To the civilized world, Phoolan Devi's death may have been an act of national outrage, but to the badlands of Chambal it is just another cog in the wheel of anarchy. To describe the bandits of the ravine, the locals use the term, baagi (rebel). Looking at Karsena village in the ravines of Bhind - where five villagers, including two women, were abducted allegedly by a ruthless dacoit, Nirbhay Singh Gujjar, two days before Phoolan Devi was killed in New Delhi - it is easy to see why. While their men were locked up for the next 48 hours, the two women were subjected to an identical physical torture that Phoolan often referred to as 'treatment that one does not think of meting out even to an animal'. These backward Garia- caste women were returned after a week. The tell-tale signs of torture - their bloodstained and torn clothes - provoked outrage in the entire village. Four young men, not more than 16 years old, stood up in a village meet and vowed revenge. Next morning, in a small ritual, the women of the village heaped garlands of marigold on the shoulders of the men, while the elders handed them four licenced rifles. A new gang of baagis was born in Karsena village. In Pahargunge of Morena district, five Dhanuk-caste women, one of them 14 years old, were allegedly raped two years back by a group of Thakur dacoits who were working for two families of Thakur landlords. These dacoits were also called baagis. After the rape, fourteen backward caste families vacated the land one night. These five acres of land had been allotted to them during Vinobha Bhave's bhoodan movement. In the innumerable hamlets dotting the landscape of the ravines, social coexistence is a misnomer. The balance between the two sets of villages is determined by the presence of powerful gangs of dacoits. The social fabric justifies and sanctions brutalities to achieve the aims of these gangs. The drinking of the water of the Chambal river is believed to increase the machismo required to take revenge on the rival castes. 'Over two decades ago, caste acrimony, vitiating even banditry in the ravines, produced Phoolan Devi, brutalizing her before she was provoked to take revenge in Behmai', remarks Ransigh Parmer, a Gandhian who works for the rehabilitation of surrendered dacoits in Bhind and Morena. Parmer believes Phoolan could be reborn any day from about half a dozen women dacoits already active in the Chambal valley unless the cycle of social discrimination which feudalism sustains is broken. The caste polarization of the bandits is total. There are upper-caste bandits, like Raju Kushwaha and Janak Singh Thakur, operating in Bhind and Etawah; there are also backward caste Bhura Gujjar and Bhura Kachchi bandits on the other side of the spectrum who are terror to the Thakurs. The menace of the big dacoit gangs reached a peak in the early Eighties. After the surrender of Phoolan and her associates, this crop withdrew from the scene. But by the mid-Nineties, the dacoits were back again. Every year between 1996 and 1998, the police felled 20-22 dacoits; but by 1999, a new generation of dacoits emerged. According to a survey of 30-odd gangs now operating along the border between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, divided by the Chambal river, at least five are run by women. Some of these leaders are identified as Seema Parihar, Meera Solanki and Suman Yadav. 'The Phoolan legend inspired them to be baagis. All of them are victims of some form of social exploitation. Four of them were driven to take up arms after being raped or tortured by their tormentors in the family and the community they lived in', says Lakhsmi Tomar, professor of sociology in a Gwalior college. Tomar fears that the killing of Phoolan might be a setback for efforts by social activists to rehabilitate the women dacoits. The voices of women against attempted rape in police custody, against the frequent abductions of women to settle caste scores had been first united by Phoolan. She is therefore worshipped among some backward castes. Tomar was surprised to see Sheela Dhobi, who turned bandit in 1997, mouthing the choicest Phoolan slangs against the police when she was being dragged through the Bhind court. Sheela Dhobi, 22, a housewife of Marwar village in the Jalore district of Uttar Pradesh, turned to banditry when she vowed to take revenge on a Thakur ganglord who had raped her for two days after abducting her. In the ravines, one caste from a particular village encourages members of the same caste to shift to that village for protection. According to Tomar, the villagers publicly pool money for raising a gang for they believe that without a gang of dacoits standing up for the village, the latter does not enjoy any status. Villagers are enamoured of dacoits for they increase the social status of a village. The number of people who throng the courts every time a dacoit is arrested is an indication. Over 10 lakh had gathered during the 1983 surrenders. That is how Ratangarh had shot into infamy when Hari Baba, the dreaded Brahmin of the village, ruled the valley for over half a decade. Seventy-year-old Mohar Singh, once a terror, lives his retired life at Mehgaon. The most notorious of the living women dacoits, Kusuma Nayar, who ruled over 16 villages on the Uttar Pradesh-Madhya Pradesh border provided these villages with a strange status as the villagers used to introduce themselves as hailing from 'Kusuma village'. The entrenched arms-trafficking through a police-dacoit-middlemen circuit is another feature of this society. A casual visit to Bhind, Morena, Etawah will take one through more gun stores than tea stalls in these district towns. According to the police, there are over 40,000 licenced guns only in Bhind and as the former superintendent of police, Bhind, D.K. Pawar, would admit, this is higher than the total number of guns in all of Maharastra. In 1997, a director general of police in Madhya Pradesh depended on a middleman for yet another surrender drama of some dacoits. It came to light later that 'tiger', the middleman, was himself an arms supplier. 'There used to be frequent fake encounters and fake claimants for the reward money announced on the dacoits, cleverly arranged with police complicity. A part of the money used to go towards buying arms', recalls Mohar Singh. Singh's name used to spell terror. Today, this surrendered dacoit is a municipal head. Mohar Singh, whom this writer met in 1998, was not exaggerating. In Bhind and Gwalior, the police had to order a probe into the swindling of fake reward money. Even the least powerful dacoits carry Rs 10,000 on their head. Mohar Singh himself used to carry Rs 50,000 on his head in the late Seventies. Malkhan Singh, who surrendered with Phoolan Devi with AK-47 rifles in 1983, had a similar amount announced on his head. W hen caste hatred and the easy availability of arms were corroding the social edifice of the valley, the politicians were the quickest to take advantage of the situation.Their flirtations with banditry began with the surrenders staged since 1972, when at Jora in the Morena district, more than 400 dacoits, including Madho Singh and Malkhan Singh, had surrendered before Jayaprakash Narayan and P.C. Sethi, the then chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. This was followed up by Arjun Singh in 1982, when Phoolan Devi and Malkhan Singh surrendered along with their associates. In the midst of all this hype, the key issues of economic and social development were lost sight of. Many of the surrendered dacoits today are a disillusioned lot for they found life outside the saga of banditry equally inhospitable. Many have joined politics. Mohar Singh, for example, is a Congress campaigner. Phoolan became an icon of the Samajwadi Party campaign in the ravines . The Bahujan Samaj Party deploys about half a dozen gangs of backward caste dacoits for poll campaign before any election. Malkhan Singh moved from Arjun Singh to Mulayam Singh Yadav before realizing that in the 'use and discard' game of unscrupulous politics, the politicians use the gangs when they need them and then forget about them. The governments of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh made half-hearted efforts to whip up the hope of a green revolution. The Chambal eco-development project was supposed to level some of the uneven landscape of the ravines, normally the hiding ground of the dacoits, and introduce terrace-farming with help from Israel.The greening of the Chambal began with much fanfare. But this did not bring about any drastic change in the agricultural pattern of the area. Geologists say that the constant erosion of land in the area because of the wind direction was almost irreversible. Digvijay Singh's dream of industrializing the Chambal did not go beyond Gwalior. The literacy programme failed to reach deep into the region despite brave efforts by Malkhan Singh's wife in her education campaign. The social empowerment of the backwards, who could not be brought forward because of the failure of land reforms, remained just on paper in spite of the panchayati raj and village-level governance. Despite important transitions in the rest of Madhya Pradesh, the ravines remained caught in backwardness. In this grim scenerio, Phoolan's female successors - Seema Parihar, Meera Solanki, Suman Yadav, Kusuma Nayar and probably Sheela Dhobi too - would wait for another surrender drama in the future, after which they would be picked up by the socialist brigade, maybe the Samajwadi Party, to be given the necessary lift through politics.