A Dacoit Tells his Story

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 village of Naror Palki in Vidisha. My father Mehtah Singh, a peasant had five children. Two of them, Bundela and myself, were in 1921 arrested by the police as suspects in a case and detained. Bundela was so badly tortured that he came out of the police lock-up blind. He never recovered from the shock and the injuries and died within a year. I was jailed for ten years. There was a third brother Saudagar Singh, who was also a suspect. He also succumbed to police pressure and died.

“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 Gwalior and Kurwai. States. Still I did not wish to commit the irrevocable act. For one whole year I depended on what villagers gave me of their own free will, but unknown to the police. At the same time I tried to get a pardon, with a chance to live a respectable life again. Instead what I got was an arrest warrant. I had no alternative. There was only one career open to me.

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 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 India couldn’t have been so lawless.”

“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.