Quotes of the Day
The strangest thing about being kidnapped, says Mohammed Salahuddin, was how familiar—and even inevitable—it seemed. The 53-year-old political activist had already negotiated a $2,000 ransom for his brother Badruddin in December 1998, and a few years before that he had secured his first cousin's release from another gang. So Salahuddin knew exactly what was happening when 10 armed men surrounded his Jeep on March 25 as he drove to a party meeting in a remote corner of India's northeastern Bihar state. Holding him at gunpoint, they yelled: "Move and we'll shoot!" Salahuddin recalls: "There was nothing I could do. In some ways I wasn't even surprised."
The men marched him across rivers and through forests, until they reached a camp hidden in a narrow gorge on the Nepalese border, hours from the nearest road. They held him there for a week, telling him they wanted a ransom of 3 million rupees ($64,000). But as the days dragged on and the police dragnet tightened, the kidnappers became nervous and dropped their price. Eventually, for the promise of $1,700, half of it as a loan, Salahuddin's abductors left him at an isolated village and fled. "I never paid," he says. "They might come back for their money, but then again if I had paid, it would have encouraged them to try again."
Adding to the sense that Bihar is perilously out of control is the fact that even some politicians may be getting in on the kidnap game. Superintendent Shoba Ohatker, who has busted more kidnap gangs than any other officer, says that in her three years on the job, she has arrested suspected kidnappers hiding in the homes of local politicians four times. And she adds that her inquiry into a doctor's abduction last December led her to arrest and charge one assembly member with "15-20 cases of arms smuggling, kidnapping and murder." (His case has not yet come to trial.) For her pains, Ohatker has twice been summoned by the state assembly to answer allegations that she is unfairly targeting pols. But the truth, it is generally agreed, is that she is actually targeting alleged gang bosses, many of whom used to work for political leaders as handy election-time muscle but now have outgrown their modest origins to become centers of power in their own right. One assembly member, Sushil Kumar Modi, 48, figures about 40 of his colleagues run kidnap syndicates, an estimate shared by the police. "Lawlessness is out of control," he mourns. "It's controlled by powerful politicians."
With law and order strictly a state affair and Bihar under the control of an opposition party, the national government in New Delhi has little authority or motive to intervene. But without some outside help, there is almost no hope of anything dislodging kidnapping as the state's most popular career choice. Though Bihar is India's third-largest state, it has attracted no investment or industry to speak of, and unemployment is chronic. Meanwhile, those Biharis who still have jobs are often paralyzed by insecurity: across the state, fear of kidnapping has emptied schools of teachers, fields of laborers and hospitals of doctors. Purnendu Ojha, a pediatric surgeon who was the first of 15 doctors from the state capital Patna to be kidnapped in the past 18 months, now works from a home he has fortified with wall-top iron spikes and metal shutters. Three armed guards frisk his patients. "I view everyone with suspicion," he says.
Ojha plans to pack up and leave once his children finish school, and he's hardly alone. Every day thousands of Biharis cram the state's railroad platforms to join the millions who have already migrated to a new life, becoming the unskilled backbone of industries as diverse as the construction business in Kashmir, the cotton houses of Bombay and the farms of Punjab. Census takers say a third of Champaran's population has taken part in the exodus. Long before his own kidnapping, Salahuddin sent all three of his sons to New Delhi to study and work. "Our society is on the edge," he says. "The entire social system is falling apart. Nobody believes anything can be achieved honestly any more."
- Alex Perry / Champaran
- In Bihar, where poverty is rampant, the career of choice is kidnapping for ransom