After netting big fish, Special Cell turns attention to other gunrunners

Special Cell, the anti-terror unit of Delhi Police which also specialises in clamping down on arms traffickers, managed to arrest Richhpal Singh, a notorious arms trafficker from the Sikligar community, who had flooded the Capital with his weapons and supplied explosives to Maoist combatants from Telangana.

This may have been a substantial development in the fight against arms traffickers; however, sleuths from the anti-terror unit are not celebrating as they believe that arms will continue to be trafficked.

The main reason for this is the fact that many members of the Sikligar community, located in ten villages Madhya Pradesh, do not have a stable source of livelihood and have to depend on their ancestral occupation of manufacturing guns.

Two states top the list of illegal arms manufacturers – Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Munger district in Bihar was notorious for the supply of illegal arms. However, because of the clampdown by the local police and Special Cell, the gunrunners shifted their base of operations to West Bengal.

"We had, over the past few years, managed to make substantial gains in Munger. Several hundred country-made weapons were confiscated and the gunrunners soon found their base of operations had started to shrink. So many of them now they have set up their base in Kolkata," said a Special Cell source.

These gunrunners now take their raw materials from Munger and manufacture the final products in Kolkata. Special Cell officers refused to divulge the areas in West Bengal used by the Munger gunrunners, as it would jeopardize an ongoing operation.

However, gunrunners from Madhya Pradesh continue to be elusive. Around 15 days ago, representatives from the Delhi Pradesh Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee had visited a local gurudwara in Burhanpur village, predominantly inhabited by Sikligars.

The committee members had distributed cloth worth Rs 20 lakh to members of the community, in a bid to wean them off their ancestral practice of manufacturing guns. The community was asked to deal in the cloth business and they were given substantial period of time to return the money.

However, a recent survey by Special Cell officers revealed that the rehabilitative and confidence building measures may take a lot of time to kick in.

The districts of Dhar, Khargaon, Barwani and Bhura in Madhya Pradesh have more than 60 percent of the population involved in the illegal gun racketeering trade, sources claimed.

In Pachauri village, Richhpal's ancestral home, around 200 houses have several hundred families, all involved in the illegal arms trade. Further, the villages of Singum, Durgupt, Bhagwanpura belonging to the four gunrunning districts are dominated by the Sikiligar community.

"In Richhpal's village alone, everyone is involved in the gun trade. During a survey, we found that most of them have never been to school. Richhpal himself is illiterate.

It would take a lot of effort from the state government to rehabilitate them," the official added.