The lucky ‘gundon ka shahar’

In October 1975, the special train carrying us along with troops from my father’s regiment pulled in at the metre-gauge railway station of Hawabagh at Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. The 900-km journey from Nasirabad near Ajmer had taken five days (troop specials are slow because they have to allow scheduled trains to pass).

For us siblings — four brothers and one sister — aged 8 to 16, the journey was a joyride. We had two first-class cabins to ourselves and the Army mess staff travelling with us supplied refreshments. The delights of the journey apart, we were not enthused about our destination. We had heard that Jabalpur was deep inside MP’s jungle, it was crime-prone and had no good schools and colleges. By and by, we also learnt that a police inspector had been murdered by ruffians days before we had arrived and that Nehru had called the town ‘gundon ka shahar’ (city of goons) in 1961, when he visited it in the wake of communal riots triggered by the rape and suicide of a college student.

It didn’t help the city’s image that an entire locality, inhabited by descendants of thugs rehabilitated by Col Sleeman as part of his campaign against thuggee in the 19th century, had degenerated into a chor bazaar-cum-red-light district.

I joined GS College of Commerce as a first-year BCom student. The college was a hotbed of student politics, but until March 1977, things were quiet, thanks to the Emergency. A month after it was lifted, we had our exams. One day, an invigilator caught an examinee copying. He protested and other examinees, most of whom were copying too, rose up in his support, tore their question papers and answer-sheets and started damaging the furniture.

Soon, Surjit Singh, the tough SP of the district, arrived and controlled the situation. The exam was cancelled and rescheduled. From then on, the SP became a frequent visitor, for such disturbances often broke out in the college. Despite all this, Jabalpur was a lucky station for our family. I completed my Masters, and after some years at the School of Hard Knocks and a few job hops, got into the IPS.

Two years later, while visiting the city, I called on Rustam Singh, the then SP and my senior by a few years. He said he had just returned from GS College after handling a situation there. When I mentioned that I was an alumnus of the college, he said in disbelief, ‘What? An IPS officer from that college?’

I told him the names of other students from the college who had done well in life. ‘Of course! All colleges are good. It’s up to the students to make the best of them,’ he remarked.