Story of a Sahib

A few years ago, a friend told me an interesting story of a man  who would rub shoulders with local political leaders. The man was a perfect example of a name-dropper who wore his political connections up his sleeve.

From fixing a transformer to getting a sewage outfall plugged, he would call a minister. Nobody ever knew if he used to call a real minister. But on two or three occasions, he got some issues resolved forthwith.

For instance, my friend said, when an elderly woman in the locality died, an overnight snowfall had clogged up the path leading to a graveyard and he got it cleared quite swiftly. For a small group of people in the locality, he was a political mover and shaker. He  managed to get two jobless young men "appointed in a government department" after receiving a good amount of money from them. The money, he had said, was for the Bade Sahibs. The young men received the appointment letters and were tasked with the job of recording the registration numbers of  the vehicles extracting minerals from a neighbouring river bed. After a month, they got salaries and offered gifts to the man, whom they now began referring as Sahib. It continued for two more months.

Observing that the same fleet of vehicles with the same knot of people were engaged in the process, the new appointees would occasionally go to their workplace.

One fine morning—my friend recounted—that the Sahib , who had kept tabs on them, phoned them and apprised that their services had been terminated, giving their unauthorised absence from their duties.

Out of sheer naivety, both the employees submitted to their fate, barely knowing that somebody had put one over on them.

The Sahib had offered them fake appointment letters and for two months he transferred a measly amount of the money he had taken from them into their bank accounts as salaries.

As youth in Kashmir largely aspire for government jobs in absence of a developed private sector or robust industries, they frequently become susceptible to scams and deceitful operators. The scam artists, over the years, have refined their tactics, developing almost fool-proof methods to dupe the desperate job -seekers. Sometimes even the saner ones get ensnared in their traps. The scams proliferate with growing internet penetration rates mostly in the rural areas.

Our broad-sheets, day in and day out, remain filled with the stories about the scammers, inventing new means to deceit the ordinary people.

Last month, a local court in Srinagar rejected the bail application  of a man, accused of cloning a fake website of Department of Health and Medical Education. The accused along with his colleagues would prod unemployed youth into applying for jobs online, using cloned website and extracting large amounts of money from them. The scammers used to upload fake orders, transfer and appointment letters, spurring  many jobless youth to download their offer letters from the replicated website. All such candidates  lost the hard earnings of their families to the scam artist before the cyber police finally managed to lay hands on them. However, there was no uproar on the social media platforms or debates in virtual spaces. Amidst the headlines, a small news item about the scam remained tucked away in the corner of the newspapers.

Back to my friend’s account, Sahib’s deceit came to light after a few months as one of the duped youth recounted the entire story to some government official.