Driving the rocky 14 km from Mau-gardari to Manikpur town takes one tiring hour. That’s actually good progress when you consider that for the villagers of Mau-gardari, a return trip takes two full days. The reason is not the almost non-existent road, but the fear of being waylaid by Shivkumar Patel, popularly known as Dadua, the Gabbar Singh of Chitrakoot’s villages.

From Mau-gardari the villagers leg it over 7 km to neighbouring Madhya Pradesh and hop on a tempo that takes them to Dabhaura for Rs 10. From there it is time to board the Varanasi-Jhansi Passenger till Manikpur. The return journey is longer as it requires a night halt, with the onward train connection available only in the morning.

They have been following this route since February 2, 1999, when five families received a demand of Rs 50,000 each from Dadua. They had been singled out for being “better off” than others. But they dared to stand up to the dacoit—even when Dadua threatened labourers from coming to work on their fields and nobody dared to sell a tractor to the families.

Still undeterred they got the local administration’s help in acquiring arms licences. Munnilal Misra, member of one of the five families, went further; he arranged to buy a tractor, and when Dadua failed to react, graduated to being a police informer.

The retribution came seven years later on August 11 last year. Munnilal and his 26-year-old son Harishchandra were returning with a drum of diesel on their tractor through the jungle road, when bullets rained on them. Their tractor was doused in the diesel and set afire. Then the father-son duo were hurled into the inferno.

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