Gangs of Rawalpindi and their lucky numbers

Over the past month or so, Rawalpindi police have put almost all prominent criminal gangs behind bars and recovered from them huge cache of weapons.

The unreported fact about these gangs is that they are known by numbers like ‘786 gang’, ‘777 gang’ and ‘313 gang’ etc. There is another prominent gang and it is named after an old move Black Tiger.

When I came to Rawalpindi to study mass communication back in 1998, I remember the business of sale of prize bonds digit by digit was in full swing here.

People from different parts of the country used to gather here at Raja Bazaar and buy these digits or numbers.

The lucky ones would have their number placed in the sequence they bought and these numbers became their lucky numbers. But there were very few lucky ones in the flood of thousands that would have been breaking at the dark shores of Raja Bazaar every night.

Looking at the names of these gangs, the first thing that came to my mind is that the city populations still have a knack for lucky numbers.

According to numerologists, they must have been following some sort of shabby characters who are dressed up as saints somewhere.

It is generally believed that these characters have the skills or intuition to interoperate different themes into numbers and predict the power of these numbers.

By this logic, these gangs are associated with very powerful numbers. It is also believed that they do or will not operate at random. Rather, they choose time and date and day of their crimes as per these numbers.

When asked about this aspect, Regional Police Officer Sohail Habib Tajik said very briefly, “May be.”

It seems that he does not care about these lucky numbers or their power. RPO Tajik has a track record of busting gangs wherever he has ever been appointed.

His office is bedecked with the souvenirs he has earned through the course of his service. One of them was Tamgha-e-Imtiaz that he won back in 2014.

He has also served the United Nations across four continents and this experience has made him a matchless investigator available on the ground now.

Since the time he has come to Rawalpindi, land has shrunken for the criminals and their gangs.

Last week, he has returned vehicles worth millions of rupees back to their owners. Cars are still stolen in the region but carjackers are also arrested now.

Tajik talks less. Usually, he sits and listens to others. He even encourages his subordinates to comment if you ask him a question about police image building or stress management.

It seems to me that he is the lucky number for Rawalpindi that has outdone all other lucky numbers that these gangs had associated with themselves.

The sore reality, however, still remains that respect begets respect. Tajik’s success is police’s success but people cannot be mindful of it until and unless the desk men at police stations learn to respect public and instil among them a sense of security. In the end, I would say that Tajik is our lucky number.