Sunglasses at night bust abductors of Haryana’s crorepati tea seller

Harpal Singh is a lucky man.

Last month, the Haryana government acquired the 48-year old Manesar tea seller’s land for Rs 3 crore.

He was on Monday night kidnapped by two men who knew of the land deal, but was rescued barely hours later at the Delhi-Gurgaon border after the sunglasses he was made to wear by his kidnappers aroused a policeman’s suspicion. It was, after all, the middle of the night.

The abductors forced Singh to wear sunglasses to conceal the tape they had used to blindfold him. The kidnappers had also tied his limbs and were holding him at gunpoint while driving him to their hideout in Delhi, said Anto Alphonse, deputy commissioner of police (Dwarka).

Singh escaped with swollen eyes and injuries to his head from a pistol-whipping at the time of his kidnapping. The two kidnappers, who have been arrested, have told the police they were aware that Singh had recently come into some money.

“Their immediate plan was to extract Rs 3 lakh from him. They planned to demand much more ransom in the subsequent days,” said an investigator not authorised to speak to the media.

The kidnappers ran into their first problem when they realised that Singh wasn’t carrying his phone. That meant he couldn’t immediately arrange the money.

Singh runs a tea stall outside a Maruti Suzuki factory and also helped casual labourers find work. According to him, the fact that the government had bought his land was known to Janmahan Singh, a labourer.

Janmahan Singh, a migrant from Uttar Pradesh, shared the information with a local resident, Vatan Ram, who owns two taxis. Until a month ago, Vatan’s taxis were plying for app-based cab platforms.