She looked bored when the question was raised by this correspondent, who met her in Gwalior Central Jail on Friday. She had just completed an interview with another correspondent. A day earlier a couple of magazine reporters had met her, and scores of applications for interviews with her are reported to be pending with the district authorities.

In the ravines no paperwallahs met me, she said, baffled by such media attention since her surrender in Bhind. Newspapermen who met her on the eve of her surrender and shortly after it hardly had a good word for her. She is reported to have told them where they got off in unprintable language.”

Referring to the terms of her surrender, he asked what facilities she had been offered and then wrote:

“Those given to the dacoits who surrendered in 1972. “She could not spell out what they were. “But they were listed on the paper I gave to the police.” She called it an “agreement”. Did she get anything in writing in response from the police or anyone? “No.” How then did it become an agreement?” She would not know. Later in reply to a question, Phoolan Devi said she had wanted the “agreement” to be signed by Mr Rajiv Gandhi.

“Why him?”

“Because he is a neta [leader].” The other leader she knew of was Mrs Gandhi. Did she know who the President was? “No idea.” Another name she mentioned was of Mr Arjun Singh.

The conversation dried up for a while. Her dialect (Bundelkhandi) sounded double-dutch to this correspondent, who spoke through an interpreter….

Eventually he concluded:

Far from being thankful to the media for having turned her into a box-office draw, Phoolan believed that press reports giving her exploits in hard detail were, to a large extent, responsible for making her life miserable. The Behmai carnage put her in the headlines two years ago. “Much of what they [newsmen] wrote about me is lies,” she said. “They wrote that I ordered my men to rape women. They associated my name with crimes committed by others.” For a moment she displayed ungovernable fury. “Yeh paper-wallon ne meri aisi-ji-taisi kar dee.” [These papermen have twisted me this way and that.] For an illiterate, she seemed highly familiar with the power of the press, and the familiarity had apparently bred contempt.

Once she was in prison, the press coverage Phoolan received was no better. In keeping with the “agreement” she was allowed to live in the male wing with members of her gang. In October 1989, more than six years later, this fact alone still caused controversy. A South Indian magazine, The Week, carried a story headed: “Phoolan Devi’s Private Sorrows”. The journalist, Ravindra Dubey, wrote under an insert headed “Sexcapades row”.

…This was probably the first instance in independent India of keeping females and males together in the same prison ward.

Most visitors, mainly newsmen, were after Phoolan. This hurt Malkhan who had surrendered earlier. Soon he found his followers moving around the two female dacoits [the other being Munni, a member of Ghanshyam’s gang]. Piqued over this, Malkhan conspired to create a rift between Phoolan and her paramour Man Singh. On July 12, 1983 Man Singh assaulted Phoolan and snatched all her money [a “domestic row”, Phoolan told me, aggravated by tension and insecurity]…. Finally jail officials brought the situation under control and Phoolan was shifted.

Phoolan then sent word to her political friends and came back to the male wing on June 30, 1983. By then she had understood Malkhan’s designs and began making overtures to the young men inn Malkhan’s gang. This resulted in an open fight between Malkhan’s and Phoolan’s gangs on June 22, 1984. The jail staff had to put the siren on. Seven dacoits and six jail officials were seriously injured. Phoolan was again shifted to the female ward.

The writer of the article concludes: “But according to informed sources, even now both the female dacoits enter the male ward during night.” Other journalists went further, speculating on what happened “during the night”. Dr Manoj Marthur, in the Bombay-based tabloid Blitz 926 March 1983) in an article headed “Phoolan Fouling Jail Peace” wrote:

…The officer are helpless and have to concede her each and every demand, including her desire to have sex.

Under the Jail Manual, male and female prisoners cannot be kept together, nor can they be in touch with each other. But Phoolan, who is known nymphomaniac and has an insatiable urge for sex, insists that she be kept with her fellow dacoits. This has put the jail officials in a quandary…

Such were the reactions o her in the Indian press. Such is the judgement of men.

What Phoolan says in her diary about the day she surrendered to the Indian government, hounded by the press, is quite simple, without any trace of the venom she had provoked in others:

“Fear had made me ill. When I was ready, they pushed our gang forward and I found myself at the head of the line. I asked what I was supposed to do and was told by an unknown officer that the Superintendent of Police would tell me what to do. I was pushed on to the stage and the S P pointed to the Chief Minister, gesturing that I should surrender my rifle to him. After that, I just did what I was supposed to do. The whole world seemed to be gathered there and I couldn’t understand why.”

Jail ACCORDING TO THE “agreement”, verbal assurances given to her at the time of her surrender, Phoolan Devi expected to be released after serving eighty years in custody. But 12 February 1991 came and went and she found herself in Gwalior Central Jail, hidden from the public eye, feeling increasingly desperate, still fighting against her extradition to Uttar Pradesh. The rest of the dacoits in the Special Unit, including Man Singh and other members of her gang, also Malkhan Singh and his men, had succumbed to the pressures and advice of the Madhya Pradesh authorities, who had finally managed to persuade them that their acceptance of a “voluntary transfer” was the only way to speed up the legal process and satisfy the civil authorities. One by one they agreed and were transported across the border to Uttar Pradesh. Phoolan Devi found herself isolated in her resistance to the move. She wrote to me during this time, expressing her despair, asking my opinion. “Even Man Singh has left,” she said. “I felt so angry, I did not even see him to say goodbye. I asked to remain in my cell.” I wrote back, giving her my opinion for what it was worth. In her reply to my letter she said:

“I am so relieved that you support my instinct. Nobody else does. Even my family have become uncertain and give me all sorts of conflicting advice, adding to my state of confusion. All know, Didi [Sister], is this: I do not trust the U P police or the government there. It would be so easy for them to get rid of me, declare me dead one day, wouldn’t it? Station-wallah Bhai Sahib (a reference to a man who runs a teashop outside Gwalior’s railway station and visits her from time to time) told me the other day that the paper-wallahs are saying I have become suicidal. I rely on you, Didi, to tell the world that if they hear Phoolan Devi has taken her own life, it will be a lie. Tell them, Didi, that I have never been a coward. I have thought of death many times; I have wanted to die many times; but my life is in the hands of Durga Mata and, whatever happens, I will not play with my own destiny.”

India has witnessed much political upheaval since Phoolan Devi surrendered in 1983. Governments have changed and been toppled. Indira Gandhi, who had negotiated with her through Rajendra Chaturvedi, died in November 1984, the victim of an assisin’s bullets fired at close range by a member of her own security guard. Her death caused chaos and bloodshed throughout the country but particularly in Delhi, where sections of the Hindu population went on the rampage, wreaking vengeance on the Sikh community of the city. I was in Delhi at the time and heard grotesque stories of retribution on a mass scale; of innocent people subjected to violence, torture and death at the hand of hysterical mobs who roamed the streets, burning people dead and alive, defying all logic, reason and authority. Members of the police force and certain politicians were accused of collaborating with the mob. Mrs Gandhi’s assassin had been a Sikh, whom she had refused to sack or shift, despite warnings from her inner circle of political advisers. She wanted to demonstrate her belief in a secular society. The British equivalent would have been to have Catholics from Northern Ireland recruited to protect Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street. History has shown that Mrs Gandhi and Mrs Thatche were not so similar after all. In relation to Phoolan Devi, Chaturvedi told me, “Mrs Gandhi had tremendous sympathy for the downtrodden, particularly for village women whose lives had been shaped and corrupted by men.”

So as not to appear sentimental in this respect, I must add that the Prime Minister was also under intense political pressure at the time. Only a month before Phoolan Devi surrendered, Girilal Jain, then editor of the Times of India, wrote a lengthy article in two parts, which appeared on the editorial page under the heading: “Mrs Gandhi’s Last Chance Search for a moral order”. He referred to her son Sanjay, who was viewed nationally as the bullyboy of Indian politics, encouraged in his ways by his mother:

…She violated two other codes when she allowed her son, Sanjay Gandhi, to get into the automobile business and do so principally on the strength of state patronage which was available to him by virtue of her being Prime Minister. More accurately, she had only acquiesced in Sanjay’s activities. For Sanjay was too wilful a young man to be too easily controlled. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that she tried to dissuade him from pursuing the Maruti project but failed. This was, however, not publicly known. Even otherwise, the people would hold her responsible for this breach of the other code the use of official machinery for private gains.

The issue was not whether it was intrinsically wrong for the ruler’s son to go into business and/or whether the kind of patronage available to him was not in fact available to many others with political clout and/or money. The issue was whether Sanjay Gandhi’s activities conformed to the people’s stereotype of the Prime Minister’s son or they violated it. Without doubt, they violated it. Members of the ruling order were not supposed to hanket after money. Two traditions the Kshatriya and the Brahmin met in Nehru just as they had met in Emperor Ashoka and Janak, Sita’s father in The Ramayana. Nehru’s daughter and grandchildren were expected to be loyal to this system’s brahminical and Kshatriya tradition. So it was bad enough that Sanjay took to big business; it was worse that he used state machinery; and it was an unmitigated disaster for Mrs Gandhi that he failed to make the car. The violation of the code is all the more reprehensible if it does not produce material success as well; crime without profit is unforgivable.

Such comments from senior editors did not assist Mrs Ghandi’s increasingly vulnerable position. She needed to create a diversion, so it would be wrong to conclude that her motives were altogether altruistic when she spoke to Chaturvedi.

Many years later, after Man Singh’s departure from Gwalior, Phoolan Devi faced further sorrow. Her relationship with her mother and brother was fractured over many domestic matters that escalated to the point where she refused to see either of them. Her sisters Rukhmini and Bhoori were her only allied. Munni, her youngest and favourite sister, shocked her by taking sides against her. Phoolan’s explanation is that Munni had fallen in love with a friend of Shiv Narain’s and therefore wanted to remain close to her brother. Moola had never made any secret of the fact that among all her children her son came first. Apparently Shiv Nraain had aggravated the situation by selling the plot of land allocated to Phoolan Devi at the time of her surrender and had bought himself a motorcycle with the proceeds.

Then, in the summer of 1989, Bhoori died in mysterious circumstances. She was discovered soaked in kerosene and severely burnt, whether by her own hand or another no one will ever be sure.