I HAD barely got up on the morning of December 28 when the coach attendant handed to me a copy of the Dhanbad edition of the Hindustan Times. I was stunned to read the report of the abduction of Ashok Karn, a staff photographer of the HT at Ranchi. The report said he and his wife were kidnapped from their ancestral home in Nalanda district. She was released after a few minutes with the instruction to make arrangements to pay a ransom of Rs 10 lakh for his release. The newspaper carried several reports from Patna and Ranchi quoting journalists and political leaders on the sensational incident.

It was beyond my comprehension why the kidnappers chose Ashok Karn. How could his wife raise such a large sum? These were the questions that nagged me as I continued my journey to Bhubaneswar. After all, Ashok was my colleague for 10 years and we knew each other very well. I still remember him proudly showing me his first Nikon SLR camera. He had not yet become a full-fledged news photographer. For his livelihood, he depended on occasional assignments from newspapers and news magazines, which were notorious for cheating freelancers.

When it came to making payments, even big newspapers were no better. The first time we collaborated was when the Malayala Manorama gave me an assignment to do a story on the toilet revolution brought about by Bindeshwar Pathak's Sulabh movement in Patna. Ashok went around Patna's Gandhi Maidan for a few days to take some eye-catching photographs. He was to be paid Rs 25 for every published photograph. The toilet story was the lead item in the Sunday magazine of the Manorama. Ashok was thrilled to find several of his photographs appearing in the newspaper along with my story.

One day, out of compulsion, he asked me for payment and I settled his account. The payment had not come from the Manorama. When it finally arrived, it was a princely sum of Rs 150, which was roughly the payment I had made to Ashok. That left me a net loser. But the satisfaction that my parents were able to read my dispatches egged me on to contribute to the Manorama as and when occasion demanded. I did several stories for the Malayalam daily and the photographs were invariably Ashok's.

We travelled together in Bihar doing several stories for the Hindustan Times. On most of these visits, he was my guide, navigator and interpreter. Once on a visit to Nalanda, he showed me the village where he was born. For some reason he did not show any interest in taking me to his ancestral home where his brother, an Inspector in the Bihar Police, stayed. It was from this village that he was kidnapped.

Ashok is a born journalist. I vividly remember that day when he virtually ran up the stairs and barged into my room on the first floor of the HT office on Budh Marg in Patna. He put his heavy camera bag on my table and began telling me the breathtaking story he had brought from Bhagalpur. It was literally breathtaking! The heavily panting and perspiring lensman, who had covered innumerable incidents of death and destruction, could not control his emotion as he narrated what he saw in the city of weavers.

Obviously, he was conscious of what he had brought from the riot-hit area - a story that will forever be etched in the memory of all those who had anything to do with one of the worst-ever communal riots in the country. Since the deadline for the first edition was fast approaching and most of our staff had assembled in my room to listen to him, I asked him to cut his story short and, instead, get me the photographs he had brought.

Among the gruesome pictures he brought - of corpses of men, women and children, burning houses and shops and destroyed looms - the most poignant was that of an army jawan pulling out a girl from a dirty pond so full of weeds that water was invisible. "It was from this pond that several bodies were recovered. They had all been hacked to death and dumped there," said Ashok.

In the morning as an army vehicle passed by, the jawans heard a human sound emanating from the pond. They stopped their vehicle, got down and looked around. The sound was feeble. There she was, a girl - 15 or 16 - gasping for breath. One of the jawans stretched out his hand to pull her out of the lake but there was no response from her. She had lost her consciousness. The jawan did not give up. He stepped into the pond full of slime and excreta, clutched her hand and pulled her on to the shore.

Then they realized why she was there. One of her feet had been cut off and blood was still flowing from the joint. Had she remained in the pond for a few more minutes, she could well have been one among the dozen or so bodies that were recovered from the pond. It was a grand betrayal that landed them in the pond on October 28, 1989. Twelve years had passed since the horrific incident when I met her at Sadaruddin Chak under Habibpur police station in Bhagalpur but Malka Begum remembered even the minutest details of that betrayal.

Bihar was at that time in the grip of communal violence sparked by the Ayodhya campaign the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had launched. Chanderi, a small village on the outskirts of Bhagalpur and close to the Rajendra Agricultural University, was one of them. In the Muslim locality of the village lived Malka Begum with her parents, two brothers and two sisters. Her father did sundry jobs to keep the hearth burning. Her elder brothers also chipped in. Prosperity was never part of their life but contentment was. Faith in Allah helped the family face financial and other crises they periodically encountered. But this faith was rudely shaken when on October 27, 1989, a mob that included many recognizable faces attacked Chanderi and butchered whoever it could lay its hands own. The bodies were dumped in a ditch.

Mohammed Nihal, whom I met at Chanderi, told me that he lost his mother, two uncles and two aunties. Some of them ran away to safety. Malka and her family were among those who fled. They took shelter in the local mosque. Next day, they were persuaded by some of their Hindu neighbours to come out of the hiding with the promise that they would be given protection at least till the Army arrived and the jawans moved them to a safer place. It was an offer they could not turn down. But they had no clue then that they were being taken for a ride. And many of them would pay for their folly of accepting the offer with death.

Malka's story is similar to what Harsh Mander, a serving IAS officer, narrates in his article, Hindustan Hamara: I Can Never Sing That Song Again (The Times of India, March 20, 2002): "A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three-month-old son, because a police constable directed her to safety and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire."

As Malka and others moved out of the mosque to what they thought was a safer place, a mob set upon them. They were armed with swords, daggers and sickles. She saw the mob hacking her parents. Most of them had the same fate. Malka too was not lucky. In panic, she ran towards the pond, the same pond into which the mob had thrown the bodies of her own parents. She was about to jump when a sword-wielding man who stood on the edge of the pond hit her with his sharp weapon. He had neatly hacked her right foot off her ankle. His companion had a bamboo stick with a sickle attached to the end. They tried to kill her with that extended weapon but she evaded it by moving further and further into the pond till she reached its centre. She was so panic-stricken that she did not even realize that she had lost her foot forever.

The men could have finished her had they stepped into the pond. But they did not want to dirty themselves. Malka has no memories of how she spent the whole night in that pond till a strapping soldier saved her. Perhaps, the weeds were strong enough to support her. "Providence has its mysterious ways" she philosophized. Every newspaper worth the name carried Malka's story. In fact, she symbolized the enormity of the tragedy that struck Chanderi where a total of 67 people were killed. It helped the Press to put a face to the tragedy. It was Ashok who first discovered her.

As I was on the move, I had no way of keeping myself abreast of the kidnapping saga. It was, therefore, a great relief when I heard on All India Radio that he had been released. The next day's newspaper had a picture of Ashok narrating the incident to Laloo Prasad Yadav. What struck me most was his comment, "How could I raise a sum of Rs 10 lakh when my take-home salary is just Rs 8,000?" It is, perhaps, a measure of the desperation of the kidnappers that they chose Ashok, instead of some wealthy person.

I have no clue as to what forced the kidnappers to release him. Was it the intervention of LalooYadav or the efficiency of the police or the belated realisation of the kidnappers that Ashok was hardly in a position to cough up Rs 10 lakh? In retrospect, I wonder whether the media would have given so much coverage if the victim was an ordinary person with no connections, political or journalistic, to boot.

There are people who blame Laloo Yadav for the kidnapping phenomenon. One of them, Sankarshan Thakur writes in The Making of Laloo Yadav: The Unmaking of Bihar (HarperCollins): "Kidnapping for ransom became an institutional affair during the Laloo Yadav years. Someone was kidnapped, phonecalls were made to relatives, the money was handed over, the victim was freed. The police, or the state, played no role. Most of the time, because they were themselves involved. In several cases, when affected families happened to have influence among the powerful, they were able to secure the release of their relatives using political influence. A senior police official in Patna said, "Most of these gangs answer to people sitting in the ministerial bungalows of Patna, the ransom money is shared. If you have the right connections, you can breathe easier because the state or the people running it are behind most of the kidnappings. "In eight years since Laloo Yadav took over - later statistics are unavailable - seventeen thousand people were kidnapped, most of them for ransom. "It was very easy to kidnap and very profitable."

Sankarshan may indeed be right in his assertion but kidnapping as an industry began in the state a long time before the advent of LalooYadav. The first time it struck me as a journalist was when a Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Chakkalakal, was kidnapped from his residence, Seva Sadan, at Rathanpurva in West Champaran district on May 31, 1984. It was in this district that Mahatma Gandhi began his non-violent struggle against the British. Fr Chakkalakal's kidnappers demanded a huge ransom for his release. They thought the Catholic Church would meet their demand. But they had no idea what kind of a man Fr Chakkalakal was. He told them in plain language that they were at liberty to kill him but they would never get even a single rupee by way of ransom. Fr Chakkalakal had built a reputation for sincerity, hard work and dedication. The word 'fear' was certainly not in his lexicon as he worked among the people, making them conscious about their rights. Small wonder that his biographer, Fr K.C. Philip, titled his book, Champaran Ka Naya Gandhi: Father Thomas Chakkalakal (Patna Jesuit Society, Patna)

As I write this, worse things have happened in Bihar. In one of the most horrifying incidents, the police killed three young men in Patna. Sub-inspector Samsher Alam who shot them believed they were criminals when the only evidence he had against them was the dubious statement of a shopkeeper. The Opposition parties have given a call for a Patna bandh on January 3. Demands for the dismissal of the Laloo ministry are once again heard. There is no way in which LalooYadav and his wife can absolve themselves of the responsibility. Few will shed tears for them if they are taken to task for their innumerable acts of omission and commission. But are they the only ones to blame?

I have before me newspapers carrying pictures of Defence Minister George Fernandes consoling the parents of one of the young men who was shot at close range. This minister did not rush to Haryana when five Dalits were killed for allegedly killing a cow. Or to Gujarat when the policemen in Ahmedabad recently organised a fake encounter to bump off an undertrial. While the trigger-happy sub-inspector who killed the young men deserves the severest punishment, let us also hear what he had to say about the killing. He thought they were criminals and he was doing a great service to the nation when he eliminated them.

The point is the police have come to believe that the best way to deal with criminals is to kill them. Instead of nipping this tendency in the bud, the state has been encouraging it. We have seen how the police were given freedom to do what they pleased in Punjab. Human rights violations by the police take place routinely in Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast. One may dismiss what happened in Gujarat in the wake of Godhra as an aberration but what about the Union Home Minister who proudly gives statistics of the number of "criminals" and "terrorists" eliminated by the police? I wish he had given statistics of the criminals and terrorists brought to justice.

Why is it that not even one terrorist involved in the recent attacks on Parliament, the Akshardham temple in Ahmedabad and a shopping mall in New Delhi was arrested? Their arrests could have helped uncover the conspiracy. Instead, the police are feted for gunning down the terrorists. There is a police officer in New Delhi who is known as the "master of encounters" as he has killed the maximum number of "criminals" in encounters. Is it any surprise that the police officer in Patna first took the gun when a shopkeeper tipped him that "three criminals" were on the prowl in the city? Sometime ago, the police killed an innocent businessman in a fake encounter on Barkhamba Road in the heart of New Delhi. At that time, Mr Fernandes did not visit the businessman's family. Nor did his party call for a bandh. Nor did the Railway Minister facilitate the bandh by unilaterally withdrawing trains from the state on that day.

Those who bay for Laloo Yadav's blood will do well to read Vijay Nambisan's lines in Bihar Is In The Eye Of The Beholder (Viking): "Laloo is not an aberration. Nor is Bihar. What is happening in Bihar is happening all over India. But Bihar is a microcosm of the whole; a laboratory specimen, as it were, most easily brought under the microscope of analysis. For there is something going on in Bihar which is of great relevance to India's polity, and perhaps not to India's alone. A study of Bihar as an organism, and not merely of Patna as a stage, might provide a really radical, yet thoroughly practical critique of our thusness - of premises we understand as fundamental to our existence as a nation, particularly as a democratic nation."

The writer can be reached at ajphilip@yahoo.com