I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun. Yes it is.
— John Lennon. 1968

Vishwanath Pratap Singh had cause to be happy on December 30 The prime minister herself had come down to Lucknow to pat him on his back and give his ministry a clean chit. Singh had. to all intents. successfully carried out his terrible vow or ridding Uttar Pradesh of its dacoit menace within a month. The peculiar thing. However, was that Singh swore to do so on November 23, five days after the Dehuli massacre. But the vast state he ruled had begun to throb with warm guns from November 18, the day of the massacre. when 12 people were killed all over Uttar Pradesh. In the 41 days that ensued, Singh’s suddenly galvanised policemen hunted out and killed no less than 299 men who were alleged to be dreaded dacoits.

But Singh’s gods had it in for him. About the time Mrs Gandhi was winging her way back to Delhi. 10 more defenceless Jatav Harijans were shot and killed in cold blood by a mysterious trio of assassins. Five of the victims were women, four, children. This time the massacre occurred at Sadhupur. a village 25 km from Dehuli as the crow flies and in the same district: Mainpuri. When the news broke the following morning. it seemed as though a thunderbolt had hit India’s very heart.

Arguments: Sadhupur couldn’t have come at a more embarrassing moment for the state Government. After all, hadn’t it been announcing gleefully that the dacoit menace had been wiped out? Immediately, the official machinery swung into action to find excuses and scapegoats for the New Year’s Eve massacre. Over the following week, in Sadhupur, in Mainpuri, the district headquarters. and in Lucknow, every bureaucrat, police official and ruling-party politician echoed one another as the theories piled up. INDIA TODAY reached Sadhupur within 12 hours or the mas acre, and when state Home Minister Swamp Kumari Bakshi and her deputy Rajendra Tripathi reached the village at 1 p.m. on December 31, they set to work at once to build up their arguments.

“It’s a political conspiracy,” said Bakshi and it was done deliberately on the very day Mrs Gandhi came to Lucknow.” Tripathi agreed with her. and hinted darkly at nefarious opposition plots. “We will kill every man who perpetrated this crime,” said Bakshi. and when Tripathi tried to caution her. said that Sadhupur was “the last flicker of a dying flame”.

Riding the bumpy trail back to Shikohabad circuit house in a jeep. Bakshi and Tripathi continued with their allegations. ” None of the 299 men killed by police during the last month was innocent, they were all dacoits.” insisted Tripathi. “And our campaign will continue. It did not end on December 24.” As if to prove Tripath1 right, the toll rose to 325 by January 6.

The facts, however seemed to show up Tripathi’s ministry. The chief minister’s Bhishma pratigya, as it was dubbed, had resulted in orders from the top to every state policeman to embark on a manhunt. And the police had cooperated enthusiastically. As the body-count rose steadily (out of 1,480 alleged dacoits killed during 1981, 310 died in the last 44 days). the sprawling state was gripped by a terror that had been experienced only at the height of the Emergency sterilisation drive.

Over-zealous: From the mass of evidence it became apparent that the police had. just as during the Emergency, become over­ zealous about their task. There were only a handful or big dacoits carrying rewards on their heads in the list of those killed. More significantly. there had been no police caualties at all. and this was suspicious because in an encounter with a dacoit gang, the police have almost always suffered casualties. Well-armed and equipped with sophisticated communication equipment, the big dacoit gangs in any case have proved too elusive for the police.

Who then were the men killed during the 41-day war of attrition? The truth began to dawn on January 6 in Lucknow, when Tripathi gave INDIA TODAY detailed lists of the 28 major dacoit gangs in the 12 districts (Etah, Etawah, Mainpuri, Farrukhabad, Jalaun, Jhansi, Agra, Hamirpur, Lalitpur. Kanpur (rural), Banda and Badaun). Out of 619 officially listed dacoits, only 293 had either been killed in encounters, or captured. Of the five biggest gangs ( led by Malkhan Singh. Chhabiram Yadav. Pothi. Mahabira and Anar Singh) only 132 men out of a total listed strength of 256 had been killed or captured. ‘It is true we have not been able to smash the bigger gangs altogether,” admitted Tripathi.

Gradually, as the evidence accumulated, it became clear that the police had been put under immense pressure to deliver their quotas of heads. In every town and village in the four districts most affected by the dacoit menace-Etawah, Mainpuri, Etah and Farrukhabad-people repeatedly said that the police had been told that the bigger their body-count was, the better would be their rewards. Each district’s superintendent of police(SP) had reportedly ordered every police station under his jurisdiction to step up the manhunt as the chief minister’s month-long vow began to near its end.

Casualty Figures : The official list of encounters’ during the blood-spattered 41 days from November 18 to December 28 seemed to corroborate this. Out of 299 alleged dacoits killed during this period, the maximum-193-had been killed between December 7 and December 24, when V.P. Singh triumphantly completed his probationary period. The casualty figures had leapt dramatically into double digits during these days.
What was most shocking about this merciless period was the fact that the police had killed people in 44 of the state’s 57 districts. in a swathe of blood that cut across from east to west and north to south. Only 119 “dacoits’ had been killed in the 12 core districts, and the remaining 180 had been killed in other far-flung corners of the state.

The state opposition parties exhibited their helplessness by not providing figures of this massacre, a massacre that had been punctuated by Dehuli and Sadhupur. But they charged the Government with the killings of hundreds of innocent people. The Lok Dal, which is the second-biggest party in the state legislature, alleged that 90 per cent of those killed were innocent. The Government hotly contested this, and Tripathi said only four cases of false en­ counters had been detected during 1981. in Varanasi, Etawah, Gorakhpur, and Meerut, that the guilty policemen had been charged with murder under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and that there had been no false encounters during December.

What does happen if a policeman is found guilty of falsely killing an alleged dacoit? Nahar Singh of village Gattapura in the Fatehabad police station area in Agra district was called to police station Pinahat for interrogation on June 18, 1980. At 5 p.m. that day, he was shot dead by the police in an encounter’ in the Pura Karkauli ravines closeby. The police are alleged to have removed Rs 3,000 from his person before killing Singh.

When an uproar ensued, Agra’s then district magistrate Saibal Kumar Mukherjee investigated the case and charged the Pinahat station officer and four other policemen with murder under Sections 302 of the IPC. Nahar’s widow was granted Rs. 1,000 from the chief minister’s relief fund-but only in November 1981. As for the guilty policemen, a CID enquiry is going on into the incident, but there is reportedly immense pressure to hush up the case.

Meanwhile, the Government was obviously determined to plug its conspiracy theory, and it stepped up the campaign. The Sadhupur killings were attributed to Anar Singh, a notorious dacoit, and Tripathi implied he was backed by certain Lok Dal politicians. The Deputy Inspector General of Police (Agra Range) Satish Kumar Mukherjee first said there could have been two warring groups in the village, and then said that Anar Singh could have been retaliating because of the police dragnet.

Important Letter: Behind this argument was a letter purportedly written by Anar Singh and left behind at Sadhupur, in which he swore continuing revenge. Tripathi had the letter in his Lucknow office on January 6. but was dissuaded from parting with a photostat copy by the state’s Inspector­ General of Police (IGP) Naresh Kumar Verma who said its authenticity was still being verified. Obviously, then, the state Government had no incontrovertible evidence for Anar Singh’s involvement in Sadhupur. And opposition leaders had all along been charging that the letter was fake.

But Tripathi nevertheless distributed mint-condition photographs of the dacoit, and that very day the chief minister told a press conference that the district magistrate of Deoria and the DIG of police, Varanasi, had detected a conspiracy to massacre Harijans in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Political circles in Lucknow were buzzing with rumours that evening about an impending crackdown by the state Government on opposition politicians. Two weapons were at the Government’s disposal: the National Security Act (NSA) and the anti-dacoity or dinance issued after the Dehuli massacre, which provided for detention of up to six months of dacoits and their harbourers without bail.

What was intriguing was the fact that the state Government has chosen not to use this ordinance during its month of death. Tripathi, who observers say is more powerful than Bakshi. let slip that the ordinance had not been used because the Opposition would then have attacked its 11se. But there seemed to be another explanation: use of the ordinance would mean physical detention of the suspects, and the state’s ministers had consistently attacked the judiciary for granting too much bail. The ordinance would not have permitted the police to eliminate so many ‘dacoits’.

Innocent Deaths: When India Today travelled through the dacoit-infested areas, it quickly became clear that there could have been many innocent deaths in fake en­counters. The police mostly seemed to have grabbed small-time offenders and petty crooks and then to have shot them in cold blood. Most of the reported en­ counters were in the night, but it is well known that the police rarely go out after dacoits after dark: experience has taught them that tracking down dacoits and keeping in touch with each other in the dark is suicidal.

It is not difficult to come across dozens of people who have first-hand experiences to relate about the local police’s threats to even some score by staging an encounter. There was Nand Singh, for instance, who came up in an inky black Etawah town street clutching a sheet of paper. It was a petition, and Nand Singh was quaking, with terror. The local police, he said, had falsely charged him with murder, and when he was acquitted for lack of evidence, had beaten up his father and brother; Singh had therefore filed a case against three policemen. Now, said Singh, the sub-inspector in charge of a police station had threatened to kill him.

Nand Singh is most certainly not a dacoit. But he is not entirely innocent either. He is alleged to be a pimp, and a small-time crook. But the fact that the police want to kill him shows how far the law is prepared to go. Local sources say that the sub-inspector is out for his blood because Nand Singh refused to increase his regular bribe to him.

Constant Terror: Subjected to frequent and arbitrary raids, the villages in the region live in constant terror, a terror that is heightened by not knowing who is the real foe, because even dacoits dress up in police uniforms. The Auraiya police station in Etawah district best illustrates this state of affairs. Two of the five fake encounters investigated by INDIA TODAY were staged by the Auraiya police, led by their officer-in­ charge Balvir Singh Tyagi. How Tyagi and his men terrorised Tilakpur, a village in the area, makes for an ominous tale.

The darkness around Tilakpur seems to conceal armies of gunmen. Silently, Tilakpur’s residents gathered around a bonfire and pushed an old man forward. His name was Mohar Singh, and he was once mukhia (headman) of the village. Tyagi and his policemen apparently believed that Tilakpur’s people were aiding a local dacoit, Chandra Prakash. They descended on Mohar’s house at 6 p.m. on December 24 and roughly asked Mohar’s nephew Rajendra to summon his father Suvaran and uncle Sarnam. When they could not be located, Tyagi summoned Tilakpur’s mukhia Jitwar Singh and told him that the police would wipe out the village and re-settle it with Thakurs if he did not cooperate.

At 3.30 a.m. that night, the police returned to Mohar’s house, got the door opened, and proceeded to ransack the place, looting everything in sight. They departed with three people in custody: Suvaran, his son Rajendra, and Vijay Bahadur, a Harijan.

Desperate Petition: The next morning an angry crowd of citizens besieged the Auraiya police station and secured Rajendra’s release. Mohar alleges that Tyagi had wanted to kill Rajendra, and then stage an encounter with Suvaran near Khanpur, a village just outside Auraiya. Their lives were saved because Mohar desperately petitioned all the district officials, and the SP then sent a motorcycle courier to order Tyagi not to kill them.

Catching the scent of a prowling journalist in his area, Balvir Singh Tyagi chose to avoid a meeting fixed on January 5 at the police station by disappearing to Etawah, ostensibly to meet the SP. He took all important station documents with him. It was left to his deputy. Sub-inspector Ram Niwas Tyagi, who began by pleading that he was “the wrong Tyagi”, to answer questions.

The only records available were lists of cases pending against encounter victims, all written out on a scrap of paper, and Balvir Singh’s encounter reports. written in purple prose. Every time there was a ‘dacoit’ death, Tyagi and his men claimed to have crept upon the fugitives in the dark and heard incriminating snatches of conversation. In none of the encounters had there been a police casualty, but Balvir Singh described them all as ferocious.

Ram Niwas Tyagi could not furnish details of when the dead dacoits had turned absconders, of post-mortem reports, or of the authenticity of the cases listed against the dead men. The sub-inspector said that Suvaran Singh and Vijay Bahadur were members of the Chandra Prakash gang and had been charged with “assembling to commit dacoity”.

Harsh Punishment: In a region trapped in the dacoit-police pincer, villagers plead that they cannot refuse if a dacoit were to land up and demand to be fed and entertained. Yet, Section 8 of the anti-dacoity ordinance, which provides for harsh punishment for “harbourers” of dacoits, has been used freely and ruthlessly throughout the 12 districts, whereas the ordinance as a whole has not been used to arrest listed dacoits. Said Tilakpur’s Mohar Singh: “No young person dares to venture outdoors after dusk here, because the police say that they want young and healthy victims.” Every knock on the door seems to herald a gun-toting policeman. And, as villager Jabbar Singh put it: ‘There is no government in my region. and the local SP is the local dacoit chief.”

But there has been very little organised protest against the fake encounters, outside of Lok Dal activism. Most of the state’s opposition parties have no records of encounters and have not attempted to investigate them. The situation was summed up by four Mukhias from Jalaun district in early 1981. in a petition to the chief minister. “We give you land revenue and irrigation tax, but you cannot protect us,” they wrote. “Please therefore transfer us to the jurisdiction of dacoit queen Phoolan Devi. She is any day better.”

Agra, Mainpuri and Etawah form three points of a triangle. Some­ where within it is the confluence offive rivers, the pachnada: the Yamuna, the Chambal, the Kunwari, the Pahuj, and the Sindh. This is where the legendary ravines begin and continue southwards, a forbidding and yet romantic landscape of ridges and dips, ideal territory for the hundreds of bands of dacoits that roam its pockets. Dacoity has been an ancient phenomenon in this region. and from the 14th century onwards it has been an honoured custom to avenge wrong by taking a life and then becoming a fugitive. But the dacoits are not considered criminals by the local population. They are called baghis. or rebels, a term that has a ring of legitimacy to it.

It is no wonder, then, that the bigger dacoit gangs exist because they enjoy considerable support from the people. But the factor that has really hamstrung the state Government is the shadowy connection between politicians and dacoits. These connections cut across caste and party lines. Nearly half of Uttar Pradesh’s legislators have some kind of criminal case or The other pending against them. Out of 675 legislators, at least 300 have had to be provided with armed ‘shadows’ as bodyguards by the Government. Nearly every major politician in the 12 dacoit-infested districts is said to have overt or covert links with the dacoits. Political survival itself seems to depend on these links. But as far as the Congress(I) is concerned, its particular links with the dacoits have proved to be its undoing.

Dacoit Power: In the Lok Sabha elections in 1980, the Lok Dal lost some choice seats in this belt, where it had traditionally held sway. Yet, the party managed to retain its overall lead. From all accounts. the Congress(I) decided to do its utmost to crack the Lok Dal stranglehold when the Assembly elections came around in June 1980. The Lok Dal’s Mahipal Singh Shastri, leader of the Opposition in the Vidhan Parishad, alleges that Sanjay Gandhi en­ trusted the task to K.D. Sharma, who was DIG in the Allahabad headquarters.

Believing that Yadav and Jat police officials would tend to support the Lok Dal, Sharma is alleged to have transferred 35 of 39 Yadav DSPS and 67 of 73 Jat DSPS out of Etah, Etawah, Mainpuri and Farrukhabad districts. and the police allegedly helped intimidate voters. Significantly. Sharma was promoted six days before he retired on November 30 last year to the rank of Additional IG, CID and since he coudn’t be given an extension, has now been made chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Agro­-Industrial Corporation.

But the maximum damage was wreaked because Congress(l) politicians openly enlisted dacoits’ aid in booth-capturing, voter intimidation and caste mobilisation. In the five core Lok Sabha constituencies of Farrukhabad, Etawah, Etah, Mainpuri and Firozabad, the Lok Dal had won three seats. the Congress(I) one, with the fifth going to an Independent. But in the 32 Assembly constituencies that comprise these areas, the Congress(I) won as many as 23 seats, and the Lok Dal only four. The police, and the dacoits, had obviously delivered the goods.

Shady Contacts: There are quite a few Congress(I) MLAs from the dacoit areas who are alleged to have strong links with dacoit gangs. But four state ministers-Jagdish Singh. Bairam Singh Yadav, Guiab Sehra and Shiv Nath Kushwaha v in particular are alleged to be neck-deep in such shady contacts. Bairam Singh Yadav has been waging a relentless battle against his Lok Dal opponent, Mulayam Singh Yadav. Mulayam Singh is the state Lok Dal president. and has for years won effortlessly from Jaswantnagar constituency in Etawah district.

In 1980, however, Bairam Singh defeated him. Mulayam Singh alleges that his opponent was actively supported by the biggest dacoit chief of the area. Chhabiram Yadav, who roped in other Yadav dacoits and ensured his patron’s victory. Bairam Singh in turn accuses Mulayam Singh of harbouring Anar Singh, who is also a Yadav dacoit, and who is the alleged culprit at Sadhupur.

These underworld connections have now come home to roost, allege Opposition politicians. And that is why the Government has been unable to crack down on the bigger dacoits. Giving allowance for the fact that Opposition men enjoy dacoit links too, this allegation seems to be borne out by the evident failure of the Government in smashing the big gangs. And even V.P. Singh has admitted to dacoit-politician links (see interview page 25).

No Tears: The sad thing is that the state’s middle classes are no longer moved by anything,” says Hiranmay Dhar of the Giri Institute of Development Studies in Lucknow. Says a senior government official: “What else can you expect when every good bureaucrat has been shunted off to Delhi?” And there are no tears being shed for the hundreds of men killed by the police. There i, no acknowledgement of the fact that even dacoits are entitled to proper trials and constitutionally sanctioned punishment. Instead, blessed by the state Government, policemen have killed with abandon and legitimised state terror.

Once upon a time, Uttar Pradesh was described as India’s heartland. and the state’s Gangetic plain was looked upon as the crucible in which modern India would be shaped. Few of those admirers could have foreseen that Uttar Pradesh would one day be the crucifix on which every norm of civilisation was being nailed.

—Chaitanya Kalbag

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