Was given up at Matugna mahilashram when she was two days old

The Bombay High Court has directed the state government to trace the biological mother of Swedish national Rebecka Saudamini Arnes, who was adopted from India in 1977, raising the hopes of the 34-year-old psychiatric nurse from Hoor, Sweden, who has been looking for her for nearly five years.

The Bombay High Court last week asked the state government to seek information from the Missing Persons Bureau and initiate action to trace Arnes’s mother, who is believed to have surrendered her when she was two days old at the Shraddhanand Mahilashram in Matunga.

After a four-year long search, Arnes moved the Bombay High Court in August 2011 with a petition filed through her lawyer Pradeep Havnur. In the petition filed jointly with her adoptive mother Eva Lindgren (60), Arnes sought a court direction to the police to take action against Shraddhanand Mahilashram for not disclosing information about her biological mother.

In their order, Justice V M Kanade and Justice P D Kode, however, observed that Arnes had the option of filing a private complaint against the institute. Adjourning the case for two weeks, the judges wrote: “So far as tracing her (Arnes) biological mother is concerned, we direct the learned Additional Public Prosecutor for the state to take instructions from the Missing Persons Bureau authorities and take steps to trace petitioner no. 1’s (Arnes) missing biological mother.”

Annexed to Arnes’s petition, however, is an e-mail exchange between her and Tushar Gandhi, the great grandson of the Mahatma, who runs the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation in Mumbai. Arnes had contended that her adoption was facilitated by Gandhi’s parents Arun and Sunanda, who at the time helped a number of Swedish couples adopt Indian children. However, since Gandhi still lives in Mumbai, Arnes had sought his help to trace her roots.

Gandhi, however, was not of much help and had in fact written some hurtful mails, Arnes had said. Gandhi, however, is not a respondent in Arnes’s case before the court.

Her petition, however, stated that the reluctance of the Shraddhanand Mahilashram in disclosing her mother’s identity had given her reason to believe that she was illegally given up for adoption.

She also cited discrepancies in her vaccination certificate obtained from the BMC and an affidavit filed by the adoption centre in the Bombay High Court that allowed the foreign adoption in 1978. She claimed her mother’s name has been scribbled on the vaccination certificate.