A DACOIT TELLS HIS STORY
GHANSHYAM
NARAIN SINGH
Jawahar Singh, king of
dacoits must at one time have been a fair man; now weather-beaten and with a
lifetime of intense activity behind him, he looked dark. Yet the six-footer had
an attraction all his own. He was a charmer even now, so much so that it would
be difficult to believe that he was a dacoit.
But
he was a real, king-size freebooter. At one time he was a terror in the Madhya Bharat region, yet there was an undercurrent of popular
feeling which showed sympathy and admiration for him. When he was granted
pardon and settled down to peaceful life, his exemplary and orderly behaviour seemed to prove that it was really society’s
mistake which made him turn a dacoit.
I
ran into Jawahar Singh by chance. Alighting at Vidisha railway station, I could not miss the six-footer
standing just outside the station at a street corner. A man with a chest still
a yard broad, flowing hair, only one tooth left in the mouth but with still the
booming voice and the peremptory tone of a man used to command, he runs a shop
selling parched grains. Serving travellers at this not too busy railway station
he makes four to five rupees for everyday of hard, unrelenting work. Not too
much, certainly for a man who once could grab jewellery
and cash worth lakhs at one swoop, but enough to keep
him a respectable, law-abiding citizen. His language has changed with the
times. In his youth both the police and criminals, with whom he spent most of
his time, used Persianised Urdu. Now he can reel of Sanskritized Hindi with fluency and can speak at a stretch.
After
a bit of skirmishing I shot the crucial question: “Why did you become a
dacoit?”
He
pursed his eyes, as if sizing me up, and said, “You will perhaps laugh at it as
the weather-beaten excuse of every dacoit, but it was police zulum which made me what I was. I think in nine cases out
of ten, it is authority that turns citizens into dacoit. Torture can make many
a law-abiding man a criminal.”
He
was lost in his memories for a time, then began: “I
was born eighty years ago in the
“I
was released from prison in 1930. My children were helpless and lived like
orphans. Even after my release I was under constant police surveillance. Then
another incident took place.”
He
paused for breath perhaps for effect, and I concentrated all my faculties in
the ear. He continued: “The incident was the theft of a pistol, five sets of
police uniforms and six rupees from the Gyaraspur Thana. For no reason at all the police swooped on me and
kept me locked up for six months. They could not even
cook up anything against me and I was set at liberty. When I came out of the
lock-up, my children who had been hungry for a week clung to me and wept. One
of them said, ‘Baba, if you cannot feed us, why did you father us?’
“I
was stunned into stony silence. But my mind went feverishly to work. Should I,
or should I not?”
Jawahar Singh’s eyes
were bloodshot by now and fingers had closed into a clenched fist. “I left my
children gaping, went to Palki village, snatched the
gun of a man named Raghunath Singh and made for the
forest. I was bent on revenge. I was a dacoit.”
“It
was a Tuesday,” he continued, “I had plenty of ammunition and I was loose in
the jungles of
Jawahar Singh skipped
some of the repetitive details of his life as a dacoit. He added: “In 1932 some
informers in Kiranda village tipped the police off.
There was a gun duel and I was badly injured. Even though I was grievously
hurt, the police dare not come near me. The Nawab
of Kurwai arranged for my surrender.
After treatment for six months in Kurwai I was sent
to Sagar.
“The police wanted me in connection with two dacoities there, but they could not recover any booty from
me. So they took to their customary fraud. A farce of identification parade was
held in which I was the only bearded man. So the witnesses had no difficulty. I
was sentenced to seven years rigorous imprisonment. I was released from Nagpur Central Jail on September 19, 1940, and went back to
Kurwai, where the Nawab,
true to his pledged word, dropped all proceedings against me.”
He was not only sad but roused and I tried to utilize the
pause to change the subject to something pleasanter. “Surely,” I said, “police
in free
“They are, they are,” shouted Jawahar
Singh. “In 1952 there were a number of dacoities in Kurwai and Pathari. The police
promptly tried to rope me in. But by chance the true culprits were arrested and
so I was able to escape yet another bout with the police. The fact is that the
police use more of their brains and brawn to find scapegoats than in trying to
catch the culprits.”
Understandably, Jawahar Singh,
after all that he had seen, was unable and unwilling
to see the difference between routine interrogation and extortion of
confessions.
“How many people have you killed?” I asked.
“Not one,” he replied emphatically, then laughed
derisively at my incredulity.
“How did you save yourself while absconding?” I asked.
“The trick was,” he said, “never to sleep during the day;
and at night when we slept one of us stood guard. At the slightest suspicious
movement we moved.”
“What is the secret of your health,” I changed the
subject.
“Good eating and good exercise,” he replied. “When I was
a youth I would eat three seers of meat, one seer of ghee and chapatis made of one seer atta
every day, and would walk about fifty miles.”
With such an organised life,
despite being an outlaw, it was not surprising when Jawahar
Singh told me he had some “principles.” “One was never to cast an evil eye on
any woman; another was not to form a gang but to go it alone; a third was never
to kill. Killing is self-defeating; going after women, apart
from its moral aspect, one loses the people’s sympathy; and forming a gang
means opening oneself to the risk of defection, with the added responsibility
of keeping out police informers. All through my life as a dacoit I used khaki
uniform; it does not get dirty easily and resembles police uniform.”
I asked: “What do you think of the
present anti-dacoit operations?”
“It is,” he said, “a waste of public
money, apart from being doubly oppressive. For the people
have to humour and grease the palms of both the
police and dacoits.”
I pointed out that the police
claimed to have killed thirteen dacoits and within a few years to have halved
the number of dacoits. Jawahar Singh shrugged his
shoulders. “You are free to believe or disbelieve this claim.”
“What do you think can end the
dacoit menace?” I asked him. He replied in one sentence: “A general pardon.”
“What is a police-dacoit encounter
like?” I asked.
“The truth is,” he said, “that both
parties try to avoid an encounter as far as possible. There had been
innumerable occasions during my dacoit days when police passed within yards of
me, knowing where I was. I held my hand and did not fire and they held their
hand. Only when one party is at a hopeless disadvantage is there an encounter.
If the dacoit is cornered, he fires and tries to escape in the scare that results. If the police are either cornered or
outnumbered, they fire deliberately off the mark, to make it appear as if they
do not know where the dacoits are, so that they can escape. But if there is a
real encounter, no mercy is shown. For dacoits, it is always a do or die
affair; for the police one of the few opportunities to earn their keep.”
I asked him about the most memorable
event of his life. He seemed pleased with the question and passed me a plateful
of sweets. “Four years ago,” he said with a smile, “I had an occasion to meet
Mr. Nehru. He had come to Madhya Bharat and his car
was being driven down a hill. I was one of those who had assembled for his darshan. I could not resist the temptation and ran towards
his car. A police cordon stopped me but Jawaharlal shouted, ‘Don’t stop him.
Let him come to me...’ I was allowed close to him. He asked ‘What do you want
from me.’ I was stunned and proffered my hand. He held it and smiled. Emotion
flowed from my eyes as I said, ‘With your darshan all
my sins have been washed away.’ He laughed aloud, waved me a farewell, and
motioned to his driver to proceed. That was the most memorable day of my life.”
That was the end of Jawahar Singh’s story. With a
decisiveness as abrupt as if he had just finished an operation, he shook
my hand, bade me farewell and proceeded towards his shop of parched grain to
serve some customers.