In an uncommon red-to-green story, Bihar’s lethal ‘kattas’ (illegal countrymade handguns) that have been felling numerous lives and maiming as many for decades, are now turning into “kudals” and “khurpis” (rural farming tools) as part of a novel exercise started by the state police.
Blacksmiths’ workshops and foundries in Bihar, many of which often secretly manufacture illegal weapons for use by criminals, are being approached by policemen with orders to turn sacks of “kattas” and knives of various kinds into simple farming and gardening equipment. In Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur districts, hundreds of such weapons, once chiselled to perfection for shedding blood, have been melted and turned into tools that help in growing food.
The exercise, the first-of-its-kind in India, started after the chief judicial magistrate of Darbhanga, P.K. Dixit, ordered in his October 17 ruling that weapons seized from the possession of a criminal convicted in 2006 be destroyed. Bihar DGP Abhayanand then ordered similar destruction of seized weapons that have been stored in huge piles in the malkhanas (storerooms) of police stations across Bihar as a pilot project.
Despite the Arms Act, 1959, providing for destruction of confiscated and illegal arms, they had never before been destroyed in Bihar. Only seized narcotics like ganja and bhang were being routinely destroyed by the police.
the police in Darbhanga has already requested a lower court for permission to destroy seized firearms in 24 cases.