SURAT: It’s not the Rolls Royce or Rolex watches which top the list of coveted items in Surat, but the steely, sophisticated gun. In fact, a gun licence is one of the most fashionable accessories in the diamond city.

The numbers speak for themselves — there are close to 2,200 licences in Surat city and strangely most of the papers are procured from distant Nagaland.

Recently, the Surat police traced close to 40 ‘All India’ gun licences which were issued by the Nagaland government. Though the city police located four of the licence holders, 36 remain untraced.

The number is significant as a CID cell in Gandhinagar, after six to seven years of investigation, reported 50 ‘All India’ licences in Gujarat which were issued by the Nagaland government.

The Union home ministry had stripped Nagaland district deputy commissioners (collectors) of the authority to issue ‘All-India’ permits in the mid-1990s. But despite the curb, almost 50 people in Gujarat managed to procure these licences.

Surat police commissioner Sudhir Sinha, on November 8, had reminded the director-general of police, Nagaland, to probe into the validity of such licences.

“We have submitted a list of untraceable Nagaland licence-holders, who had either procured weapons or ammunition from various authorized gun dealers in the city.

“The list would come in handy for the authorities in Nagaland when these licence holders would return for renewals,” says Sinha. A CID team visited Nagaland between April and May 2004, following a high court order.

They found that in some cases none of the licences were directly signed by the deputy commissioners there.

All of them were signed on behalf of the deputy commissioner.

At least four districts in Nagaland — Dimapur, Okha, Mon and Peren — were under the state home department scanner.

“The licences originally belonged to those people whose weapons and licenses were seized by the administration during the peak of insurgency in Nagaland.

“Most of the licences were later transferred clandestinely to people, who we think, are either brokers involved in the gun running racket or security men posted in various industrial towns of the state,” says a senior official of the state CID.—By special arrangement with The Times of India