Don’t cross Delhi Border and set shop in UP. Criminal gangs with full protection of political masters are reaping the harvest in police uniform.
The depth to which a state can descend under gangsters’ rule is best evident in Uttar Pradesh, where crime is everyday occupation of a good many people, and punishment, if any, is merely subject to the criminal’s political connections. With a party of criminals, now in power, extortionists and kidnap gangs spare none, and the police often are a party in the loot. Throughout the state, the criminal law has become a dead letter.
Just how precarious is life in Uttar Pradesh shows in the recent experience of Kunal and Sahir, two BBS students of Amity University in Noida. As the duo drove out of the campus in their Mercedes C-class sedan, two men in police uniform waved them to a halt, and, on the pretext of examining their papers, made them step out of their car to be forced into a waiting car that drove them away. Hours later, the expected call rang at the homes of the boys’ parents, demanding a ransom of a crore of rupees. It looked like business as usual.
The ransom was later brought down Rs 85 lakh. It was paid and the boys were released. But the kidnappers’ plan finally went berserk as the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, and legal luminary, Arun Jaitley, happens to be a close friend of their victims’ father. Anguished by his friend’s plight, Jaitley rang up everyone concerned, from ruling Samjawadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav to his Chief Minister son Akhilesh Singh Yadav to almost every top official in the state who could be of help, including the state DGP. Even the agencies of the Union of India were tapped for help.
Jaitley’s effort roved effective. It not only helped minimize the ransom amount but galvanized the state government into action. In four days flat, the gang was arrested. It comprises two graduate engineers, a health instructor and an acclaimed sportsman. It is hoped that their prosecution will reveal how these men with perfect professional backgrounds had ganged up to try their luck at abduction of rich men’s kids. But they apparently admitted to the investigators that they’d perpetrated something similar a while ago when they picked up from around the same place a student in his Audi and obtained Rs 50 lakh for his release.
However, to anyone familiar with the location of the Amity University complex in Noida, and the busy roads nearby, what is most perplexing is the thought of a group of amateur criminals sporting police uniform mustering the audacity to kidnap their victims in broad daylight. The area is policed round the clock and has sufficient number of surveillance cameras. It is difficult to believe that a location as protected as this could become the happy hunting ground of a kidnap syndicate without the benign negligence, if not active encouragement, of the state’s police. The other thing that raises question marks on what is apparently a commendable feat of the police, that of nabbing the criminals at the drop of a hat, is that just a push from a nationally important politician like Jaitley could get them caught. Therefore, far from being total strangers to the police, they could even be birds of a feather! This fits into the larger picture of a criminal-police nexus across the state, invariably at the instance of politicians in power.
It is not if crime rate was down in Uttar Pradesh during the rule of Mayawati, Mulayam’s bête noire. But the difference lies in the Samajwadi Party’s close affinity with crime syndicates, and the political patronage their “bosses” receive. Mayawati had, despite all her disregard for financial norms, kept her party on a leash, with a firm dividing line between politicians and policemen. It resulted in a marked improvement in law and order, from the mess in which Mulayam had left the state in 2007. But it hasn’t taken the ruling Yadav dynasty even a year to bring the state back into the terrible pickle in which it was left. And this dynasty seems unaffected by the rise of its own GenNext. Foreign-educated Akhilesh Yadav, who was sworn in as Chief Minister last year amid a lot of hope that he’d ‘gentrify’ a party of rough-speaking bumpkins and history-sheeters. That hope is belied, with the youngster appearing to be a mere pawn, with his father and other elders of the clan driving him from the back seat.
The mafia-like functioning of Samajwadi Party, and self-evident criminalization of the police under its rule, has ominous significance for investors from Mumbai and foreign financial capitals. It is also ominous for the country with Lok Sabha elections barely a year away and Congress and BJP, are far from looking prepared to rule. While the Congress is reeling under the weight of incumbency, the BJP is incapable of sorting out its internal leadership problems. It has put some credibility to the prospect of a non-Congress non-BJP government at the Centre. Though only an astrologer can forecast its longevity, Mulayam Singh Yadav is a strong contender for its leadership.
And that’s where the problem lies. India has no dearth of criminalized politicians, but few other states have Uttar Pradesh’s unique feature of criminals holding ministerial positions and ordering the police. Gangs operating in police uniform and getting full protection and cooperation from the local police and their masters. It starkly resembles novelist Graham Greene’s gut-wrenching description, in ‘The Comedian’, of Haiti under the dictatorship of ‘Papa Doc’ and ‘Baby Doc’, and the rogue police force, the ‘Tonton Macoute’, under their command. One fervently hopes that India’s inability to elect competent leaders does not lead her to the fate of Haiti under the Papa and the Baby.
Surely, all this is a music to the ears of Behanji who rode to power in 2007 on the promise to eliminate the “goonda Raj”. She kept such elements under check initially and known as tough administrator. Whatever is happening in the neighbouring towns ofUP may give rich dividends to Mayawati in 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
(Harish Gupta is National Editor of Lokmat group)
