Community on the run

If you roam the hillocks near Yavat, some 50 km from Pune, chances are you will spot a 70-year-old woman hunting for birds. Wali Merwan G...

If you roam the hillocks near Yavat, some 50 km from Pune, chances are you will spot a 70-year-old woman hunting for birds. Wali Merwan Gudrawat has no other way to feed herself. Her three sons are in Kolhapur Jail, charged with dacoity and there is no one to help her in old age. For that matter, there is no one to help most women of the Kanjar Bhat, a community damned by circumstance and almost frozen in time.

In the homes the Kanjar Bhat have, the father is not the head of the family anymore. For the men are always in hiding, away from the public gaze and always wanted by the police. The males in the family 8212; rough estimates put the community strength in Maharashtra at not more than 300 families 8212; disappear once they cross the age of 15 years. In fact, it has been a community on the run for quite some years now. Branded by the police as born dacoits, the Kanjar Bhat men are always underground while their women brew liquor to keep the homes going.

Migration from Rajasthan after Independence proved tobe the undoing of the Kanjar Bhat. With no land to call their own and unable to find jobs which could bring home money, some from the community opted for dacoity. And that damned the community. In the eyes of the police and in the eyes of society. Nobody likes the Kanjar Bhat.

The police added to the myth, painting them as diabolical killers with an ancient signal system to warn and make good their escape. Today, the Kanjar Bhat are thought of as a community whose men have an axe for a weapon, who duck the law by letting out cries which mimic the mongoose and the birds.Still, the police are always in hot pursuit. In the last twelve months, a crackdown on the Kanjar Bhat in and around Yavat has led to more than 50 8220;surrenders8221;. Now boys from the community are being roped in as 8220;spotters8221; to help step up the 8220;surrenders8221;.

Maybe another 50 men will surface in the coming months. It is good going for the police. But what of the Kanjar Bhat? Will the surrenders get them jobs? Can they return to themainstream? Nobody knows.

The police say that they have sought help from social organisations like the Association for Attitudinal Healing and policewoman Kiran Bedi8217;s India Vision Foundation, both working with prisoners and their families, for vocational guidance. Some plans for schooling and sheep rearing are also being talked about.

But officials admit that unless a concrete rehabilitation programme is chalked out, the surrenders will not mean much.

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Away from all such talk, the plight of the Kanjar Bhat continues. Almost every hut in the community8217;s habitation has a metal drum and an aluminum plate the pre-requisites for a local brew. Made totally by women who trudge to neighbouring towns to sell the brew, the liquor sales keep the families alive.

8220;I make Rs 50 a day by selling liquor to the men in Yavat. Most of it goes in buying gur jaggery for more liquor,8221; says Saraswati, whose husband was arrested on the charge of dacoity three months ago.

8220;Our grandparents taught us to steal.But we want our children to go to school and do something else for a living. We want to change, get back to normal lives,8221; says Jaya Pyarelal, who also operates a bhatti, a liquor-making unit.

Inspector Balaji Shinde of the Crime Branch Maharashtra rural, who has been keeping track of the Kanjar Bhat8217;s movements, says that he has noticed the desperation of the community to shrug off the past and lead normal, settled lives. But the police, if it wants to, cannot do much until help arrives in the form of some rehabilitation package.