Train robbers ride the rails in India

Several dozen outlaws boarded the long-distance train to New Delhi early Friday and made their way to four air-conditioned sleeper carriages on the 17-car train, confident they would house the better-heeled passengers.

Working swiftly, the scofflaws jolted sleepy passengers awake, beating any who resisted and relieving them of about $20,000 in valuables before escaping onto the dark plains.

While this might sound like a scene from the Wild West, it remains a relatively common occurrence in India. A similar incident occurred two days earlier, part of what experts estimate are more than 100 armed great and small train robberies each year.

Corruption, poorly paid security forces, political infighting and weak governance leave significant swaths of the country just on the edge of government control, vulnerable to insurgents trying to carve out a separate homeland and to opportunistic criminals.

Central Bihar state, where Friday’s attack occurred, is among India’s poorest, and Maoist rebels reportedly have a significant presence in the area.

Many trains on India’s 69,300-mile system are patrolled by police officers, and four were reportedly on board Friday’s Lal Quila Express on its meandering 35-hour, 900-mile trip from Kolkata to New Delhi. But they were unarmed; commanders decided last year that they should patrol without weapons because Marxist rebels were so frequently disarming them.

“Security forces without guns, what is the use of them?” said Ajit Kumar Singh, a research fellow with the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management. “This only invites criminals to make more trouble.”

Without arms, the police officers found themselves badly mismatched — “sitting ducks,” in the word of one news report — against as many as 50 outlaws armed with 9-millimeter pistols, metal rods, Saturday night specials, clubs and knives.

“I was folding my hands and pleading with them to let go of my husband, but they hit my daughter twice with an iron rod,” one robbery victim told the NDTV news network. “No police came, or rather they came only after an hour.”

“There was one,” her daughter quickly added. “But when he got to know about the [thieves], he hid in the toilet.”

During the heist, described as one of the biggest in recent memory, a security official was shot and 25 passengers were roughed up, including women hurt when thieves ripped gold earrings from their ears. By the time the outlaws left and the train reached the next station in Kiul after 5 a.m., passengers were livid, venting their frustration by vandalizing the station master’s office.

Police later surmised that four members of the gang boarded the train at Jamui, at which point passengers and security officers managed to overpower two of them. Two others escaped, however, and may have alerted fellow gang members, who boarded at the next station.

Narendra Kumar, a local reporter with Sahara Media Group, said gang members in their late teens and early 20s then pulled the emergency cord in a lonely stretch between stations, grabbing cellphones, cash, watches and jewelry during a 30-minute period before making their escape.

Though armed train robberies involving wealthy passengers on relatively luxurious long-distance trains capture the headlines, most of the dozens of holdups involving poor riders on local routes gain little notice, experts said.

Another growing problem are “drug and loot” gangs, whose members pose as friendly passengers or vendors, offering tea and cookies spiked with sleeping pills. On Sunday, a West Bengal passenger died at Asansol Subdivisional Hospital after being drugged with an unknown substance.

Singh, of the Institute for Conflict Management, said a lack of coordination between police agencies, fighting between the state and central governments and weak national policy mean that armed train robberies are unlikely to end any time soon.

“I’m very sorry to say I see no chance of improvement in the future,” he said. “I see no cohesive policy here whatsoever.”

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Anshul Rana in The Times’ New Delhi Bureau contributed to this report.