Khaki Files by Kumar Neeraj

Author:Kumar, Neeraj [Kumar, Neeraj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353056803
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

7

Moon-gazer

Moon-gazing is an esoteric pastime for a motley group of people ranging from celebrities to yogis. It is a part of Trataka, an ancient yogic technique that has been practised for thousands of years and is known to bring incredible benefits to those who practise it. It includes steady gazing at the moon that can apparently heal the eyes, clear the mind and even increase psychic abilities. Hollywood celebrities—Kate Hudson, for one—are known to have moon-gazing parties where invitees gaze at the moon for fifteen minutes and then meditate before their Rabelaisian pursuits commence.

I, too, by a quirk of fate, turned into a moon-gazer during the early years of my police career. Every evening as I returned home, I would look at the moon to see whether it was waxing or waning. Nights when the moon is down are called ‘dark nights’ in police parlance. It is on dark nights that criminals prefer to operate, as they are difficult to spot by police patrols. I would be anxious with the waning moon, apprehensive about the possible occurrence of a serious incident in my jurisdiction, as gangs belonging to an erstwhile criminal tribe were active in my district, whose depredations were the stuff of horror stories.

I was posted as deputy commissioner of police in south Delhi between 1989 and 1992. Midnight raids by gangs of criminals, who more or less had a common modus operandi, plagued my district. They would break into homes, bludgeon the residents to death in their sleep without any provocation and then ransack their homes, looking for jewellery, cash, wristwatches and other small items of value. If spotted and chased by the police, they would throw stones at them, sometimes severely injuring the officers, and then escape under the cover of darkness.

Usually sighted in their undergarments, they were commonly referred to as the ‘kachchha-banyan’ gang in police circles as well as in the media. Not much was known about their place of origin, their way of living and what made them habitual criminals and mindless killers. No database was available on them. Arrests, if any, were few and far between, with little effort to track their backward linkages.

The British, when they ruled our country, believed that certain communities in India were congenital criminals. Labelling them as criminal tribes, they enacted the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, which, after several amendments, became the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911. Certain castes and communities branded as criminal tribes under the Act were subject to strict restrictions on their movements, required to report to the nearest police station on a weekly basis, and liable to search and arrest if found outside their prescribed area. On account of this ‘branding’ and stereotyping, the social ostracism, alienation and social exclusion of about thirteen million people belonging to 127 tribes followed.

When India became independent, this repugnant piece of colonial legislation, branding communities as habitual criminals and damning them forever, was repealed in 1949, and subsequently, criminal tribes were de-notified in 1952. This story is

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