Guns Come Calling

Yet another shooting took place. No, I am not referring to Connecticut, but our own Connaught Place in Delhi. A guy at a Dhaba was quite pissed off on being served leftover food and after few rounds of heated arguments, took out his gun and fired at the waiter. Probably he was not a good shot, the waiter escaped unhurt and the police were prompt enough to arrive and arrest the quick-gun Pande.

It is not yet clear whether the weapon he used was a licenced one or not, but most probably it might be latter.  Going by the recent events it looks like we are sitting on a huge pile of unlicensed weapons; and they are now making their presence felt in urban centres.

The recent killing of liquor baron Ponty Chadha at a farmhouse near Delhi and the attack on a hospital in Guragon point to the alarming trend of use of illegal firearms and the lack of scrutiny by authorities while issuing licence for firearms. Sukhdev Singh Namdhari - an alleged conspirator behind the murder of Chadha and his brother, obtained arms licence and passport by providing fake residence proof. He even got his arms licence renewed twice without surrendering the original documents.

The landed gentry in villages have always owned guns, ostensibly to guard their farms and for hunting. The gun culture in the badlands of Chambal valley and Bihar enjoyed a wild-West like cult image. The illegal arms factories dotting some of the small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar mainly catered to the dacoits and naxalites in the hinterlands. The end of Phoolan Devi era brought down big-ticket dacoities, which used to hog media headlines.

Now the guns manufactured in these units are finding its way to places such as Delhi, Gurgaon and other urban centres in North India. They are no longer fired just in the air during weddings and other celebrations, but are being used to prove a point. They are brandished during road rages, at toll plazas and other places to prove Mao Zedong's dictum that "power flows from the barrel of the gun".

With wheels of justice in our country hardly proving to be any deterrent, guns are being used with impunity and often in public places like crowded streets and hospitals. It looks like we are heading towards a Kalashnikov culture that has blighted Pakistan since late 1970s.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat