AleGuided by their chieftain, sometimes wearing a sari to represent the goddess Kali, the men would gather around an earthen pot filled with wine, their faces painted white, red or black. Armed with swords, guns and pistols provided by the great zamindars of colonial Bengal and Bihar, who reared them in secret, the gangs would end their worship by marching in the dark to commit looting. The hiss of a lizard, the roar of a bull or the sneeze of a person indicate danger. A jackal or a virgin who came across their way promised fortune.
few men, Colonial officials mourned, can be found to give evidence against great dacoits of 19th-century Bihar and Bengal, such as Sona Fakir, Madhu Chung, Jadoo Muslim, or Madhu Tauti. Former mobsters who were persuaded to turn approvers have mysteriously disappeared.
Earlier this week, the Bihar government released politician Anand Mohan from jail, who was arrested by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer G. The sentence of life imprisonment for the murder of Krishnaiah was-rewriting prison rules To allow those who murder public servants to be released earlier than other types of murderers.
The release, issued by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to aid his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) allies, shows the influence of gangsterism in Bihar politics. Linked to the state’s toxic politics of caste, and the often-brutal competition for control of government spending and resources, bahubali-literally, the strong-armed- play an almost institutional role in the struggle for power.
However, electoral politics did not make a gangster-politician. The failure – some would say by design – of colonial and then independent states to conduct effective policing of organized crime made democracy just another object to prey on.
culture of crime
Long before large-scale politics began in Bihar and its neighboring states, effective governance was in the hands of Mughal-era zamindars controlling vast estates. Even though the East India Company clashed with these feudal armies to raise revenue, Historian Hetukar Shah He writes, he came to see the zamindars as valuable allies. A colonial official said: “Although a zamindar has no legal control over his people, he has more effective control over his tenant than a large landowner in England.”
From the late 18th century, the East India Company began the establishment of the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, which was designed to maximize land revenue. The settlement broke up the complex relationship between landowners and peasants—and made it less important for landowners to perform a policing function in their communities.
dacoits of the 19th century, Historian Surajan Das writes, attracting a formidable array of matchlock-men and foot-soldiers who had lost their jobs in local official establishments, ex-soldiers of the Nawabs of Bengal, peasants in distress and even zamindars who Found himself in financial trouble.
The local police kept the dacoits well informed about their operations, colonial records show, while the warlords returned the favor by telling the authorities where they were operating. “For twenty or twenty-five rupees,” accused dacoit Srimanto Ghosh told the colonial authorities, “we could always get witnesses to say that we were with them at night.”
mobster with a cause
After the deepening of economic hardship during World War II, banditry increased throughout Bihar. Large groups of criminals—in some cases jailed M.K. In the name of Gandhi – started attacking landlords and traders. In the summer of 1942, fifty armed men appeared at a market near Patna to raid the local grain market. Freight trains were looted, while women and children helped the bandits carry the looted food.
According to Left-leaning Congress extremists Historian Vinita Damodaran, along with dacoit gangs started waging war against the colonial state. The so-called Azad Squads, a revolutionary organization formed by politician Jayaprakash Narayan, attacked police stations and treasuries in the hope of funding a full-scale rebellion.
The politicization of violence intensified in the 1970s as Maoist groups began to set up armed units to counter the power of dominant castes and landlords. large estates, Scholar Arvind Das Notably, militias had long operated to control rebellious rural labor. Killings of landlords and massacre of Dalit agricultural laborers since mid-1975 became more furiousPolice are using extra-judicial executions in an attempt to crush the Maoists.
The battle deepened in the following decades as caste began to dominate the politics of Bihar. Each group competed to ensure that its community could control spending and minimize competition from others.
Anthropologist Jeffrey Witso It is noteworthy that during the Panchayat elections held in 2001, an armed gang played an important role in the election campaign. Led by a Kalashnikov-wielding ‘Shiva’ and an accomplice armed with a hunting rifle, the gang members would drink tea in the village square and even play with children.
“I asked an old Rajput farmer why the villagers tolerated his presence hooligans Like Shiva,” wrote Witso. “The Bhumihars live there,” replied the farmer simply. The police were missing in action—and criminals took their place.
missing police
In late 1861, when the imperial authorities first raised police forces for the province of Bengal, the emphasis was on keeping costs down. The Patna division, the most populous in Bengal, employed 1,520 personnel to oversee its 1.2 million population. This meant that each individual officer was responsible for approximately 789 people. Bhagalpur, with a population of two million spread over 20,000 square kilometres, had only 532 officers and 3,740 men patrolling an average of 37 square kilometres.
royal police, Historian Peter Robb Note, “Rather than being a force to detect and reduce crime, it remained a largely symbolic representation of power and order, playing its part alongside other such instruments.”
After independence, a government survey filed In 1953, Bihar accounted for a quarter of all dacoities. However, very little was invested in the police department. data published by Bureau of Police Research and Development Let us tell you that Bihar Police is the most anemic force in the country. Even though the government has 1,42,551 personnel posts, only 83,011 posts have been filled due to budget constraints. That is, only one officer is available for policing for every 147 state residents.
state of panic
George Trevelyan, then a royal civil servant and later secretary of state, proudly recorded in 1864 The policemen in bright blue tunics, yellow pantaloons and red turbans “can be encountered at every turn of the road.” However, the force had all the coercive power of ornamental parrots. As scholar milan vaishnav Recorded in a spectacular act, organized crime has spread throughout the political system. Each caste group created its own guilds, and most parties used them to enforce their authority.
Anand Mohan had reason to feel distressed by his incarceration: UP gangster Atiq Ahmed was finally convicted of no crime in 2019, And many politician-criminals have avoided conviction in ways familiar to their 19th-century forebears.
The story of Bihar gangster Rajesh Ranjan alias “Pappu Yadav” is also instructive. Growing up in a family surrounded by a bizarre cult that performed ritual dances with snakes and human bones, Ranjan turned to small-time crime, and was once paraded around Kosi town by the police, declaring him a thief. I went. Although later Atiq Ahmed was killed earlier this monthBegan his career by using panic to grab scrap metal contracts.
From the other end of the class spectrum came seven-time MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh, popularly known as “Raja Bhaiya”. Child of a minor princely family, Singh was famously – if apocryphally – distinguished fed his victims To crocodiles
Large parts of India are ruled by criminal cartels. The Constitution, it has been remarked, functions a few kilometers from New Delhi’s borders. Lacking the capacity to enforce the law, India’s bloodthirsty police system has condemned states like Bihar to a perpetual state of criminal injustice.
The writer is National Security Editor with ThePrint. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)