“What do you miss now?” a journalist from the US had once asked Phoolan Devi, years after she quit being a dacoit and became a Member of Parliament. "The power and authority," she had said. "When people betray me now, like those bastards at Channel Four, [the filmmakers]… if I were still a dacoit, I could have taught them a proper lesson."
It isn’t hard to guess, then, what her reaction would have been today, had she tuned into the recent podcast by her convicted killer Sher Singh Rana with influencer Shubankar Mishra in which he talks with (caste) pride about why he killed her.
Over the two-and-a-half-hour-long podcast, the duo repeatedly debase Phoolan with casteist and sexist slurs. But it’s not just casual casteism and sexism. Rana peddles lies about Phoolan and distorts facts. Thus, it becomes important to counter some of his claims.