In a haunting video circulating on social media, Rajesh Kumar Keswani sits shackled in chains on the floor, his body battered, his beard unkempt, and his legs bloodied from relentless beatings.

A dacoit looms over him, forcing him to face a mobile camera, his voice quivering as he delivers a desperate message to his family — an appeal dictated by his captors.

Keswani, a rice trader from Kashmore, pleads in his recent video, his voice laced with pain: “Please, just end this. It is now the 50th day of my abduction. Do not trust anyone. Fulfil their demands.”

He was kidnapped in November from his office. Despite repeated strikes and protests by civil society and Hindu groups in Kashmore, there is no sign of his rescue. His family, under immense pressure, has been asked to pay a ransom reportedly as high as Rs 10 million.

Keswani’s plight is not an isolated case. It is a grim reflection of a larger crisis that has gripped northern Sindh for decades. However, the menace of dacoits has grown more ruthless, brazen and sophisticated in recent years. Dozens of dacoit gangs, armed with sophisticated weaponry and emboldened by weak governance, operate with impunity. Kidnappings for ransom, extortion rackets that cripple local businesses, brutal killings and looting people on the major highways have become a grim, daily reality.

These acts of terror are not mere statistics; they are seismic events that shatter families, dismantle communities, and erode the very fabric of the society of northern Sindh. Viral videos of kidnapped victims — faces etched with terror, bodies shackled and bruised — serve as chilling reminders of the dacoits’ cruelty and the state’s apparent powerlessness.

Armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons and bolstered by greater networking, northern Sindh dacoits operate with near impunity — kidnapping, extorting and terrorising communities at will. With roots stretching back to colonial times, once loosely organised gangs have become structured criminal syndicates that leverage tribal loyalties and state inefficiency to their advantage…

The Indus Highway, once a vital artery for commerce and travel, transforms into a no-go zone after sunset. Buses and trucks avoid the route in darkness, while smaller vehicles, clustered together in desperate convoys, rely on a lone police escort — an unsettling symbol of the region’s fragile security.

Yet, even the police, meant to uphold law and order, find themselves outgunned and outmanoeuvred. When they attempt crackdowns, they face adversaries with advanced weapons and an intimate knowledge of the terrain. On February 28, dacoits in Shikarpur ambushed a police patrol, killing one officer and injuring another, allegedly in retaliation for a gangster’s killing by police days earlier.

Imdad Khoso, a council member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) from Kashmore, who organised a protest outside Karachi Press Club in late February to draw attention to their plight, says, “The situation has now become unbearable. Traders are extorted, people are kidnapped, and robberies are rampant — yet the government remains silent. How long can we live under this shadow of fear?”

For generations, Sindh’s Katcha [riverine] area, which lines the banks of the River Indus for thousands of acres — from Kashmore to Dadu on one side and Ghotki to Moro on the other — has been infamous for its criminal activity and serves as a haven for high-profile dacoits. The Katcha area is characterised by its riverbed, which remains dry for most of the year but floods during monsoons, and is divided into ketis [tribal land] controlled by powerful landlords.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Like many parts of the Subcontinent, northern Sindh has long grappled with the scourge of dacoits or ‘dharials’ as they are called in Sindhi — an issue dating back to the Arab period, according to experts.

In his book Decade of Dacoits, Imdad Hussain Sahito, a former professor at Shah Abdul Latif University in Khairpur, traces their presence through the Delhi Sultanate, the Arghun and Tarkhan period, the Samma dynasty, the Mughal era, the Kalhora era, the Talpur period, and British colonial rule.

The British colonial period also saw a new generation of dacoits, whose legacy extended beyond Pakistan’s independence in 1947. Sahito notes that the rural landscape of Sindh saw dramatic changes after 1954. In 1966, military ruler Gen Ayub Khan sought the help of Pir Pagaro as some dacoits were reportedly his disciples. Pagaro ordered their surrender, and those who refused were eliminated by the Hurs themselves.

The 1970s and 1980s marked a turning point, as dacoits adopted modern techniques and sophisticated weaponry. Growing socio-economic disparities and political turmoil fuelled their expansion, with young and educated criminals resorting to kidnappings for ransom. The situation worsened during the 1983 Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) against Gen Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship, triggering a surge in abductions.

Sahito’s research, focusing on 1984–1994, reveals a staggering 11,436 kidnappings in Sindh during that period. In March 1986, a jailbreak at Sukkur Central Jail saw 34 dacoits on death-row escape, forming new gangs that unleashed terror — burning villages, destroying crops, and driving thousands, mostly Hindus, to flee. 

In 1991, an unprecedented spike in kidnappings compelled then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to launch a military operation. Although it didn’t fully eradicate the dacoit gangs, the crackdown did liberate the region extending from Hyderabad and Jamshoro to Sukkur, where they had operated freely for almost three decades. This effectively pushed the dacoit strongholds into northern Sindh, primarily confining them to the area between Sukkur, Ghotki and Kandhkot-Kashmore.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

However, the dacoit problem in northern Sindh has escalated to alarming levels in recent years, posing a serious threat to the region’s security and stability. Analysts attribute this surge to multiple factors, including police inefficiency, political patronage and economic decline, all of which have........

© Dawn (Magazines)