Moon Gazer continues……

Guna is one of the fifty-one districts of Madhya Pradesh. Its eponymous headquarters, located on the banks of the River Parbati, is a small nondescript town, though on its outskirts are located an important industrial centre, a major fertilizer factory and a huge gas plant.

Maithali Sharan Gupt, a 1984 batch IPS officer, was the SP in the Guna district then. Before sending the sub- inspector to Guna I spoke  to  Gupt,  informing  him  of the barbaric and macabre crimes being committed in my district and the suspected links with some of the criminals of his district. Even though I had never met him before (nor have I till date), when I requested him to help my officer in his field inquiries, he was extremely responsive. Aware that criminals from his district were operating in other parts of the country, the young SP ran his own chain of informers to keep tabs on them.

He decided to depute the best from amongst these informers with my officer, the sub-inspector. Additionally, a crack detective of the district was also detailed with him to gather as much information as possible on local criminal gangs. The trio visited several villages that were known to have inhabitants with a criminal past, and my sub-inspector collected invaluable information on them. During his legwork, which took several weeks, he succeeded in creating a network of his own informers and studied the modus operandi of the criminals belonging to the erstwhile criminal tribe. He was, however, oblivious to the fact that he would soon do something small but so significant that it would prove to be the undoing of the gangsters.

To be continued….