UP Tragedy: More Than One CM In The Family, None For The State

After the shocking events of 2 June at Mathura’s Jawahar Bagh that claimed 29 lives, including that of Superintendent of Police Mukul Dwivedi and Station Officer Santosh Yadav, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav tweeted:

With this tweet, and by ordering an inquiry by Allahabad High Court’s retired judge Justice Murtuza Husain, he was done with the tragic episode.

To recap, on 2 June a contingent of UP Police had gone in Mathura’s Jawahar Bagh on an anti-encroachment drive. The park had been illegally occupied by the Azad Bharat Vidhik Vaicharik Kranti Satyagrahi, a religious cult. Members of the cult fought back with lethal weapons, leading to deaths of civilians and police officers.

The BJP has alleged that the police were restrained and told not to use full force under the orders of senior minister Shivpal Yadav, who is also CM Akhilesh Yadav’s uncle.

Shivpal Yadav, meanwhile, has already given himself and other party leaders a clean chit. Ambika Chaudhary, who had been dropped from the cabinet earlier, was resurrected to defend Shivpal and deflect the blame on to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh for letting ‘Naxalites’ flourish in Delhi’s backyard.

Incidentally, before being dropped by Akhilesh in December 2015, Chaudhary was the state’s revenue minister. Would it not be logical to ask him about his own role as minister and his reasons for not seeking revenue records to check whether the 280 acres of land belonged to the squatters, led by Ram Vriksh Yadav, or to the government?

Did he get to see the application for granting a 99-year lease to the squatters or was this step bypassed? No questions have been put to him, even as all revenue records related to the land are said to have been lost. Missing documents appear to be the least of the government’s concern. When one (or some) of its senior leaders has an interest in the property, original documents are bound to go missing.

This loss of crucial documents may be a part of a bigger Jawahar Bagh conspiracy and may resurface in the Samajwadi Party’s next possible regime, with ownership rights being vested with some of the party’s bigwigs. Don’t be surprised if that happens. The way revenue records of some prime properties in Lucknow have been fudged is proof that when a government decides to play crooked, there is nothing that can stop it.

Whatever actions the government may have taken, its steps are being seen as merely an eyewash aimed at protecting SP stalwarts. It can neither shrug off its responsibility nor deny the role of someone in the party, or the government, in grabbing government land.

Transfer of district officials is a routine exercise. So is the pinning of responsibility on junior officers. Bureaucracy, being a spineless creature, often plays along with the wishes of scheming politicians. Some of the lower rank babus are understandably worried about their jobs when they obey illegal orders, but those at the top have acquired an expertise at whitewashing their masters’ sins.

This is what happened in the case of Jawahar Bagh, leading to an avoidable tragedy.

A judicial inquiry is generally farcical as only government-friendly judges are tasked to probe the events. Nothing proves it more than the inquiry into the Muzaffarnagar riots. The probe found that a local intelligence officer and one senior superintendent of police had goofed up big time, leading to the worst riot in the state’s recent history. Not a word of censure against the then Principal Secretary (Home), the District Magistrate, and Senior Superintendent of Police of Shamli (where the riots were as violent as in Muzaffarnagar) who were kept in loop with the developments.

In the case of Jawahar Bagh, there were reports that the former DM of Mathura, Rajesh Kumar, had written a letter to the Principal Secretary (Home), Debashish Panda, requesting reinforcements before undertaking the eviction drive.

The DM had reportedly asked for 12 additional companies of Provincial Armed Constabulary, five companies of Rapid Action Force (RAF) and five companies of women RAF, besides 1,800 constables, women constables, fire tenders, ambulances, cranes and videographers vide his letter in February this year. The local intelligence officer had also alerted his superiors, time and again.

It is unbelievable that the Subhash Sena members occupied government land and that nobody at state headquarters was ever informed by the local administration about the trouble in making. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the local officials must have turned a blind eye, only under pressure from Lucknow because of the Etawah connection between the cult and the ruling party. (This cult was born out of another, whose leader had held a notorious public meeting in Kanpur in 1975 where he proclaimed himself to be Subhas Chandra Bose. The public had chased him away).

Nobody in the State Intelligence Department was alert enough to connect the dots.

To say that the Union Home Ministry failed to take action against the “Naxalites” assembled at Jawahar Bagh, with a pile of arms, is ridiculous because the state police has been known to arrest innocents in the Naxal-infested region of Sonebhadra. What stopped them from arresting the “armed Naxals” in Mathura?

A CBI probe could have unraveled the whodunit mystery but the government is fighting shy of roping in the agency. One would be inclined to say that its reluctance to do so proves its guilt. It has a habit of avoiding a CBI inquiry unless compelled to, as had happened in the case of Yadav Singh (notorios engineer-in-chief of Noida Authority, Greater Noida Authority and Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority) .

Be it Dadua, the dreaded dacoit of Bundelkhand or Nirbhay Gujjar, the terror of Chambal, Samajwadi Party leaders are known to have had a soft corner for the outlaws. Gujjar, in fact, was eliminated when he became too embarrassing to the SP leaders as he openly claimed his proximity with them. He once described Mulayam as his “guru”, prompting the party chief to describe it as name-dropping by the bandit.

With the government in denial, an evocative tweet by a serving police officer sums up the mood in the force. In his tweet, he requested Mathura’s slain SP Mukul Dwivedi not to take birth in India again.

Instead of India, Uttar Pradesh would have been more appropriate.