By Jeremy Page
The Times, South Asia Correspondent
Thursday, June 24, 2010
It’s another painfully slow day at the Singh Arms Corporation, a musty, one-room gun shop near Kashmir Gate in Old Delhi that dates to the birth of modern India in 1947. Charan Pal Singh Ghei sits alone at his desk, surrounded by ancient glass cabinets full of shotguns, hunting rifles, pistols and revolvers.
On the wall above hang three Mughal-era matchlocks once owned by the Maharajah of Uppal. Gathering dust in a corner near by is a British Snider Enfield rifle dated 1857 — the year of the Indian Mutiny. “This is a dying trade,” says Mr Ghei, 76, the shop’s owner and head of the All India Arms Dealers Association. “Even my own son doesn’t want to take it over.” The problem, he explains, is that although Indians have had the right to buy and bear guns since 1959, it can take two years to get a shotgun licence, and longer still for a handgun.
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