Often on dope but not doped out, the blue-eyed, tough-looking foreigners with snarling dragons tattooed on their shapely biceps zip past at menacing speeds on their Enfield motorbikes up and down the serpentine roads of Kulu district. Cocooned in their own world of hash, coke and techno music, they fear no government agency or the police nor give two hoots to law and order.
Any Manali local will tell you that when the Hells Angels-like firangis go about town on their mobikes without helmets, at times four on one bike, the hapless traffic cop prefers to look the other way. Wearing no helmet may be a minor violation, but even serious offenses like growing cannabis and smuggling it out of Kulu are committed with ease and recklessness. Of course, it is all done with the connivance of the locals, who refuse to become witnesses even when a foreigner is arrested.
Always combative, these foreigners, mostly military-trained Israelis, do not hesitate to pick up fights. Locals admit they are generally looked down upon by the foreigners but they avoid "antagonising" them as the local economy depends heavily on the money coming in from foreign tourists and the drug trade.
When it comes to breaking the law, the foreign toughies resort to all kinds of tricks - from bribing the law enforcing agencies, bending the rules, to jumping bail. Says Anurag Garg, SP, Kulu: "They use the loopholes in the criminal justice system of India to overstay in the country and continue with their activities." Often, they flaunt their foreigner status to claim immunity from law and threaten to complain to their embassies about the harassment they are subjected to. "Fearing that they will be accused of sabotaging the tourism industry, the cops generally avoid meddling with the foreigners," says an official.
Garg cites the example of a foreign national who was to be deported to his country because of his suspected involvement in the flourishing drug trade. But once granted bail, he resisted all deportation efforts of the police. Again, in 1998, a British woman pretended in the court to be the pregnant wife of an arrested German and pleaded for permission to meet him. When he was being taken to the village where his "wife" was residing, he managed to escape from police custody. The duo subsequently disappeared.
According to police records, since 1991, 19 of the total 124 foreign nationals arrested under the Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act and the Foreigners Act have jumped bail. Among them are Yossi (Israel), Miles Spencer (Britain), Robert Caram Aschi (Italy), Eyal Miercook (Israel) and Gudio Karasch. Nobody knows where they are or what they are doing.
The police neither have the infrastructure nor a network of informers to identify such offenders living in the remotest parts of Kulu Valley. There are only 350 policemen for the entire hill district, which has a population of over three lakh people. Shockingly, only seven or eight policemen are deputed in the Manikaran valley, where the world-famous Malana Creme (the high-quality charas of Malana village) is produced. Sources in the police department admit to the involvement of foreigners in the illegal trade of hashish but claim that procedural and logistical problems hinder them from undertaking any operation against them.
