INDIA’S BANDIT QUEEN

  • 18 Jan - 24 Jan, 2025
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Fiction

In the months that followed, articles kept appearing in the press. A local Hindi newspaper, Jagran, of little reputation nationally, printed a letter they said they had received from Phoolan Devi. It was unsigned. The fact that anybody could have sent it didn’t seem to bother them at all. The English-language press in India, equally unscrupulous, picked it up despite uncertainty about its source and headlines began to appear: “Total War Threat by Phoolan”, “Phoolan Gives Threat”. Phoolan Devi denies being the author of the letter; however, the effect it had was to inflame communal feelings in the area. One part of it, reproduced by the Times of India, on 1 March 1981, focused on this aspect:

The letter added: “The dependants of those killed in Behmai village each have been given Rs 10,000. Were the Mallahs who wee burnt alive not human too? Thakurs have declared that they will pick up Mallahs and kill them one by one. I warn that if one Mallah is killed, a hundred Thakurs will be killed by my gang.”

As a result, caste tensions throughout Uttar Pradesh intensified and Phoolan Devi gained the reputation of being a cold-blooded, ruthless murderer. She had been tried and condemned by the press.

Those who remained in Behmai shaved their heads as a symbol of their loss; it became a village made up predominantly of women and children. The only men to escape the shooting were those who had left the village earlier that morning to escort the baraat from a neighbouring village. Apparently, an informant had rushed down the approach road and warned the wedding procession to turn back. Reports of the massacre remain confusing but, to clarify the basic facts, 22 Thakur men were shot, 20 died and two survived. Both Krishna Swarup and Dev Prayag Singh took their families and left the village soon after their recovery, fearful of further retribution after all the exposure they had received in the press.

Aftermath
MUSTAQEEM WAS LIVID. He had contributed some of his men to the raid for the ritual of revenge but had not been thee himself. He had seen press photographs o the carnage and listened to radio reports that spoke of the political reaction. From everyone’s point of view except perhaps the Singh brothers’, who had not been there Behmai was a disaster.

“Have you all gone mad?” Mustaqeem shouted, when the gangs assembled again about a week later. “Look what you’ve done. There are thousands of police pouring into this valley from all directions. No one is safe because of you!” he screamed at Phoolan Devi.

“It was not my decision, Baba. Anyway what is done is done. You should take it like a man,” she replied sullenly.

“I don’t need any advice from you, Phoolan Devi,” Mustaqeem snapped back. “I always said you would bring bad luck and you have. And you,” he yelled, turning to Man Singh, who sat in silence next to Ram Avtar and Balwan Singh. “You’ll end up like Vikram Mallah. Dead, I tell you, dead!”

“Those Thakur dogs asked for it,” ventured Ram Autar.

“And you’ve asked for police dogs to climb on our backs,” Mustaqeem retorted, furious, fully aware of the consequences they would have to face.

Balwan Singh tried to bring some calm to the situation and suggested that they split up into twos and threes. The two women, Phoolan Devi and Meera Thakur (his lover), he said should go into hiding together, finding work as labourers in some small town. Hundreds of village women did this and contractors asked few questions. The police would not be looking for them in such a setting; they would not be detected; their faces were not known to either press or police; he had seen the photofit picture of Phoolan and it looked nothing like her; Meera Thakur had never been photographed either. As he spoke, Phoolan says, she thought of Vikram Mallah’s words, “Never let anyone take your picture,” he had said when she wanted to be photographed with him in a tiny booth in Kanpur, which had advertised postcard-size pictures, in colour, for 20 rupees.

“What I do,” Balwan was saying, “is show my face in a village where I know the police have informers. I pass through the village and tell people I’m camping on the outskirts. I even pay someone to bring me food later or some gesture like that. Then I walk at least twenty kos away from there without stopping. It always confuses the police!” he said, laughing, but Mustaqeem was in no mood to laugh.

Glaring at Balwan, he said, still in a rage, ‘I’m going to meet my cousin Immamuddin and then I’ll go to Bombay. He knows people there. You can do as you want.”

“Surely Bombay will not be safe,” Man Singh said with concern. “Any place is safer than here, after what you fools have just done!” was the response.

The gangs camped there for the night under heavy guard. Mustaqeem positioned men at vantage points, high up on ravine ridges, on look out for the tellatale lights of police jeeps. The night passed without incident as Phoolan Devi prepared herself to leave the following morning with Meera Thakur. Balwan was right, Man Singh told her, it would be safer that way, at least for a few weeks. He would hide in the ravines with some of their own men and keep moving, for the sake of safety. They would not go far, he assured her, as they discussed ways in which to keep in touch. Phoolan told him to cut his hair, which made him easy to identify, but he laughed, saying, “Don’t worry, there times will pass,” They huddled close together and slept, covering themselves with a thick, coarse blanket. It was extremely cold that night in February 1981. Dreading their separation, Phoolan Devi said, “You take the blanket,” as he was falling asleep. He held her tight and replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.”

The next morning, soon after dawn, having drunk some tea made by male members of the gang and eaten two dry rotis, Phoolan Devi set off with Meera Thakur. They were both dressed in cotton saris, bought from some sympathizer in a neighbouring village. She embraced Man Singh and touched Baba Mustaqeem’s feet. It was the last time she was to see the Muslim bandit chief. She told him to see Sholay if he went to Bombay, the only film she had ever seen herself. Despite his rage of the previous day, Mustaqeem blessed the women and wished them luck. Man Singh and Balwan Singh accompanied them part of the way, in silence, leaving them where the ravines ended, to cross flat fields in order to catch a bus on the main highway, linking Kanpur to Agra.

They were to meet a sympathetic bricklayer, who would find them work on some building site in a small town. No one on the bus, or at the bus stop where they waited for more than an hour, paid them any attention.

For a week or more they worked carrying headloads of bricks, together with a score of other village women, earning eight rupees a day. At night, they would walk a minimum of two hours, in different directions each day for the sake of caution. Enough mistakes had already been made and the police presence in the area was alarmingly visible. In reality, they were quite far removed from where the Anti-Dacoity squads were operating, combing the terrain that surrounded every remote village with which, according to police files, Phoolan Devi had ever been associated.

After the women’s departure, the men also moved on with their respective gangs. Mustaqeem advised that they split into twos and threes, no more, and abandon all thoughts of any further operations for a while. They would meet again when the storm had died down. Man Singh went east, towards Rewa in Madhya Pradesh where the police were less active than they were in Uttar Pradesh.

Balwan Singh headed south with his men and entered the village of Behta, where he had reliable suppliers and informers. His plan was to buy some essentials for the men before they broke into smaller groups. By the time they reached their destination, not having eaten all day, their legs were heavy with fatigue. Their most trusted “contact”, a young man in his early twenties, welcomed them like returning heroes. Within a couple of hours he got them all they needed. His wife started cooking, as he implored them to rest awhile and eat something before moving on. The village was quiet and peaceful, with the sound of children at play in dusty alleyways.

Unknown to them, a police informer in the village had recognized Balwan Singh and another member of his gang. He had rushed to the nearest police station with the news, eager to collect his reward. As the gang sat down to eat, another informer, this time someone on their side, had rushed into the house saying that a police contingent was entering the village. Grabbing their weapons, Balwan and his men cut through the village to the safety of the surrounding ravines, firing shots at the police patrol. The police gave chase. Had Balwan held his fire, he might have escaped, but he didn’t and what followed is well recorded in Shears’ and Gidly’s book Devi:

The chase lasted all day, covering 22 miles of rugged terrain. At the Betwa River, which meets the Hamuna at Hamirpur, some of the dacoits ran into a quarry while three took up positions and waited for the policemen. As the officers came into view the bandits fired, hitting Inspector Moolchand in the leg. Another officer, Sub-Inspector Udenia, dived for cover, pulling Moolchand with him. A group of armed police approached from another direction and, seeing the two crouched behind a mound, believed them to be baghis and readied their weapons. Moolchand and Udenia threw up their hands, shouting that they were police. But the others, thinking this to be a trick, opened fire and Moolchand was hit again, this time by his own men. The dacoits, who were much closer to Moolchand and Udenia, crawled up to Moolchand, grabbed his rifle and put a bullet in his head, while Udenia fled. Realizing their terrible mistake, the armed police threw grenades at the dacoits and killed six of them, including Balwan Singh who was, in fact, dressed in a police superintendent’s uniform.

Unaware of her lover’s death, Meera Thakur told Phoolan Devi that she had had enough of carrying bricks and was going back to the ravines to rejoin Balwan. Phoolan too was missing Man Singh and found her daily routine pointless, depressing and exhausting. That Saturday, they collected their wages and left town. Before setting off in different directions, they embraced in a crowded bus station alive to the voice of vendors, flies buzzing all around them, plagued by various touts and fortune-tellers. They were not to see each other again.

In her search for Balwan, Meera Thakur met up with other members of his gang, who told her what had happened. Before she could absorb or recover from her grief, she too was shot dead in an encounter with the Uttar Pradesh police. Her death caused a minor political storm. The police, having stripped her naked, paraded her body on a handcart through the streets of a small town in Uttar Pradesh. Although she had not been at Behmai, her association with Balwan condemned her. Grotesque photographs appeared in several newspapers and prominent members of the public and a number of journalists were outraged, accusing the police of brutal obscenity. Enquiries were called for at press conferences and questions were raised in parliament. Sections of the police force, mostly senior officers, also felt in was an outrage. Mr Pathak, for instance, who was the D I G of Gwalior when I met him, said, “Why naked? Would they have done that to a man?”

At the time of Meera Thakur’s death, Phoolan Devi and Man Singh had regrouped and were operating with six other men in the gang, some of whom had been at Behmai.

“We were eight altogether,” she said later from jail. “We committed a dacoity in Bhadroli village in the Agra district but it took us months before we succeeded. Every time we approached this place, the villagers would open fire, preventing us from entering the village, so we decided on a plan to deceive them. We sent two of our members, trussed up, towards the village. The rest of us, dressed as policemen, followed them, cautioning the villagers over a loudhailer that these two men were members of Phoolan Devi’s gang who had escaped from police custody and were to be held till the jeeps arrived.

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