How the Leopard got his Spots
- 01 Feb - 07 Feb, 2025
Essentially from the same caste, but of a higher sub-caste, he regarded himself as far superior to the Mallahs. In addition, he had little respect for women at a personal level, although he imitated the behaviour of other bandit leaders of any repute, who had established a ritual of “showing respect to women”, at least in public. Basically, he though women were inferior beings.
I met him once, briefly, in Gwalior Central Jail and quickly formed this impression, despite the fact that, on the surface, he was extremely polite. His attitude to me had probably also been influenced by the knowledge that I was there, fundamentally, to see Phoolan Devi, for whom he still had contempt.
In 1981, he commanded the largest single gang in the valley, consisting of some seventy men, and was referred to in the press as the “Bandit King”. Rumour had it that he owned an inflatable boat which was “from abroad”. The import licence was said to be in the name of some politician whom he had supported at election time, delivering “block votes” from certain villages under his influence. The boat, which the gang was said to carry everywhere with it, enabled Malkhan to keep all his river crossings a secret, moving only by night. Although local fishermen, who ferried dacoit gangs up and down and across the rivers of the valley, rarely informed the police of their movements, they were liable to talk loosely. Village life is such that any event adds to the day’s excitement and becomes a talking point, making gangs vulnerable to informers who thrive on gossip; meeting the “Bandit King” inevitably led to a great deal of such talk, lending glamour to the storyteller.
A member of Malkhan’s gang, Sobaran Singh, a young man who worshipped his leader, suggested that they eliminate the woman who called herself Dasyu Sundari, or “Beautiful Bandit”. Malkhan had been curt with him, saying he did not kill women and besides, Phoolan Devi had done nothing against him personally or directly. However, he agreed, if someone were to get rid of her the valley would be free of the police force that now hounded them round the clock.
Malkhan’s comments circled in Sobaran Singh’s head, dominating his thoughts. One day he decided to do Malkhan a personal favour by dealing with the matter himself. Having reached this decision, e took off for Galauli, telling Malkhan he needed some time off to see his family over a domestic problem.
At Galauli, he received a warm welcome as a member of Malkhan Singh’s gang who had come to pay his respects. Phoolan Devi and Man Singh had not arrived but were expected. Instead he was introduced to two other members of her gang, Laltu and Ram Shankar, with whom he struck up a friendship. They too were waiting for Phoolan and Man Singh, and Sobaran decided that he had found the lead he was looking for. With them, he was treated as an honoured guest and, when night fell, Laltu suggested he accompany them to a neighbouring village, Sirauli, where they were staying for the sake of safety. Galauli, being Mustaqeem’s village, was well known to the police.
The next morning, Laltu informed him that Phoolan Devi and Mas Singh were expected soon and that a messenger from Galauli would bring them information when they arrived. Sobaran decided to stick close to these men, who were about to lead him to the woman he had come to kill. Once it was over, Malkhan would be grateful and admire his initiative. He was sure of that.
Unknown to him, that same afternoon of 30 March 1981, Sub-Inspector Yadav received a telephone call from one of his informers tipping him off that Phoolan Devi and Man Singh were said to be near either Galauli or Sirauli. The policeman thought it over and came to the conclusion that Galauli was too obvious; he would try Sirauli first. He got on the police radio and rounded up a commando force of fifteen highly-trained men, armed with light machine-guns and grenades. Late that afternoon, they set out in police jeeps, pulling up in the cover of high grass, not far from the village. Yadav’s informer had already told him in which of the two possible “safe” houses Phoolan Devi was likely to be. He told his men, “Cover them both and hit them together. There must be no mistakes.”
Inside one of these houses, Laltu, Ram Shankar and Sobaran had just sat down to eat, in a relaxed atmosphere of casual banter, when the door was kicked in and a hail of bullets sprayed the room. Ram Shankar apparently tried to reach for his gun but was shot through the chest. Laltu died before he had time to move and Sobaran’s body was riddled with bullets, his mouth full of food.
Sub-Inspector Yadav’s disappointment that Phoolan Devi was not among the blood-stained corpses he examined was mitigated by the fact that his men had gunned down three members of her gang and he sent out wireless messages immediately, to all concerned. Three members of “IR 40” Inter-Range 40 was the code name in UP for Phoolan Devi’s gang had been “successfully eliminated”, he said, without naming the men because he did not know who they were. He then ordered that the bodies be put on public display in the village square.
Eager to earn their stripes, the police circulated this information to the media and other government agencies. On 1 April 1981, a report appeared in the Hindustan Times, a Delhi-based newspaper, saying:
Three members of the most sought-after dacoit gang, led by nineteen-year-old bandit beauty Phoolan Devi, were killed in an encounter with police in the Jalaun district. The elusive Phoolan Devi is believed to be among those killed, but no official confirmation is so far available from Jalaun.
IN Galauli, a short distance away from Sirauli, considered to be the “twin” villages of the district, police had already mounted a massive paramilitary operation and although Phoolan, Man Singh and Baladin managed to escape, Jage and Kallu Lalla, two other members of their gang, were found and shot. Their bodies too were put on public display.
At the end of it all, the authorities had to admit that, far from eliminating Phoolan Devi, they had not even caught a glimpse of her. In fact, no one was sure whether she had been in the area at all. They had no idea how close they had come to achieving their objective.
The gangs were fragmented, splintered into small groups constantly on the run. Informers on both sides thrived. Just as the police were prepared to pay for information, gang leaders also paid handsomely to monitor police movements in the ravines. Recalling the time, Phoolan Devi comments:
“We reached the Betwa River one evening, after being on the run the whole day. We were just 20 kos away from Ghamna, the village towards which we were walking, when we received information that the police were heading the same way so we had to change direction. After many more hours of walking, we reached the jungles of Panna-Chhatarpur. We were tired and hungry and did not have a single paisa between us. If someone gave us food, we ate, but most of the time we went hungry. After a few days of this, Baladin went to visit his sister, but on his way to her village he was arrested by the police and sent to jail. Now there were only two of us left.”
Around this time, two Delhi-based journalists, Kalyan Mukherjee and Brij Raj Singh, were researching the story and later published a book entitled Malkhan: The Story of a Bandit King. They also assisted the police in negotiating the terms of Malkhan’s eventual surrender in 1982 and received the reward of seventy thousand rupees for their efforts. Referring to the time in question, they wrote:
Back in Lucknow, Vishwanath Pratap Singh [the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh at the time] remarked, “You will see the results soon.” He also said his government would give thought to a proposal of flooding the ravines; though it would not be possible to flood the entire area, he said, such a measure was possible in selected areas. While those who knew better snickered in their sleeves at the idea, Vishwanath Pratap Singh was not alone in coming out with such wild ideas: at one of the meetings the S P of Hamirpur, Vikram Singh, had suggested letting loose in the ravines leopards trained to identify bandits! Another officer proposed bringing in the Indian Air Force to strafe the bandits in the ravines a war from the skies….
The meetings went on and their minutes piled up. However, one important change had taken place: in the encounters in the daang [forest] the police had come across the sophisticated firepower of the gangs. In a meeting of March 28 at Delhi, a demand for increased firepower was made, and consequently 600 S L Rs [self-loading rifles], 150 light machine-guns, 20 mortar launchers and ammunition valued at forty lakh rupees [i.e. Rs 4,000,000] was sanctioned for the Madhya Pradesh police. Binoculas, V H F sets and vehicles were obtained from various paramilitary organizations.
In April 1981 the Madhya Pradesh government promulgated the Anti-Dacoity Ordinance, giving sweeping powers to the police to arrest harbourers and informers on mere suspicion. The ordinance allowed for seizure of property and imprisonment for a period of four months without bail and sentences of ten years for the harbourers….
The death squads of Uttar Pradesh Police had started their work in the beginning of 1980, ending the year with the claim of killing one thousand badmashes the term they use to describe bandits. The Chambal bled as a spate of police killings disfigured the countryside of UP; as human life became nothing more than numbers in a police register. The lies of the U P police became so bloated with the desire to please the Chief Minister that U P became a state caught in a Brownian motion of death. The men in khaki turned the bandit districts of the state into a forest where human beings were hunted. In a space of six months, more than seven hundred “bandits” were killed; five thousand were arrested in “encounters”. The real bandits hit back in Aliganj, Mainpuri, Pawa-Pawta, Agra, Etawah, killing innocent villagers and gunning down policemen, and an unprecedented orgy of blood engulfed the Chambal.
While in Madhya Pradesh there was still some semblance of sanity, the fake “encounters” being few, Uttar Pradesh had become a no man’s land a headless monster gone berserk. To go by police claims, one out of every five hundred adult men in the state had become a bandit.
Many years later, in 1987, I visited the village of Galauli on Phoolan’s recommendation, accompanied by her mother and brother. It was a relatively large village with a population of about 11,000 and far more urbanized than many I had been to, although still very much a “ravine village”. Approachable by road, it was primarily a Muslim stronghold that included a minority of low-caste. Hindu families. I was told there had been no history of any conflict between the two communities.
We went to what had been the home of Baba Mustaqeem. His relatives still occupied the house, the same house to which Mannu had taken Phoolan Devi in 1979 after Vikram Mallah’s death. The house, its inner courtyard and terraces seemed familiar from Mannu’s descriptions, and Muslim manners were as polite and ceremonial as he had experienced. When I spoke of Mustaqeem, I was corrected by one of the young men present who said I should refer to him as Baba Mustaqeem because he had not been an ordinary man. While we ate an elaborately cooked meal, which included mutton cooked with beetroot, quite an extraordinary nad exquisite taste, different kinds of vegetables, dal, rice and freshly roasted rotis, I tried to explain my intentions. The same driver who had accompanied me to Nagina, Lakshman Rao, was with us and was treated with the same respect. By now he had become a firm ally. Employed by the Indian Tourism Department Corporation, he was unused to such treatment from the hosts of those he drove around as part of his job. Every where we went, he was treated as an equal and, intent on helping me with my project, he disappeared after lunch nad came back with two young men, both Muslim, whom he introduced to me as “members of Baba’s gang”. I asked them if they had, in fact, been with Mustaqeem. They said they had protected his interests in the village, produced safe houses and carried messages but had never lived with him in the ravines and had never committed any crime.
They were obviously close to the family and we were ushered on to one of the upper terraces, over which a large tree hung like a canopy. We talked for hours, and then walked through the village. They showed me the place where the dead men,
to be continued...
COMMENTS