Bandit in India was folk hero to some
mohar singh 1926(?)-2020
Mohar Singh, who has died aged 93, was a luxuriantly moustachioed dacoit, or bandit, who terrorized the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh for nearly two decades, but was seen as a Robin Hood figure by poor villagers — a reputation he deployed in later life to enter politics and even appear in a Bollywood film.
For many years the deep ravines of his native Chambal valley teemed with criminal gangs carrying out murders, robberies and kidnappings for ransom. The most famous dacoit was Phoolan Devi, who transformed herself from an illiterate villager to a member of parliament and inspired the 1996 biopic Bandit Queen before she was assassinated at 37 in 2001.
Before he and his gang of 140 bandits surrendered to police in 1972, Singh, who began his criminal career at 18, had a charge sheet of some 500 crimes against him, including 85 murders. But he preferred the term “baaghi” ( rebel) to dacoit and claimed to have been driven to a life of crime by an unjust social system.
“Whatever I did, I did for a cause,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “Whoever from my community got into a fight over land and asked for my help, I would take up the cause. We would go into a village and be garlanded. We would give money to poor people so that they could get their daughters married.”
Mohar Singh was born in 1926 or 1927 and became an outlaw after killing a man in a property dispute, retreating to the heavily wooded ravines of the Chambal. “We were driven to the ravines due to a tedious legal system which denied us and many others our rights,” he said in 1972. “I had a dispute over land which dragged on for so long that I rebelled against the system and wielded the gun.”
Often dressed in police uniforms, his gang would strike before vanishing into the forests, taking hostages with them. At the peak of his fame in the late 1960s a reward of 200,000 rupees ($ 3,500) was offered for his capture, a substantial sum at the time.
Yet Singh claimed to have principles: he left women alone and would never attack a member of his own caste or a Brahmin, the Hindu priestly caste.
In 1972 Singh surrendered after cutting a deal with local officials and his sentence of 20 years in jail was reduced to eight for “gentlemanly” behaviour.
Released in 1980, he lived as a farmer on land given to him at Mehgaon in Bhind by the local government.
“There was not a single moment that I didn’t like what I was doing,” he said.
Singh is survived by two sons and a daughter.