Yogi Adityanath may claim to eliminate the mafia but cannot break out of a system that has been endorsed by his party
Uttar Pradesh has always had the dubious distinction of being the badlands of the country, with politically connected criminals having a run of the place and the line between the lawmaker and lawbreaker almost blurring due to the collusion between the two. This political patronage of rowdies and thugs, ostensibly to help consolidate a party’s position by way of coercion, show of strength and to expediently deepen social and caste schisms for remunerative vote banks has been on for decades. So much so that underworld dons themselves, over time, became elected representatives of the people. In such a scenario, the police as a tool of the executive, that has anyway been compromised, has played along rather than risking the lives of its men for trying to decriminalise the system. Both the caste parties, be it the Samajwadi Party (SP) or the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), had legitimised the political worth of ganglords to such an extent that even mainstream parties, the BJP included, were not immune to following the unstated grammar of muscling up. Any party in power needed unofficial bahubalis. In fact, current Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath soared to power primarily claiming he would cleanse the politics of the State once and for all and end the “goonda raj.” People trusted his mahant image, hoping he would clean up his own party in the process. A series of “encounters” and elimination followed, too, till one of them backfired and cost the lives of policemen instead. It shows that the determination to tame the underworld isn’t enough so long as the system isn’t disinfected. Or sacrificing some minnows in the public eye to protect the big fish wouldn’t pass off for showmanship. The recent case of Vikas Dubey, the don of Shivli, has only fortified that perception. It’s been nearly a week since he has been on the run after his henchmen killed eight UP policemen, who had gone to conduct a raid on his house. Turned out they had walked into a trap as Dubey was tipped off by moles in the forces itself and he stage-managed a “reverse encounter” of sorts. That senior officers ignored warnings that the gangster was being aided and abetted by people within the force is testimony to the man’s clout. The police are still clueless about his whereabouts despite Adityanath himself supervising the probe. Dubey’s life is a saga of crime fuelled by brazen political patronage by the BJP and the BSP alike. Of late, he was even trying to make his way back into the ruling BJP despite knowing Yogi’s severe intolerance for criminality and murdering senior BJP leader Santosh Shukla in cold blood inside a police station with several policemen as eye-witnesses, all of whom later turned hostile. Some in the BJP are even keen to use his services now, going against Adityanath’s zero tolerance towards organised crime and claim to put the mafia either in prison or in the house of Yamraj. So were his statistics just meant for optics? By the end of December 2019, there were 5,178 encounters in which 103 criminals were killed and 1,859 were hurt. There were reports about terrified criminals “surrendering” in order to escape encounters with the police claiming that 17,745 criminals had surrendered or cancelled their own bails to go to jail. There were much-publicised “surprise” visits by Yogi to police stations. In such a scenario, it is difficult to imagine that Dubey would get even more adventurous unless he was sure of his protection.
If the crime chart of the State is anything to go by then nothing that the cops claim to have done on the ground has made much of a difference. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) figures for 2018 released at the beginning of the year, UP tops the charts in crimes against women in the country, and offences against children, particularly girls, and the elderly have only grown. According to the report, the State topped the list with 59,445 cases, with an average of 162 being reported every day. A case of rape is registered with the UP police every two hours while crime against a child is reported every 90 minutes. Let us not forget the BJP’s own legislators booked for rape, Kuldeep Sengar and Ravindranath Tripathi, both of whom were able to buy time due to their claimed proximity to the senior leadership and their hold in local party units. For all of Yogi’s protestations, the BJP tops the State list with 37 per cent legislators having a criminal history. In the current Vidhan Sabha, 143 of the 403 legislators have “impressive” criminal antecedents. The BJP, which had won 312 seats, has 114 MLAs facing criminal cases and 83 already booked for heinous crimes. So how much hope does the State have of catching the likes of Dubey and his political masters and holding them accountable for their crimes and misdeeds? Not at a time when our elected representatives have overturned a democratic lineage for a mutually agreed upon peerage. Can the ascetic Adityanath deny that he has allowed some baggage to occupy his asset space?
