Author:
Publication: The Times of India
Date: January 27, 2005
When National Hydro Power Corporation
(NHPC) jointly bagged the ambitious Rs 19,000-crore rural road construction
project in Bihar under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojna last year,
its chairman and managing director Yogendra Prasad appeared impatient at
media scepticism about its smooth execution.
"We have executed several projects
in insurgency-hit North-East and even in Jammu and Kashmir," he boasted.
A month later, the CMD was spending sleepless nights - two of his company's
senior technocrats were abducted on way to Bettiah.
A two-week drama followed, which
came to an end only after one of the captives, chief engineer KK Singh,
escaped from his abductors in UP; the abductors later put the other captive,
general manager T Mandal, aboard a Delhi-bound train at Narkatiaganj in
Champaran.
The men had demanded Rs 10 crore
as ransom, to be paid through hawala channels in Mumbai. While the NHPC
denied that any ransom was paid, the claim was met with much scepticism.
In Bihar, where kidnapping has become
more of an industry, such denials are invariably tagged along whenever
captives return home safely.
If you believe in statistics, sample
this: 32,085 cases of kidnapping were reported between 1992 and September
2004 in the state, about 20% of these were for ransom, according to police
records.
Police records don't tell the whole
story, though. "So wide and octopus-like has the grip of criminals on society
become and so complete the lack of confidence of the people in the administration
that only a fraction of the cases is reported to the police," a People's
Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) fact-finding report stated in 1994, adding,
"instead, people prefer to go for a direct negotiation with the kidnappers."
The public's cynicism stems from the perception that politicians are stakeholders
in this cash- rich "industry".
From being mere henchmen of politicians,
"many criminals have themselves joined politics and become MLAs and MPs...
This has contributed to the collapse of the rule of law," a report of the
Bihar's unit of People's Union of Civil Liberties stated way back in 1988.
The Patna High Court in December last ordered storming of Bihar jails.
The seizure from incarcerated political strongmen only corroborated the
popular view.
