JAIPUR: Sansar Chand, notoriously known as the 'Veerappan of North India' for allegedly being responsible for poaching all the tigers of Sariska wildlife sanctuary, is yet to secure bail from a Jaipur trial court. The dreaded 55-year-old man, however, could get bail from a Delhi court that declined to slap the stringent anti-organized crime law, MCOCA, against him on Tuesday.
Sansar Chand is in jail since his arrest by the Delhi Police in June 2005. He is a native of the Thana-Gazi area in Alwar district from where he is said to have begun his journey into the illegal trade of wildlife organs and skins. Months before the kingpin was arrested in Delhi, a special team of the Jaipur police had arrested his wife Rani and son Aakash in October 2004.
"We recovered two tiger skins from Sansar Chand in 2005. He is still facing trial in the case and is yet to get bail from the court here," said Vidya Prakash, the investigating officer. "During his interrogation in 2005 he made the shocking revelation that there were no tigers left in Sariska. That was the extent of his poaching network," said the police officer.
According to the police, Sansar Chand's international poaching racket was well established in China, Nepal, Bangkok and spread as far as Italy. Hailing from the Giharas tribe that traditionally trades in wildlife, Sansar Chand got into the poaching business ever since he was a child in the early 1970s. His first reported arrest dates back to 1974 that resulted in a conviction too. Over 680 hides of endangered species were seized allegedly from his residence then. "But the Supreme Court reduced his sentence saying he was too young," said wildlife expert and lawyer Mahendra Singh Kachhawa. Sansar Chand was 16 then.
The teenager went on to become the country's biggest skin smuggler. "His father Munni Lal shifted to Delhi and the boy was initially engaged in trading hair collected from the barber shops. This business took Sansar Chand to a hide Mandi where he met Tibetan poachers. And then there was no looking back for him," said Prakash, investigating the officer.
For the next three decades, Sansar Chand evaded arrests by cleverly avoiding direct involvement from the illegal trade. "In 2004, the city's Manak Chowk police seized 23 claws and dozens of nails of tigers from one E P Singh, who disclosed that he bought these from Sansar Chand and his wife," Prakash said.
The man today is said to be wanted in at least 60 different cases of poaching registered with different police stations across the country. Though his tribesmen are not hunters themselves, they are close to other the traditional hunter tribes that are responsible for much of the poaching that feeds the illegal market.
The poaching kingpin is also allegedly involved in the biggest seizure of illegally procured hides in India so far. Around 30,000 hides of endangered species, some of them rare, were recovered from house number 478 in Zafarabad, New Salempur in Delhi on March 24, 1988. Three persons arrested then identified Sansar Chand as their supplier, the police said.
