Fear is the key in the badlands of Beed

In 2023, the sand mafia made an attempt to kill the first woman collector of Beed, a district in Marathwada, 465 km from Mumbai.

The collector, Deepa Madhol Munde, was agile enough to catch the man, who tried to drive a dumper truck through her official vehicle. The incident was barely covered by the media. Beed remained in relative obscurity.

With the abduction and brutal murder of Santosh Deshmukh, the popular sarpanch of Massajog village in December 2024, Beed has finally hit the headlines.

Shocking details are coming to light: 308 recorded cases of murder, 765 cases of attempted murder and 782 cases of rape in the last five years. And this is just the tip of the official iceberg, claim local residents.

Women feel so unsafe they prefer to marry outside the district so they can leave for good. The abduction of women is as common as reporting and recording abductions is rare. Many civil servants posted to the district do not bring their wives along. Women are treated as sex slaves, women workers’ uteruses are removed to prevent conception — such are the stories that have been spilling out. Social workers with field experience admit to a lack of comprehensive data but, judging by what they are told by the women, the numbers are as high as the tales are horrific.

The way things stand, Beed might even give the badlands of eastern UP and Bihar a run for their money.

Fear is the key in Beed, say Marathi journalists in Mumbai. Not much is reported even in Marathi newspapers, as people are terrified of backlash from the underworld. Police and politicians are complicit: kissing the ring of the mafia don is the norm. 

Beed has spinning mills and ginning factories, the Parli thermal power station (where a fly-ash mafia is said to be active) and a number of sugar mills, but it depends largely on cotton and sugarcane cultivation.

One of the poorest districts in the state, it is staggeringly neglected.

Large parts of Beed have no access to water, compelling women to walk long distances to fetch the day’s requirements. In Patoda village, as many as 200 young men are yet to be married, claims deputy sarpanch Surekha Bhusnar, because nobody wants their daughters to marry men from a village with no water. At least 77 other villages face a similar water scarcity, says Bhusnar.

Politically, Beed has had fair representation in the state. As many as 14 MLAs from the district have been ministers. Currently, the district boasts two ministers: the BJP’s Pankaja Munde and late BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde’s nephew Dhananjay Munde of the NCP (Ajit Pawar).

Beed has no rail connectivity and roads are yet to reach large parts of the district. Hardly any new industries have been set up, while existing sugar and spinning mills are owned and controlled by a few families — Munde’s extended family being one of them.

Dhanajay Munde’s links with the underworld stand exposed in the wake of Santosh Deshmukh’s murder. (The sarpanch’s only fault was that he responded to a call from the guards at a solar energy unit who had been assaulted by criminals demanding ‘hafta’.) Deshmukh was reportedly assaulted with iron rods and the killing allegedly shared live on a video call with a ‘politician’ nobody wants to name.

Everybody knows that ‘politician’ is Walmik Karad, whose proximity to Dhananjay Munde is no secret. Those who abducted and killed Deshmukh are known to be Karad’s henchmen.

Karad began his adult life employed as domestic help in Gopinath Munde’s home in the 1980s. He went on to become a confidant of both Gopinath and his younger brother Anna. His friendship with Dhananjay goes back three decades.

Director of a sugar mill and a company owned by Dhananjay, Karad looks after both his business and political interests in Beed — in fact, he acts like the de facto minister.

After absconding for 20 days following the murder, Karad surrendered to the police in Pune on 31 December 2024. He claimed to be innocent and released a video statement stating he was being framed.