Narsinghpur (Uttar Pradesh), Feb. 14: Eight years ago Dadua hoodwinked police by draping himself in a sari and disappearing into a crowd of women. Eight years later, he hoodwinked them again, this time in a sadhu?s robes, and opened the Hanuman temple he had promised in thanksgiving.

Then, the dreaded Uttar Pradesh dacoit vanished as noiselessly as he came, leaving a Rs 12-lakh elephant from Assam tethered to a banyan tree at the temple gates, possibly as a Valentine?s Day gift of love to the people.

Dressed in saffron and lost in a group of about 200 sadhus, Dadua showed up at daybreak at the chariot-shaped temple in time for the first puja. Rituals done, the 55-year-old left, having kept the promise he made after escaping the police when he was all but trapped at his in-laws? place in Ghataipur in 1997.

Waiting police teams and Provincial Armed Constabulary personnel didn?t have a clue. Or, knowingly looked the other way.

A virtual sea of people this morning descended on the temple grounds, a short distance away from the banks of the Yamuna. Villagers, dacoits with guns slung on their backs and district and block-level Samajwadi Party officials jostled to enter the complex, strewn with mini-mountains of marigolds and laddus.

?So what if it is a temple built by Dadua? He is very good to the poor. I am not ashamed of being his fan,? said Chandrakant Rai, a Fatehpur district Samajwadi Party leader, whose presence along with several colleagues seemed to hint at the politician-criminal nexus chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav?s rivals have been crying hoarse over.

?We know Dadua as a messiah. The villagers will vouch for how many poor families he helped to get their daughters married. He is also deeply religious, which is evident from the amount of money he spent to build the temple,? gushed Satish Patel, a villager of Khaga.

The 95-foot temple, built at a cost of nearly Rs 70 lakh, is a three-tier structure shaped like a chariot. A huge Hanuman statue stands on the topmost tier and another one in gold in the sanctum sanctorum on the first tier. Priests and sadhus milled on all three levels, busily chanting ?Jai Hanuman? and ?Jai Dadua?.

At the gate, members of Dadua?s gang stood alongside villagers, mostly Kurmis, with microphones to control the almost two-lakh crowd. Eight tents were pitched up to accommodate the guests, one exclusively for district administration officials who came for the show.

As part of the formal inaugurations, a havan and a community bhoj ? 300 quintals of vegetables, 150 quintals of wheat and 50 quintals of laddus were required for the feast ? were held. Over 1,000 priests and sadhus came from Ayodhya, Hardwar and Allahabad and performed aarti.

?We invited everyone. There are politicians, devotees and sadhus. We are thrilled to see the number of people. The temple is a gift of love from us to everyone around here,? said Samajwadi Party leader Bal Kumar, Dadua?s 45-year-old brother.

As many as 100 district-level Samajwadi Party leaders ? the state-level politicians stayed away ? turned up for the inauguration, allegedly to show loyalty to Dadua without whose patronage they cannot survive.

Dadua is wanted in connection with nearly 112 criminal cases. He operates in eight districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and is believed to earn up to Rs 10 crore a year by ?providing protection? to tendu contractors and pulling off abductions.

The police said they have only a hazy idea how Dadua looks because no photographs are available. ?His survival strategy includes a well-worked out plan to position himself on the border of the two states,? said Fatehpur SP Mukesh Shukla.