The spree of dubious encounter killings of dacoits by the police in Uttar Pradesh ever since the controversial saffron-clad monk Yogi Adityanath assumed the reins of this country’s most populous state has raised considerable controversy. Even more shocking has been the mysterious execution by unknown assassins of two jailed criminal warlords while being taken to the hospital under heavy police guard in broad daylight and under the glare of media cameras.
To make matters even more suspicious, two younger members of the same dacoit family were shot dead in an encounter barely a week ago. It may be interesting to compare the current scenario in Uttar Pradesh to four decades ago when dacoits and police encounters had also raised a furore in the state; a state then ruled by none other than another contentious political personality — Vishwanath Pratap Singh.
The sheer numbers paint a far grimmer picture of police excesses in the Singh era 40 years ago.
While India Today, quoting officials, said that 183 listed criminals had been shot dead in police encounters since the Yogi Adityanath administration took charge six years ago, the same magazine had revealed from official sources that as many as 1480 dacoits were killed in police encounters during the single year of 1981.
VP Singh and the Killing 300+ Dacoits in 1981
An incredible 310 dacoits were shot dead in the last one-and-a-half months alone in the year 1981, as the police campaign against dacoits reached a crescendo following a public vow by then Chief Minister V P Singh to wipe out the dacoit menace forthwith.
Singh was praised by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself for his crusade against the badlands of the state goaded by the massacre of his own caste brethren Thakurs by bandit queen Phoolan Devi, a lower caste Nishad. Unfortunately for him, it all horribly misfired.
Dacoits retaliated by carrying out arbitrary massacres of innocent villagers, most of them lower castes, and in April, the Chief Minister’s elder brother Chandra Pratap Singh, a High Court judge, and his elder son were struck down in an ambush by unknown assailants.
Unable to protect even members of his own family, Singh resigned a few months later amidst a conspiracy against him by foes within the Congress Party like Narain Dutt Tiwari and Vir Bahadur Singh, as well as Opposition firebrands like Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose political base in central Uttar Pradesh was a major target of the police anti-dacoit drive.
Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Quid Pro Quo Trend
After the ignominious departure of VP Singh who would later politically resurrect himself during the Bofors controversy and later go on to be Prime Minister, the dacoits versus police saga in Uttar Pradesh stopped making the headlines except stray incidents.
In 1995, when Mulayam Singh Yadav was chief minister he dropped all charges against the infamous Phoolan Devi and inducted her into his Samajwadi Party and she was elected twice in succession to Parliament, although mysteriously assassinated in 2001 in front of her Delhi residence.
From then on, most political parties and their leaders in the state developed mutually beneficial relations with dacoits or as they were locally called bahubalis both for financial benefits and the influence they had among sections of the electorate depending on their caste.
In 1997 when BJP strongman Kalyan Singh toppled the Mayawati-led BSP-BJP coalition government, he included as many as 19 ministers with serious criminal charges, some of them known crime warlords, in his cabinet.
Mayawati's Volte-Face
As it spread its wings in Uttar Pradesh, even the BSP sought protection from these criminal warlords despite Kanshi Ram’s Dalit politics. For instance, two of the most notorious dacoit gangs in the state, both from the Bundelkhand region, led by Dadua and Thokia, suddenly decided to support Behenji and her elephant symbol in 2007, sensing which way the political winds were blowing.
During the election campaign, the gang created ripples by raising the slogan Mohar lagegi haathi par, nahi goli padegi chaati par (vote for the elephant or get a bullet in the chest). However, after Mayawati swept to a historic victory with full majority in 2007, she decided on the advice of her intrepid cabinet secretary Chandra Shekhar Singh to go after the dacoits.
In a remarkable blitzkrieg operation the police managed to gun down both Dadua and Thokia and many members of his gang within a few months of Mayawati coming to power. She also went after several other notorious crime chieftains like Mukhtar Ansari, Raju Bhaiya, and Atiq Ahmed, many of them former ministers and legislators of other political parties.
Although Mayawati earned a lot of her accolades from the local and national media for her tough no-nonsense campaign against the most dreaded criminals in Uttar Pradesh, which were so far reluctant to praise the Dalit leader, she would have to later pay a heavy political price. During the crucial 2009 parliamentary polls, when Behenji had hoped to make a pitch for the Prime Minister’s post, the gangs of Bundelkhand led by the relatives of Dadua and Thokia, switched their support to the Samajwadi Party, changing their slogan to Goli padegi chaati par, agar mohar lagegi haathi par (get a bullet in the chest if you vote for the elephant). In 2012, Mayawati, mired in charges of corruption, having antagonized a large number of caste groups partly egged on against her by criminal gangs, lost power to the SP led by Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam Singh’s son and political successor.
Akhilesh Yadav and His Tough Approach
The Akhilesh Yadav government that succeeded Mayawati’s rule had a ministry in which almost a fourth of them had pursued criminal careers or had very shady connections, all handpicked by Mulayam Singh’s brother Shivpal Yadav, who is known for his connections in the gangland.
The young and urbane Yadav scion did try to take a tough approach, denying entry to the party to criminals like DP Yadav and refusing an electoral alliance with Mukhtar Ansari, but this, apart from provoking an all out war with his uncle Shivpal, also weakened him at a grassroots level even as the media praised him. His party would later be routed by the Modi juggernaut in both the parliamentary polls and state assembly elections in 2014 and 2017.
It remains to be seen whether Yogi Adityanath too would ultimately fall victim, like many of his predecessors have, in rushing headlong in a no-holds-barred battle against top criminals in his state. A big difference from the past is that the Sangh propaganda machine has in recent months managed to give an openly communal twist to the anti-dacoit operations by the police, which has ready support from the growing number of people who are swayed by anti-minority prejudice legitimized by the central and state governments.
(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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