4,500,000 Criminals

In ancient India, every small potentate had his private army of spies and muscle men. When the Grand Moguls conquered the country in the 16th century, they gradually dethroned these minor rulers. Their henchmen, out of jobs, turned into gangsters and racketeers whose franchise on India's crime has lasted to the present day. Their estimated number: 4,500,000.

Catalog of Crime. Each gang developed its own specialty. The Kabutri Nats, famed for their beautiful women, operated as dancing troupes: while the women danced, the men and children frisked the audience. The Bauriahs became confidence men: disguised as sadus (holy men), they duped pious Hindus into parting with their hoarded valuables. The Barwars specialized in brazen daylight thievery, expelled members who stooped to night operations. The nomadic Panjaros rustled cattle. The Harnis forced their women into prostitution and rolled the customers; when the heat was on, they usually beat it disguised as fakirs, often taking a leper along to scare off the curious.

The Ramoosics, also panderers, had a side interest in a bungalow-protection racket. The Bhamptas were railroad thieves. Their favorite trick, best performed on a crowded train, was to frighten a baby, slide to the floor to comfort it, and meanwhile slit open the baggage of the other passengers. The Kolis impersonated cops: descending on a village, they would arrest the village constable on some phony charge, then strip the village. Other groups became counterfeiters, moonshiners, muggers. Children learned crime at their mother's knee. Some tribes pressed a silver rupee, fastened to a piece of string, into a newborn child's throat, where it would form a pocket which, when the child grew up, provided a hiding place for stolen coins and jewels.

How to Reform Them? The British liquidated the Thugs, a group of professional murderers who contributed a word to the English language. But the others they decided to recognize as a sort of criminal caste. Under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871), the more notorious groups were segregated in special settlements. All their members had to register at the age of 14, whether or not they had been personally guilty of a crime, faced special penalties, much more severe than those for ordinary offenders.

Later, criminal tribesmen were given a chance to reform. Many settlements were placed in the care of the Salvation Army, various missions and philanthropic organizations. Children were sent to school, taught useful trades. This work was carried on after India became independent. Last week the state of Uttar Pradesh, following the example of Bombay and Madras, repealed the Criminal Tribes Act, thus freeing all but a small percentage of India's criminal tribesmen from their semi-prison existence.

The authorities were under no illusion that they had abolished the tribes' preference for ancestral occupations; but with the stigma of hereditary crime removed, they hoped to convince the tribes eventually that crime does not pay.

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