Even by Bihar standards, the release of Dr Ramesh Chandra early on Wednesday morning after four days in captivity verged on the bizarre. Drama, caste, politics — Union minister CP Thakur has been implicated — and an improbably hitch-free rescue mission combined to make this yet another talking point.And, as usual, the truth was somewhere out there — no one knows exactly where.First, the rescue. Police say they were led to the kidnapped neurosurgeon by Babloo Singh, whom they had arrested in connection with the case on Monday. Acting on his confession, a police team of nearly 40 went to a house in Chirora, a remote village near Patna, at 3-30 a.m. on Wednesday.To avoid alerting the abductors, the team left their vehicles half a km away and walked in the dark. Dr Chandra was asleep when the team, led by Patna SSP Sunil Kumar, burst into the house. No shots were fired. The easy success of the operation prompted the police to pat its own back, after complaining that they receive too many brickbats for a force that doesn’t allow more than 350 kidnappings an year. ‘‘Our leads were so perfect that we never doubted the outcome’’, said DGP D P Ojha.Then started the political blame-game. Babloo, the police said, had named Samata Party MLA and history-sheeter Sunil Pandey as the man on whose instructions the kidnapping was carried out. ‘‘Pandey asked me to get Rs 50 lakh from the doctor’’, Babloo reportedly said.Indeed, it turns out that the money was a sore point for Babloo. He’d been involved in earlier kidnappings and was unhappy with the share of booty — ‘‘I was given only Rs 20,000 while the vidhayak saab took in lakhs’’, he told the media today.As if an MLA wasn’t enough, the police also dropped the name of Union minister Thakur, saying the abductors had phoned his residence after the kidnapping.That set the stage for Laloo Prasad Yadav to call a press conference and ‘‘expose the links of the BJP-Samata combine in the conspiracy to tarnish the image of Bihar.’’ Distributing copies of the phone records, he said: ‘‘Laloo’s.er.Rabri’s government cannot be bowed down by such tactics. Arrey C P Thakur ko mein na jante? He is involved with the Ranvir Sena and other criminal gangs.’’Asked for his reaction, Thakur — who claimed to be a ‘‘good friend’’ of the doctor’s — called it a ‘‘third-rate political conspiracy’’.Sunil Pandey went further: this was, he said, a conspiracy against Bhumihars, the caste to which he and Thakur belong. ‘‘The RJD is targeting the Bhumihars’’, said the man who led violent protests when Thakur was dropped from the Union Cabinet earlier.The BJP played it with a straight bat. While dismissing the allegations against Thakur as absurd, and demanding a CBI inquiry into the issue, it was not willing to defend Pandey. ‘‘It is Laloo’s strategy to create a smokescreen whenever he is in trouble’’, said party leader Sushil Modi.The trouble now seems to be heading for the doctors, who had threatened to go on an indefinite strike from today if Ramesh Chandra was not traced. The ultimatum didn’t go down well with Laloo, and today he said he would take action against doctors who had implicated the government in the case.He also declared that the government would ensure that all ‘‘clinics and nursing homes in Bihar are run according to Indian Medical Association guidelines.’’.If Laloo can keep to his word, that may be the best news Bihar — where hospitals are in a shambles — has had in a long time.
