Uttar Pradesh’s crime matrix

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

In UP, the Yogi Adityanath regime has redefined the perception of law and order. A former police chief from the state recently noted that policing is no longer about maintaining law and order, it is about keeping ‘order’, meaning the old and established normality. It means not disturbing the nexus between politicians, the cops and the criminals who fall into different categories: politicians, would-be netas, hired assassins and killers active in blood sport. Even by existing norms, the ‘order’ plummeted to such a nadir last week that the BJP government’s claims about Adityanath’s remit came apart. It seems that the monk from one of the country’s richest cloisters was chosen to lead the state because the tough-as-nails reputation he acquired by learning politics in crime-ridden Gorakhpur without ‘blemishing’ his credentials would help clean the state’s cesspools.

On the night of July 2-3, the accomplices of Vikas Dubey — labelled as a gangster, a ‘history-sheeter’, a murderer, but someone who certainly thrived under political patronage — killed eight cops in Kanpur’s boondocks. It was called an ‘encounter’, a term that earned notoriety under Adityanath. Among his ‘achievements’ were the serially staged encounters between the cops and alleged criminals that formed part of a cleansing operation. The victims were largely small-time offenders from a religious community or the so-called lower castes.

Dubey, who lived at Chaubeypur (rural Kanpur), was a criminal, land-grabber and a political power-broker who wore the aura of a Robin Hood because he took the law into his hands to protect the local Brahmins, the caste to which he belonged. He nurtured political ambitions. Among his victims was a BJP leader, Santosh Shukla, who was murdered at a police station in 2001, when the party was in power. Dubey was arrested but acquitted for want of evidence because the witnesses turned hostile. The hired gun’s CV boasted of 60 cases, spanning a gamut of crimes. But he was back in Chaubeypur under police protection, a status symbol in UP’s villages. Local lore had it that he controlled two Brahmin-dominated villages, called the shots in the local body elections and influenced the Assembly and parliamentary polls. Was it a surprise that a circle officer, Devender Mishra, planned to capture Dubey in his lair but was shot with his team because somebody tipped off the criminal?

The government’s spokespersons blamed the preceding SP dispensation for the spike in crimes. Certainly, the SP’s record of mollycoddling and sheltering all kinds of undesirable elements proved to be its undoing each time it was in power. But didn’t Adityanath arrive with loftier ambitions?

Actually not. UP’s political history is dotted with names like Raghuraj Pratap Singh, alias Raja Bhaiyya, Akhilesh Kumar Singh (whose daughter Aditi Singh is a Congress MLA), Dhananjay Singh, Mukhtar Ansari and Atique Ahmed. These are bahubalis-turned-politicians who murder, abduct for ransom, attempt rape (Dhananjay, a former BSP legislator from Jaunpur, was accused of the crime) and breach of peace. The bully boys got away because they commanded fierce loyalty in their demarcated principalities and exuded power that tied the administration’s hands. Mayawati, the BSP leader, ‘dared’ to arrest Raja Bhaiyya when she was the CM, for which she earned the wrath of the Rajputs, the caste to which he belonged.

Adityanath is extolled as a patron of the Rajputs, his caste. He signalled his partiality when he was slow in acting against two criminals, both Rajputs: Kuldeep Singh Sengar and Swami Chinmayanand. Sengar, a BJP MLA from Bangermau in Unnao district, was notorious for fostering illegal sand mining and operating unlicensed buses, offences that are glossed over because they bring in the big bucks that politicians and cops hanker after. In 2018, he was arraigned and jailed for raping a minor. The rape sparked off a series of crimes implicating Sengar and his relatives. A party hopper, his last port of call was the BJP that figured out his significant Rajput following and gave him a ticket in 2017. Indeed, Hriday Narayan Dikshit, the UP Assembly Speaker, mobilised Sengar’s help to win his election from Bhagwantnagar.

A prerequisite for consolidating and expanding political power is getting the ‘big-hearted’ but dreaded criminals on one’s side. In its heyday, the Congress deployed this instrument to good use. Its precedent was adopted by the parties that displaced it, notably the BJP that snagged the big names in criminal history who were associated with the Congress or the SP. Adityanath got the Rajput, Jat and Gujjar criminals on his side and reaped electoral dividends. Police stations are packed with Rajputs but Adityanath alone cannot be accused of nurturing caste loyalties. Akhilesh Yadav had posted Yadavs, and Mayawati, the Dalits.

In an entrenched upper-caste ecosystem that characterises the BJP government, criminals such as Dubey or Sengar hardly provoked outrage or even invited censure. They are seen as the mainstay of a larger order that has to be strengthened at the service of the ‘Hindu identity’. Little wonder then that the spate of ‘encounters’, which principally targeted Muslims and later the ruthless crackdown on the protesters against the CAA were lauded by UP’s gentry. Had Dubey belonged to another community, by now he would have been under lock and key.

The SP has lived with the tag of presiding over a ‘goonda raj’, just as Lalu Prasad and ‘jungle raj’ are synonyms. Both labels have emanated from a successful campaign by the BJP that received kudos from upper-caste controlled establishments. It’s not a coincidence that with all the aberrations, the SP and Lalu’s RJD had fairly worthy records of checking communal disharmony and ensuring a modicum of justice for Muslim victims. That turned the establishment against these parties. What’s sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.

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