Sital Singh Bagi's life sounds like a script of a Bollywood masala flick.The 67-year-old ex-IAF man has been fighting a nine-year legal battle to prove that he is the ‘real’ Sital Singh Bagi and not ‘dead’ as his family had got him declared after he fled home allegedly to escape terrorists and did not surface for a decade.A retired warrant officer of Indian Air Force (IAF), Bagi claimed he was settled with his family and owned a milk dairy in Delhi when three terrorists confronted him in December 1987 and asked him to join their group.The terrorists threatened to kill him and a terrorized Bagi left his wife and four children at his ancestral house in Gurdittpura village in Patiala and fled, he claimed.Bagi said he went Orissa, where he spent 3-4 years, and then moved to Kolkata, before going to Dhaka in Bangladesh, where he became a priest at Gurdwara Nanak Shahi.Bagi said he returned to his native place in December 1998 as he was ‘no longer afraid’, but his wife refused to recognise him and so did his children.They also threatened him with ‘dire consequences’, if he again approached them, Bagi alleged.He then went to the IAF authorities for release of his pension, but was shocked when he was told that his name was struck off the pension rolls and his wife was getting the pension after she produced a court decree declaring him dead.Bagi moved a civil court in Rajpura in 1999 to get the decree declared null and void and for restoration of pension.
