Sometime this month the Eastern High court of Denmark will pronounce a verdict on one of the most curious criminals in India’s annals, someone we know by the name of Kim Davy. The Danish court knows him as Niels Holck, a family man, married to an anorexic, the older of whose two children, a son, has a dissociative disorder, and who has an elderly mother. Through the five days of the trial last month, all of them sat in the courtroom to hear him depose and once saw him weep. Sometime member of a gang that robbed banks with the moniker The Barefeet Robbers, Niels Holck is also the author of an ironically titled book: They Call Me A Terrorist. In 1995, from an AN-26 plane, he was among those who dropped many hundred AK-47s and thousands of rounds of ammunition in West Bengal’s Purulia district. His plea in the court was he had to do something to help people in West Bengal fight communism; he wanted to supply them arms, modestly. This evangelical spirit entered, after he spent some time in Bengal with Ananda Margis. He saw repression on such a scale, that it moved him. From his youth, like right thinking Europeans, he had developed an aversion to the Hammer and Sickle. What he had seen only steeled his resolve. An argument was made that the AK-47s, which were mere conventional side arms, were meant for self-defence, not terrorism, for Ananda Margis. Ananda Marg was projected as some kind of spiritual NGO. (I have a different memory of Ananda Marg. Growing up in Agartala, my mother used to point to saffron-robed Ananda Margis and frighten me, saying that if I was going to be naughty and stayed outdoors for long, they would come and take me away. Blood curdling stories, all of them involving skulls, did the rounds.) The plea was made that AK-47 was one thing and terrorist bombs totally another. Moreover, Kim Davy had no idea he was dropping weapons other than AK-47s. He realised that the drop contained many more lethal weapons than he originally thought, only when he saw the news after the drop had been made. Holck declared somewhat sensationally that the court would have to decide whether he was going to be judged by a medieval system or by Danish standards.
In Denmark, I believe, everybody is shocked at the idea that a man like Holck, a kind of social worker, could be repatriated to a country like India for trial and sentencing for something like helping innocent people defend themselves. Why, Denmark was loath to send accused criminals even to civilised European countries! How could the government send him to India? It was almost like sending an upstanding Dane to Azerbaijan. An opinion poll duly showed 86 per cent were repulsed by this thought. Peter Bleach, his comrade in arms, told the court, that if Niels Holck were to set foot in an Indian prison, conditions were so bad he would promptly die. This forced the prosecutor to make the wry observation that Bleach himself had managed to survive his incarceration in West Bengal. But we all know that Bleach is an SAS-type, trained to believe Indian prisons are summer homes. Not Kim Davy, the new Prince of Denmark.
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com