Word: dacoits
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...That's the philosophy of the "dacoit" bandits who maraud across India's impoverished northern plains. And it's a message that finds an unlikely echo in NATO's handling of the Macedonia crisis...
...grinding poverty of a lower-caste family in Uttar Pradesh, she was married off to a widower at age 11 who beat and tortured her. She ran away from him but was shunned by her village elders, and spent her early teenage years in the violent world of the Dacoits - the storied bandits who roam the desolate plains of northern India. Devi exploded into the national consciousness in 1981, as the 21-year-old leader of a Dacoit gang that massacred 21 men of the Thakur landowning caste in the village of Bhemai. The massacre was a brutal revenge attack...
...According to the legend of Phoolan Devi in the villages of northern India, her lover and Dacoit mentor Vikram Mallah had taught her, "If you are going to kill, kill twenty, not just one. For if you kill twenty, your fame will spread; if you kill only one, they will hang you as a murderess." The Bandit Queen?s story certainly bore out that maxim. But the maxim has a corollary: The more people you kill; the wider the clamor for revenge...
They travel in gangs through the hills of the state of Madhya Pradesh, robbing wayfarers as did highwaymen of old. Villagers admire them, movies glorify their exploits. For eight centuries, India's dacoits (dakoo is the Hindi word for bandit) have been the buccaneering heroes of pulp-magazine adventures. But none is more compelling than the tale of Phoolan Devi, 27. Over the past four years she has become her country's most notorious dacoit. Once pursued by 2,000 police, she has been charged with 70 cases of banditry and is suspected of some 50 murders. Fanciful...
...subsequent rise to criminal eminence was swift: she fell in with a dacoit named Babu Gujar, seduced his lieutenant Vikram Mallaha and, while bathing Gujar one evening, stabbed him to death. Thus Mallaha became chieftain, Phoolan second in command. Dressed in blue jeans and a multicolored turban, brandishing a stolen bullhorn and a rifle, she quickly earned a reputation as a deadly shot. When Mallaha's restive followers killed him, Phoolan formed her own gang. On Feb. 14, 1981, to avenge her lover's murder, she and her marauders gunned down 20 apparently innocent citizens in the village...