Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 6th November 1909 — No.18
Facts and Opinions
The Daulatpur Dacoity
The extraordinary story from Daulatpur of a dacoity by young men of good family, sons of Government servants, is the strangest that has yet been handled by the detective ability of a very active police — more active, if not successful, we are afraid, in cases of this kind than those in which the dacoits are of a less interesting character.
The details as first published read more like a somewhat gruesome comic opera, than anything else.
Dacoits who wear gold watches and gold spectacles on their hazardous expeditions, dacoits who talk English so as to give a clue to their identity, dacoits who turn up at a railway station wearing gold watches, barefooted and stained with mud, dacoits who carry in their pockets bloodcurdling oaths neatly written out for the police to read in case they are caught, are creatures of so novel and eccentric a character that they must have either come out of a farcical opera or escaped from the nearest lunatic asylum.
The later accounts modify some of the more startling features of the first, but until the story for the prosecution is laid before the Courts, thoroughly known and thoroughly tested, sensational headlines and graphic details are apt to mislead.