Cops and robbers:
Chambal’s brothers in arms

Chambal's bandits are bestowing the police with riches to look the other way—and their payback is in getting free passage from and into the ravines

By N D Sharma

On March 28, armed bandits stopped a video coach near Sheopur (once a part of Morena district but now a separate one), asked the passengers to get down, set the coach on fire and abducted eight wealthy-looking people to the Chambal ravines. The gang was later identified as that of Rambabu Gadaria.

Two days later, Madhya Pradesh minister of state for home Nagendra Singh (the Cabinet minister for home is chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan himself) visited the area and returned after asking the police to arrest the Gadaria gang members or face the music.

Now, Gadaria is a deeply religious person—almost as religious as the incumbent chief minister and his two predecessors. According to the accounts given to the local media by the passengers who were let off, the gang leader had touched the feet of girls and women passengers, and given them Rs 500 each. Gadaria has an abiding faith in goddess Durga. He offers, so say the locals conversant with his habits, a metal bell at one of his favourite temples of the goddess in the Chambal on ashtami, the eighth day of the Navaratras.

He and his band reached the Berar-Wali-Mata-Ka-Mandir, in the forests of Pahargarh in Morena district, on the morning of April 6, hoisted a huge bell weighing around 38 kg on the roof of the temple, and performed puja for nearly an hour. And Gadaria didn’t forget to offer dakshina to the pujari before fleeing into the ravines.

The police did not interfere with his religious activities. But once the gang members were safely ensconced in the ravines, they hauled down the bell and incarcerated it in the Pahargarh police station.

The Gadaria gang is hardly a paragon of humanism or piety: it is responsible for killings, kidnappings and extortion, and Gadaria himself carries on his head an award of Rs 15 lakh. Then, again, killing remorselessly, too, is part of a dacoit's dharma, as the state's politicians and police officers know only too well. The noise they are creating about killing Gadaria or eliminating his gang—and other dacoit gangs, too—is only to artificially calm the public’s tempers till the matter peters out.

In October 2004, there had been a mighty hullabaloo across the state and beyond when the Gadaria gang had shot dead 13 people at Bhanwarpura village of Gwalior district. Then chief minister Babulal Gaur reached the village the very next day and issued all the appropriate statements about doing his best, etc—but only just enough to temporarily contain the outrage.
Nonetheless, the chief minister's directives were followed with commendable alacrity. The police chief constituted 13 special teams to comb the forests in search of the Gadaria gang. And a top cop who was posted in the area to coordinate the search operations came up with the brilliant idea of setting up suicide squads of police attack personnel, and sending them into the forests on do-or-die campaigns. No one knows whether the ravines were filled with dacoits, doubling up with laughter over the police’s actions.

Then, as quietly as a dying whisper, everything was forgotten, in line with the December 2001 operation when some 200 officers and police jawans were tossed like cattle fodder into
the Shivpuri forests to nail the Gadaria gang.

Killings, kidnappings and extortion notwithstanding—the staple diet of Chambal’s denizens—Rambabu Gadaria is a phenomenon the politicians and police force of Madhya Pradesh would prefer not to disturb. Apart from his piety—or perhaps because of it—he has a habit of being resurrected: he had ostensibly been killed by a Shivpuri district police party during an “encounter” in January 1999. The cops who had "eliminated" the reigning scourge of the Chambal were felicitated at a public function at Shivpuri by former chief minister Digvijay Singh and given out-of-turn promotions.

A few months later, however, Gadaria resurfaced and surrendered before the Gwalior police—only to decamp from custody along with a substantial quantity of arms and ammunition.
There are some who say that the police personnel posted in the dacoit-infested Chambal region have become rich, acquiring properties beyond their lowly-paid means.

I would dismiss this as sheer cynicism. Does it really matter if the dacoits take a little care of their brethren in khaki, and the latter show a little brotherly concern about the welfare of those who make their lives worth living?