In the 19th century, British caravans traveling in the north of India were plagued by a cult of assassins who committed flawless, silent ritual murders in the name of Kali.
They did this by posing as fellow travelers, walking beside the caravans for several days to gain the foreigner’s trust. Along the way, other fellow assassins would join along, all the while pretending not to know each other as their numbers grew.
Then, on signal, they would sneak up on their hosts while they slept, strangling them and then burying their bodies before dawn, leaving no trace.
With estimates of hundreds of thousands of murders, they remain the most effective terrorist group in world history.
This cult, called the ‘Thugs’, were the main reason why the British passed the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871.
This Act warned of various Indian communities who were, quote unquote “addicted to crime.”
All a Governor General had to do was decide which groups were criminal and then simply publish the suspected tribe’s name in the Local Gazette, making them heretofore ‘notified’ as criminal.
If in 1871 you belonged to any one of 160 types of communities based on a trumped-up British definition of tribe, you would have woken up to find yourself to be retroactively criminalized from birth.
By the late 1940s 2,300,000 tribals had come to experience the brutal business-end of this law.