India throws a net over banditry

On a rainy afternoon, just a few days into the monsoon season, a tired lawyer with thinning hair stood on the courthouse verandah wiping away sweat with a rumpled handkerchief and wondering if business could, after so many years, be turning bad.

His client that day was a 20-year-old woman, an illiterate villager with hoop earrings, gentle eyes and charges that included weapons possession and attempted murder. She was, she admitted, a dacoit -- a bandit -- and until a few months ago was part of a gang that had kidnapped and robbed its way through villages of north India.

Defending bandits has always been a steady business for the lawyers of this small town, a guarantee of work in the quietest of times.

But after more than 800 years, India’s once-powerful bandits are disappearing: hunted by aggressive police commanders, denounced by the villagers they once claimed to defend and pushed into ever-more-hidden corners by the spread of the modern world.

The bandit tradition that began when emperors ruled India -- a tradition tangled in myth and history, led by men who are part thug, part caste warlord and part Robin Hood -- is dying.

“There is so much pressure on them now,” said the lawyer, Kumar Tiwary, who earned less than $1 for the day’s court hearing. “There are not even many bandits left.”

It’s hard to imagine they lasted this long.

Tourists mob the Taj Mahal 50 miles to the north, and it’s only a three-hour train ride to the glass-walled malls and high-tech offices that line the roads outside New Delhi, India’s capital.

But Etawah also is at the western edge of the Chambal, a maze of deep ravines and scrub forests that has hidden generations of outlaws. Named for a river that runs through the region, the Chambal is a place where 10-foot-deep gullies suddenly give way to gorges with 100-foot-high walls of dirt and rocks. A small army could disappear into the ravines and not be found for weeks.

While India’s cities grow ever more modern, propelled by some of the world’s fastest economic growth, the Chambal remains defined by poverty and violence.

“It’s different here,” said Nitya Anand, a police official who insists the bandits have been nearly wiped out -- but who goes nowhere without heavily armed bodyguards. “People are proud to be dacoits.”

For generations, dacoits were at the center of village life, with travelers warning of them back to the 14th century. The most powerful held sway for decades, often with the open connivance of police and politicians. They made money by kidnapping landowners and robbing travelers, and earned fealty by protecting members of their own castes against raiding bandits from rival castes.

In an area with few schools or jobs, the bandits also created what was, effectively, a criminalized social welfare organization. They paid for weddings and doctors’ visits; they settled village disputes; they protected the weak.

In return, villagers protected them.

Although most stories of Robin Hood-like dacoits are exaggerated -- much of the money taken from the rich went directly into the bandits’ pockets -- these old-style outlaws are remembered warmly.

“Our parents and grandparents, they raised us to believe that dacoits were good people. They helped the poor, they gave people money,” said Ram Avtar Singh, a 55-year-old farmer walking with friends deep in the Chambal. “They were heroes.”

The most famous was Phoolan Devi, a low-caste farmer’s daughter who became internationally known as the Bandit Queen. Widely seen as a heroine -- despite the bloodiness of her 10-year fight -- she surrendered two decades ago, served time in prison and became a politician before being slain in 2001.

But the days of heroes ended in the 1970s and 1980s when more than 600 dacoits turned in their guns under increasing police pressure.

The remaining gangs balkanized and abandoned the dacoits’ informal code: target the powerful, never harm a woman and leave the poor in peace.

Today, there is only one rule: Don’t target your own caste. Everyone else -- rich or poor, man or woman -- is fair game.

As a result, the dacoits’ support network has withered, and it is fear that now binds villagers to them.

“These men are all thugs,” said Singh, whose village saw a local woodcutter become a powerful bandit two years ago -- then quickly change into a pure criminal, preying on nearly everyone. A year later, he was killed by police.

Few mourn him. “These bandits are like rain: today here and tomorrow gone,” Singh said.

The Chambal remains awash in poverty, a place of empty mud-walled homes whose residents long ago fled the economic emptiness, where many schools remain closed because teachers fear being kidnapped, where a plow is often little more than a sharpened stick pulled by a buffalo.

But slowly, modern India has reached even into the Chambal.

Paved roads now unravel through some ravines, and villages hidden until a couple years ago behind swaying pontoon bridges can now be reached by police in minutes. Isolated hamlets have cellphones.

Then there’s Daljeet Singh Chaudhury.

A top regional police commander, Chaudhury has become something of a celebrity, and everyone from politicians to tenant farmers tells stories of his fearlessness, his honesty, and his relentless ambition to rid the Chambal of bandits. His forces, some of whom worked openly with the bandits a few years ago, now track them with assault rifles and electronic surveillance gear.

Chaudhury isn’t shy about proclaiming his victories.

“They have been shot, they have been arrested, they have surrendered,” he said of the dacoits. His men, he says, have killed about 30 in a little over a year, wiping out nearly every major gang.

“Things are peaceful and there is not much movement of gangs in the ravines, and not many kidnappings,” he said. “I would say they are on the run.”

This new world -- the roads, the phones, the bridges, the ambitious police commander, the angry villagers -- has been devastating for the dacoits.

“At first, I had a good life,” said Sunita Pandey, the bandit waiting with Tiwary at the courthouse. She went into the ravines when she was 15 and spent four years on the run. For an illiterate village girl, it was an adventure: money, excitement, movies played on battery-powered TVs.

Everyone, including the gang’s handful of women, battled the police. “After a month, you know how to handle a gun. They’re everywhere around you, and you need to know how to use them,” she said.

But two years ago, the police began closing in, killing gang members in a series of ambushes. The teenage girl was left nearly alone. Finally she surrendered. “I was afraid,” she said. “Everybody was dying.”

Next to her stood her lawyer, listening.

For years, Tiwary has heard officials promise that banditry is on the verge of extinction. Today, even he worries about his rapidly shrinking client base.

But, he said, a few will hang on. The poverty is too great. “They’ll always be here, at least a few,” he said.

Then he sat back down on the courthouse bench, waiting with his young client for her hearing to begin.