August 26, 1978, left many permanent marks on the Capital, some good, some awful. Sunil Gupta, legal advisor, Tihar Jail, where Billa and Ranga were kept till they were hanged till death on January 31, 1982, says for many years the Vande Mataram Marg, along the Central Ridge where the children hitched a ride from Billa and Ranga and were abducted, was called Billa-Ranga Road. “They were the equivalent of Gabbar Singh, the fictional villain from Sholay, which was a huge hit in 1975. The killings struck terror in the hearts of middle-class parents,” he says.
It changed the nature of the Ridge itself, which was regarded as wilderness till then. In fact, the bodies of Sanjay and Geeta were discovered by a goatherd on his rounds. No one trespassed upon the Ridge, except for poor women and men who collected wood from the area for cooking and heating, cajoling or bribing the occasional chowkidar to look the other way. As sociologist Amita Baviskar wrote in Economic and Political Weekly in 2018 on the changing geography of greens in Delhi: “On the Northern Ridge, the domestication of the wilderness took the form of clearing the dense understorey of shrubs and creepers such as bansa, heens, gondni, jangli karaunda, bilan gada and kankera and replacing it with grass. Ornamental plants and shrubs were planted in neat beds. Gravelled walking paths were cut through the forest. A small pond was spanned by a bridge, reeds planted along its banks, and benches placed so that visitors could enjoy the pretty scene. A badminton court was created in a depression near the Flagstaff Tower built by the British in 1828. The ruins of Pir Ghaib, a 14th-century Tughlaq hunting lodge, and Chauburja, a mausoleum from the same period, were spruced up. The Ridge was now accessible and inviting to middle-class citizens.”