All The Prime Ministers Onions !
BY R.K.MISRA
Look before you leap
and think before you speak for words return from the past to haunt the future.
Who would know it
better than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When safely saddled in Gujarat as
chief minister, he would haul the Manmohan Singh led UPA government over the
coals for rising prices of onions. In his speeches Modi conjured up a scenario
wherein onions would be the prime target of thieves and people would need to
keep them in safe deposit vaults.
Ironically, India is
headed towards precisely such a situation under Modi rule with the social
media overflowing with replays of his old onion speeches as well as film song
parodies centering around the Indian staple !
From gems, jewellery,
cash and hoards, even mobiles and ATM break-ins, the theft of choice is fast
shifting to the edible vegetable: Onions!
In Gujarat the home
state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and union home minister and BJP
president, Amit Shah thieves are now targeting onions. With the wedding season
in bloom and the housewife in gloom as onion prices touch Rs 100 per kilogram,
members of the slick fingered gentry have also changed gears, adapting to
market conditions and demand-supply economics.
With a kilogram of
onion turning much dearer than a litre of petrol, Sanju Prajapati, a
vegetable vendor in Palanpur patiya, Surat stocked up the eat-
essential dreaming of glad tidings. The glad turned to sad as he opened his
shop on Friday morning to find that thieves had broken-in the night before and
walked away with five sacks full. Punning on an age-old nursery rhyme one would
say , ‘all the kings horses and all the kings men ,could not get back Sanju’s
onions again’. He ,however ,refuses to give up for he is at pains to
understand how something adroitly covered and camouflaged under
waste and rubbish, attracted the attention of the ‘experts’. An expert or an
insider ,he must be, said Sanju, if he can get to the heart of the matter. The
vendor is scouring through CCTVs in the vicinity trying to come to grips with
the problem that exercises his mind and scissors his profits.
On the serious side,
Ahmedabad ,the key city of Gujarat gets about 1000 tons per day of which about
65 to 75 per cent comes from Maharashtra
and Karnataka and the remaining from Saurashtra region of the state. Gujarat
itself has seen a decline in sowing of onions from around 9000 hectares
last year to around 6000 hectares this year. And therefore the rise and fall of
the important onions!
‘West is west and east
is east and never the twain shall meet’, said Rudyard Kipling, the author
-poet who worked as assistant editor with the Indian newspaper,
Pioneer , long decades ago.
The onion thieves
,however bridged the poetic divide. When vegetable trader Akshaidas opened his
shop in a place of Midnapore district in West Bengal this last week he realized
that thieves had made away with three bagfuls of onions. They did not touch the
cash box but stripped the shop of the 100 kgs of onions which he had purchased
with money borrowed from a friend, ostensibly in search of fast profits.
As one said, desperate
times are cause for desperate crimes.
Surat is the sole link from onion theft to fake currency seizures. So one has
five people including a priest of the highly Gujarat revered Swaminarayan sect
allegedly printing fake Indian currency worth Rs 1.26 crores. In a major
crackdown five people have been arrested from various parts of the state along
with duplicate currency worth over Rs one crores, the Surat police confirmed.
The fake currency was being printed from a room inside a temple of the
same sect in central Gujarat.
From onions to fake
currency and now high profile cash criers! Two expert burglars who turned
thieving from crass coinage to cash collectives deserve mention. The two man
team- 26 year old ,M.B.Shiva alias alias Bariappa Reddy of
Bangaluru teamed up with 21 year old Hakam kathat of Beawar,Rajasthan to
form a formidable duo that specialized in cash break-ins countrywide.
In an era of
super-specialisations, the duo had turned their ‘cash-only’ fetish into a
calibrated science. Setting up a pan-India network they targeted 21 shops in
just one area of Ahmedabad in a ziffy and walked away with a pile.
Their thievery team is
almost a corporate set-up with associates in every state and city,
organized to a T. The two lead a lavish life-style, fly countrywide to fulfil objectives,
operate from luxury hotels and target only a maze of shops in a market ,not
individual shops. Apparently time is money seems to be their belief while cash
and only cash, is their motto. As the cops said, they operate on a
strictly ‘cash only’ basis . In most of the shops they burgled in
Gujarat, there was much they could have taken besides the cash which would have
fetched them a good sum of money but they did not touch any of it. The premise
being that if they picked up goods or jewellery or anything else, they would
need receivers for the stolen goods which, invariably is a dead giveaway.
They were so well
informed by their network of associates, that they landed in Ahmedabad
just around Diwali and stayed in a post hotel used forged identity documents. Obviously
they had been briefed that business and trade establishments remain closed for
five days immediately after Diwali and begin their work only after ‘labh
pancham’. Also this being the only long break, most of them go out of town or
even abroad for a holiday with their family.
Thus even in the remote
possibility that the break-ins are discovered, they will not be available
to corroborate to the investigating cops. And by the time they do, the duo
would have vanished without a trace. In this particular case they burgled 21
shops in a single complex in one night. By the time the Ahmedabad crime branch
got to work, the duo had moved to Surat, over 200 kms away. As the
investigators tracked them to Surat, they were already in deep Rajasthan
but that’s where electronic surveillance saw the cops race ahead and catch them
as they returned to Beawar in Rajasthan, their homing point for sharing the
’loot”.
Desperate times, see desperate crimes !
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