By Sidharth Mishra
Crime in Delhi has travelled a long way from rustic law-breaking of 1990s to the glamorous gang wars of today. At the turn of the century when then Police Commissioner Ajay Raj Sharma had persuaded central government to extend Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA) to the national Capital, it had raised many an eye brows as Delhi was not known to have any organized gang.
Other than the terror-related cases, the outskirts of the national Capital and then emerging satellite hubs of Noida and Gurgaon were known for crime committed by the de-notified criminal tribe gangs. Sharma, who had vast experience of policing interiors of Uttar Pradesh found that the offenders after committing crime in the city easily escaped to the neighbouring states of UP and Haryana, shielding themselves from the Delhi Police.
To chase these gangs into the hinterlands and neutralize them could be done only by empowering Delhi Police with MCOCA. Sharma had realised that though Delhi did not have glamorous crime syndicates like the Mumbai underworld, it did have gangs which had roots in history and social topography of the region – the gangs associated with the tribes which had been notified under an act by the British as criminal tribes. Post-independence this act was de-notified, thus these tribes came to be known by the acronym DNT.
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