After coming to power on November 24, 2005 the new Bihar government initiated speedy trial to punish the gangs involved in this crime. The present DGP, Abhayanand, then ADG (Headquarters), was given credit for the early success in checking such crimes.

But the official website of the Bihar Police clearly indicates that kidnapping rose sharply in Bihar after 2007 when it dipped to 2092 from 2301 in 2006. A quick glance at the figures would be quite revealing. In 2001 it was 1689. In 2005, the year Nitish Kumar took over, the number of kidnapping was 2226 and in 2010 it jumped to 3602. Thus it was over 60 per cent increase in the five years period between 2005 and 2010.
What is tragic is that now the kidnapped children are sometimes getting killed if the ransom is not paid. If the bodies of Nitin and Vivek were recovered from Gopalganj and Aurangabad districts on December 5 and 6 Ankit and Akash from Patna and many others from elsewhere in the state never returned home. Yet it is also true that in some cases the police have recovered the victim and nabbed the criminals.
The state government now claims that the organized gangs have been destroyed. But it seems that the proliferation of unorganized gangs are making the task more difficult for the police. Unlike in the past, these unorganized criminals seem to be more brutal as killing the hostage was not so much common earlier. Many of these criminals are high-school and college drop outs, who enter the world of crime only recently. Sometimes they kill the hostage out of panic.
In the past middlemen, mostly people having right political connection, would broker a deal between kidnappers and the parents. The kidnapped child would, most likely, return after the payment of ransom. In some cases they were released without any payment because of the pressure from the media and opposition parties. One may recall how the police swung into action after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, during the Rabri Devi rule, made the kidnapping of a couple of school-boys an issue in his election campaign in Bihar.
Now kidnapping makes no big news. There is no media pressure and opposition parties and civil society groups cease to exist. Thus the kidnappers have a field day. The government in power always claims that law and order has improved, but it is the duty of the media and other watchdogs to project the fact.
Take the case of the kidnapping of Ankit from Gaighat locality of Patna a couple of years back. An English daily carried the news in a couple of sentences in its brief news section in Page-two, while the other regional newspapers chose to black the news out on the first day. This initial absence of pressure from media gave the kidnappers enough time to take the boy away from Patna, though family members and some local citizens did protest against the incident.

Instead of keeping the police on toe the media and other pressure groups are busy patting them on the back. In such a situation there is no urgency on the part of the police to react quickly.

Though the number of cases of kidnapping has witnessed sharp rise, what the state government often claims is that there is sharp fall in the case of kidnapping-for-ransom. It was 385 in 2001 and fell to 251 in 2005. After the take-over by Nitish Kumar the figure came down further and in 2010 it was just 72.

But kidnapping for ransom, many police officials opine, is an intelligent way of confusing the masses with the jugglery of statistics. Kidnapping is normally done for ransom––unless it is done by Maoists or some one else for political reasons––but since the parents do not get ransom call by the time of the lodging of FIR the police try to project that the number of cases of kidnapping for ransom has declined. Besides, in many other cases the relatives do not want to divulge that they had actually received ransom call.

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