Chambal village marks 50 yrs of 1st mass surrender of dacoits
BHOPAL: In the first week of April 1972, the residents of the tiny village of Dhorera, 36km from Madhya Pradesh’s Morena, left their homes. Bags and children on their shoulders, they put locks on their doors, and took all they could carry -- some on foot, some on bullock carts. Fleeing was not unusual in the area. These were, after all, the ravines of Chambal where dacoits, guns and murder were intrinsic to everyday life. Yet, this was different. It was not a flight sparked by fear; it was a temporary exodus for peace.
As the families left, new inhabitants came in. The homes were unlocked, and tents were set up, by people from the district administration, politicians, social activists, and police personnel. Then arrived some unprecedented, but not unfamiliar, visitors.
More than a hundred dreaded dacoits entered the village with guns slung across their bodies. The state and the dacoits had hunted each other until then. Now they were trying to negotiate a surrender.
About a week later, on April 14, 1972, more than 200 dacoits surrendered in Dhorera. It was the first such mass surrender in Chambal, and was led by dacoits Mohar Singh and Madho Singh. The former, carrying a reward of ₹3 lakh on his head and accused of 85 murders, lay down arms with more than 80 men. The latter — carried a reward of ₹1 lakh — surrendered with 12. There were 10 other smaller dacoit gangs that surrendered, too, all shouting slogans in praise of Mahatma Gandhi, and social activists Vinobha Bhave and Jai Prakash Narayan.
Fifty years later, on April 14, civil society activists and some of the former dacoits will return to Dhorera to commemorate that seminal day five decades ago, and to relive a journey that finally brought some semblance of peace to the ravaged region.
Years of back-channel talks
The final touches may have come in Dhorera in 1972, but the surrender was years in the making, according to people who have studied and tracked Chambal’s dark days.
“The first initiative for the surrender was taken by Vinoba Bhave in 1960 on the request of Tehsildar Singh, the son of dacoit Man Singh. Tehsildar was in Naini jail, and wrote a letter to Bhave seeking a permanent solution. Bhave had advocated a surrender for dacoits, and in a famous speech on the banks of the Chambal river in May 1960 said that these dacoits were better than the ones (a reference to corruption) sitting in Delhi,” said Jayant Singh, a professor of journalism at ITM, Gwalior who followed the stories of Chambal’s dacoits.
After the letter, there were intermittent conversations between the government and activists around questions of surrender but these faded into the background, overtaken by broader political events such as the death of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964.
Ten years later, Madho Singh reached out to Bhave and Narayan. The negotiations could not have come at a better time. Chambal was deep in the throes of violence. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, there were at least 700 dacoit gangs operating in six districts in MP, four districts in Rajasthan, and six districts in Uttar Pradesh, Jayant Singh said.
The topography of the ravines made it fertile ground for the operation of these gangs. The soft soil allowed only for movement on foot, or on horses and camels, which the police found difficult to navigate. A former state police services officer KD Sonakiya said, “The structure of the ravines changes every monsoon, so it was difficult for police to have a clear map they could use to chase the dacoits.”
Retired deputy inspector general of police, Hari Singh Yadav, who spent 13 years of his service in the ravines, said, “In the 1960s, dacoits increased due to a perceived sense of injustice. When people faced atrocities, they would join the dacoits. The sardar (chief) would give them guns and manpower, which they used to exact revenge, and in turn would join the gang. These gangs sustained themselves through abduction and extortion.”
In early 1971, Narayan deputed the Chambal Ghati Shanti mission, an organisation of 50 social activists, to begin negotiations with a clutch of infamous gang leaders including Mohar Singh, Tilak Singh, Saru Singh, and Badla Ram, among others. Eventually, the negotiations were whittled down to two primary conditions. One, the surrendering dacoits would not be given the death sentence for their crimes; and two, after they completed their jail terms, they would be given three acres of agricultural land. Narayan often joined these negotiations, and proposed the idea of an “open jail” for dacoits, the first of which was set up in Mungaoli in Ashok Nagar district. Eventually, there was a breakthrough with Mohar Singh.
Singh, who died in 2020 in Bhind, would often say that when Narayan informed then prime minister Indira Gandhi that a deal was done, she said she would allow it only if Mohar Singh surrendered. “Even Prime Minister was concerned about me,” he said in an interview with HT in 2019.
The Dhorera surrender
Even during the negotiations, the trust was still fragile. Singh asked that a village be vacated for the dacoits and their families to stay together as final touches were being ironed out. Dhorera, with 40 homes, was picked because of its proximity to the Mahatma Gandhi Sewa Ashram in Jaura, and the Pagar Kothi where Narayan lived. On the order of then MP chief minister Prakash Chand Sethi, police declared the whole area a “peace zone” where dacoits were allowed to roam freely.
Retired constable Shri Krishna Singh Sikarwar, now 85, was one of the 2,000-odd MP police personnel posted at the village. “It was an unusual moment for us because we were welcoming the dacoits to the peace zone, the same people we had been chasing for so many years,” he said.
Initially, the administration expected only the Mohar Singh and Madho Singh gangs to surrender, but as word spread, at least 10 other gangs wanted to lay down arms as well. “The negotiators had to quickly call for extra ration and water tankers because there was always the chance of clashes breaking out if there was mismanagement,” said Sikarwar.
Ajmer Singh, now an 85-yearold farmer, was part of the Mohar Singh gang. “I surrendered when I was 35. It was like the freedom movement for us. We were afraid because it would have been easy for police to kill us in a fake encounter. But we trusted Jai Prakash Narayan. Because our numbers were so high, the police took two days to complete the process of arrests. I was housed in Mungaoli jail.”
For the villagers of Dhorera, the temporary shift was a chance to be a part of history. Parimal Singh Kansana shifted to the village of Kashipur for 10 days. It was his pucca home, one of two in the village, that Mohar Singh occupied. “All the women and children moved to their maternal homes for two weeks while some men, including my father stayed behind to help the district administration,” Kansara, now 68, said.
He added that the village did not have a relationship of fear with the dacoits, grateful as they were for their support of the poor. “We were not afraid of the dacoits because they only punished zamindaars and businessmen.”
For some, though, memories attached to the dacoits were less pleasant, and they were less enthused about the negotiations. Gangaram Gupta, from Dhamkana village in Morena, was seven when he was kidnapped by the Barelal gang. “I went through torture for 24 days. The dacoits threw me from a camel. My father paid ₹5,000 as ransom. When the gang surrendered, without any real punishment, it pained me. But we told ourselves this would bring peace for our families.”
What happened to the dacoits
The mass surrender of 1972 opened the floodgates for more such over the next few years. By 1985, a total of 654 dacoits had surrendered, official data shows. Retired director general of police DC Jugran, who was the Morena police superintendent in 1972, said, “In the decade after the surrender, there was a lot of pressure on dacoits. There were encounters, and as numbers went down, more and more wanted to give up arms.”
Malkhan Singh, for instance, surrendered in Bhind in July 1982 in front of 10,000 people. Phoolan Devi surrendered in February 1983 in Bhind.
Most dacoits served imprisonment of eight to 10 years, and when they came out, had to construct entirely new lives. The Gandhi Ashram in Dhorera, set up in 1969, played a key role in the reconciliation by finding ways for surrendered dacoits to integrate. “The big challenge was to maintain peace after the surrender. Those who suffered due to the dacoits could easily have developed feelings of revenge. That is why SN Subbarao started humanitarian activities from the Ashram. At its peak, as many 80 dacoits were with the ashram,” said social reformer Rajagopal PV, one of the people involved in the ashram.
As the dacoits pivoted to a life outside of crime, one arena that welcomed the most influential among them was politics. For years, they had run quasi governments, and this meant a readymade catchment of support that came with these leaders. Mohar Singh joined the Congress and won the Mehgaon municipality election in 1995. Phoolan Devi rose to become an MP from Mirzapur in UP twice before she was assassinated in 2001. Tehsildar Singh, who first wrote to Bhave proposing the mass surrender in 1960, fought Mulayam Singh as a Bharatiya
Janata Party candidate from Jaswant Nagar in 1991, but lost.
Shadow of violence
Fifty years may have passed, and the dacoits have long lost their influence, but the shadow of a culture of violence still looms. A Madhya Pradesh home ministry report says that in 2020, the state issued 250,000 gun licenses. Of these, 30% were in three districts -- Gwalior (30,500), Bhind (22,000) and Morena (23,000). IPS officer Manoj Kumar Singh, who was posted in Bhind in 2020, said, “Beyond these, about 150 murders were committed using illegal arms between 2016 and 2020. The illegal arms business feeds off the legal arms licenses, because ammunition is in plentiful supply.”
For police personnel on the ground, a subculture where every folk tale is about gun-wielding dacoits has grave ramifications. In his last posting in the district of Rajgarh, Pawan Singh Bhadoriya registered only one case under the arms act in over a year. Now town inspector of the Sihoniya police station for just seven months, he has already logged 20 cases. “The youngsters have started taking to social media to show off their collection of arms. Here, owning a weapon is a matter of pride.”
Between April 13 and April 15, in an event organised by the Gandhi ashram and the Ekta Parishad, at least 30 surrendered dacoits and their families will arrive in Dhorera to commemorate the day of the first mass surrender. The “golden jubilee” is set to take place at Jayaprakash Narayan Degree College — inaugurated in 1995 on the same piece of land where the surrender agreement was reached on April 14, 1972.