his lost son. The judge suspected that these people could have bought land owned by Singh and later sold by Gosain as his natural heir. Both the claims have yet to be investigated.
Family's Reaction
Gosain's eldest son Gautam Kumar said the family had never doubted their father's identity and that he had never discussed the "impersonation case" with his father.
"He (Gossain) 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?" he reportedly asked.
"Now after all these years, our lives and identities are hanging in balance because my father's identity has been taken away. We live in so much anxiety".
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