A Fanatic Caught Out

Mein hi Dara hoon, aapke paas hoon, maarna ho to maar deejiye (I am Dara, now I am at your disposal, kill me if you want to)," he said, when Mayurbhanj SP Yogesh Bahadur Khurana asked him whether he was actually the man the police had been hunting for over a year-whose elusive nature had, in local lore, taken on a half-mythic character. Finally, he fell to a bait he could little resist: a gun. Dara Singh never had any firearms. His only weapons were two spears and a packet of chilly powder to throw in the eyes of whoever came to arrest him. Of course, he always carried a copy of Hanuman chalisa. It may have helped him convince the villagers that all his acts were god-inspired. At the same time, say the police, Dara has not said anything of his alleged Sangh parivar affiliations.

Rabindra Kumar Pal alias Dara Singh, who allegedly torched alive Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons near the forests of Manoharpur village in interior Orissa last year, had been nurturing the ambition of becoming another Veerappan, the notorious ivory and sandalwood smuggler of Karnataka. Dara desperately wanted a gun in order to achieve his dream to lord it over the forests of Orissa. And, of course, to kill elephants for ivory. A discredited and frustrated police force jumped at the opportunity. A "non-functional" gun, wrapped in a piece of gunnycloth, was arranged to lure the desperado into the police trap.

Apart from Staines’ killing, Dara was also accused of the murders of Father Arul Doss in Jambani and Rehman, a local trader, in Padiabeda, both while he was already a much-wanted figure. According to the police, Dara has admitted that he was present at the scenes of all the murders, but says he did not take part in the killings. "Dara Singh claims he didn’t intend to kill Staines; he had gone there to threaten or thrash him so that he would leave the place. He says the mob went berserk and lynched the missionary and his two children and burnt them in their jeep parked there," says Khurana, who managed to arrest Dara within 20 days of his taking charge of the district.

The police traced Dara through an intermediary to the forests near Gohira village in Keonjhar district. They knew Dara wanted a gun at any cost. "The police had already offered a country-made tamancha through a source but Dara refused it, saying he wanted a bigger gun for poaching ivory," Khurana told Outlook. On two earlier occasions, the police had sent the decoy but Dara didn’t turn up. "There was a lack of coordination within the force. Nobody was sharing information. This added to the police failure," says an officer. Having failed to deliver, the then SP Pradeep Kapur was moved out, and Khurana took over the operation.

This time, sub-inspector Balram Sagar was sent as a decoy with the gun. A team of 40 police personnel in mufti followed him. Dara and two of his associates-Jagannath Munda and Trinath-were sleeping under plastic sheets about 2 km from Gohira village. "The contact person went to Dara. Our officer was behind him. The contact then asked the police officer to come forward to meet Dara. As we had planned, the officer was to engage Dara in conversation for three or four minutes. It was around 10.45 in the night and we had taken position around them. After a few minutes, Balram Sagar pounced on Dara," Khurana says. A stunned Dara was immediately overpowered but his associate Trinath managed to escape under the cover of darkness. The police fired three rounds in the air. "Our priority was Dara Singh. We had decided that he should not be allowed to slip away, therefore we didn’t care much for Trinath. As it is, there is no case against him," explains Khurana.

Once the prized catch was in their custody-Dara has an award of Rs 8 lakh on his head-the police wanted to take him to the nearest police station before the villagers got wind of his arrest. The police party walked him down the hilly terrain for about 12 km to Kulania police station, where his initial statement was recorded. Dara was produced in Karanjia court on February 1 late at night, amid slogans in his favour by a motley crowd of curious villagers who still thought their saviour had been unjustly arrested.

Staines’ widow Gladys, though, says she is happy with Dara’s arrest since "he won’t be able to kill others". And while she says that she has "forgiven" Dara, she prefers that the law take its own course. In a separate statement, Sajjan George, spokesperson for the United Christian Voice, said that Dara was a mere pawn in the conspiracy to intimidate Christians in the country. He hoped that the government would expose the organisations behind the "hate campaign".

Though the arrest comes just before the state elections, it has surprisingly failed to stir up a political storm so far. The Congress, the feeling goes, would project it as indicative of its commitment to the rule of law and the safety of minority communities. The BJP, which even organised a day’s bandh in September to protest against the "police harassment of the local people in the name of searching for Dara Singh", has so far maintained a stoic silence. Each party is extra cautious in approaching an issue that had created an international storm.

The main challenge before the police and the CBI now is to prove Dara’s guilt in a court of law. Given the nature of evidence against the accused and the poor quality of investigation by the agencies concerned, fears are being expressed that securing a conviction would be a tough call. Even Subhash Chandra Mahanta, assistant public prosecutor in Karanjia (where the cases are pending trial), does not sound very hopeful. He told Outlook: "Till now, the weapon used in the Rehman murder case has not been recovered." Rehman was allegedly chased and attacked by Dara in a local market in Padiabeda. His hands were chopped off with a farsa (cleaver) before he was set on fire in full view of the villagers who had come to the weekly bazaar. Yet, the police could find only two eyewitnesses to the crime and one of them-a gramrakkhi (village watchman)-happens to be a police appointee whose testimony can be doubted.

Even though Dara kept eluding the police, somewhere along the line he knew that his end would come without warning. According to the police officers who nabbed him, "he was not scared but stunned". When Khurana asked him why he remained elusive for one year, Dara replied in a resigned tone: "Mujhe maloom tha, ek din to yeh hona hi tha (I knew that this would happen one day)."

The end, when it came, would have been rather disappointing for the local tribals. Contrary to the stories spread among them about Dara’s supposed miraculous powers, no superhuman forces came to his rescue when the police officers in plainclothes pounced on him in his forest hideout. He could not "run at the speed of 80 kilometres per hour", nor could he "become invisible". Neither did any of the Sangh organisations come to the defence of this self-styled saviour of Hindutva and the saffron ideology.