The Good Girls. Sonia Faleiro
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In 2014, the party was in control of the state government, and its influence extended over the local bureaucracy and police.
Uttar Pradesh was India’s largest and most powerful state, with a population of more than 200 million people. It sent eighty members to Parliament. ‘The road to Delhi,’ it was said, ‘passes through Lucknow,’ the capital city of Uttar Pradesh. In fact, eight out of India’s fourteen prime ministers were from this politically significant state. Even India’s new prime minister, who was from Gujarat, had contested the general elections from here in 2014.
But living conditions in Uttar Pradesh reflected none of this. As many as 60 million people in the state were poor, said a World Bank report.7 The infant mortality rate was the same as in some war-torn countries. In times of drought, when crops perished, people ate grass to survive.8 Against this backdrop, one chief minister had spent taxpayers’ money on filling public parks with statues of herself.9
A state bureaucrat attempted to explain why the system was so broken: ‘If you get a cow that gives you twenty litres of milk twice a day and you know you’ll own the cow for only a short period, what will you do?’
The answer? Milk it dry.
Two years earlier, in 2012, Akhilesh Yadav had become chief minister. Educated in Australia, where he received a degree in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, the forty-one-year-old had often been photographed on his mobile phone or pecking away on his laptop. The media called him ‘tech-savvy’. This was shorthand for ‘likely to be smart’. His father, Mulayam Singh, a former mud wrestler who had founded the Samajwadi Party, didn’t think much of his son – but a senior advisor had pointed out the advantages of putting the young man forward. ‘Do any of you know who Hannah Montana is?’ he had said. ‘Ask Akhilesh. He knows. That’s why we need the young generation leading the party.’10
Akhilesh had some good ideas to improve the state – more power, better roads and a pension scheme. But his cabinet ministers were old-school thugs. The Association for Democratic Reforms, an organisation that campaigns for better governance, showed that about a third of the politicians who were elected nationwide to Parliament in 2014 had a criminal record.11 In Akhilesh’s cabinet, over half the members had pending criminal cases.12 Critics were convinced that nothing was going to change.
Soon his government, like the Yadav governments that preceded him, was also slapped with the label ‘goonda raj’: the rule of criminals.13 In the climate of fear and insecurity that subsequently developed, the phrase ‘raat gayi baat gayi’ – the night has concluded and so has the incident – circulated as often as it ever had before, meaning that victims of Yadav-led crimes might as well forget about getting justice. The reputation of this dabbang – thuggish – government tainted all Yadavs.
The Yadavs in Jati, the hamlet that adjoined Katra village, occupied the opposite end of this power spectrum. They were climate refugees who were forced out of their homes on the banks of the River Ganga when it flooded. Ganga-kateves, people called them, those whose lands the Ganga has consumed. Having lost their homes and virtually everything they owned, they lived in hovels held up with bamboo sticks. They went barefoot. Their babies were naked. On hot days they slept out in the open, by the side of the road.
But because they were Yadavs, some Katra villagers didn’t feel safe around them, especially after dark. ‘If they come with guns,’ someone said, ‘what will we do?’
One of the Jati men, Veerpal Yadav, had a fearsome reputation.
Veerpal, who was known as Veere, had moved to Jati four years earlier when his childhood home in the sandy hamlet of Badam Nagla was swept away, and with it the land on which he had grown corn, maize and taro root for five decades. He was left with a handful of watermelons salvaged from the alluvial soil of the riverbank.
Badam Nagla was not a place to be missed. It was so isolated that when a notorious bandit, who stood accused of murdering eleven policemen, needed someplace to hide this was where he took cover. There wasn’t even a drainage system. When it rained heavily, the men stepped out without trousers, carrying their clothes in polythene bags that they balanced on their heads. They slipped them on again only once they were indoors. One former resident described living in Badam Nagla as ‘living like an animal’.
Jati crouched at the mouth of Katra village, which had shops and two schools, with the closest town only twenty minutes away. And just as Katra was dominated by Shakyas, Jati, by some similar unspoken rule, was for Yadavs. Almost all the 187 families living in Jati were Yadav; some were related to Veere.
One of them was Veere’s brother.
To start with, this brother, a single man, was around constantly. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t. In next-door Katra a horrific rumour took root. Veere had shot dead his brother, people said. He had then burned the body and dug a hole in the nearby jungle to bury the remains, so he could snatch control of his brother’s property – which he did, they said, by moving in his family.
Who knew where the story came from? No one claimed responsibility and no one informed the police. No one said they had witnessed the alleged killing or even that they had spoken to someone who did. But almost everyone in Katra heard the rumour. Soon, it was a part of the frightening mythology that dogged the Yadavs next door.
They were unspeakable things, people said, who sucked the blood of even kith and kin.
6 clothes, cooking pots and even cash: dnaindia.com/india/report-mulayam-caught-bribing-voters-1238446
7 World Bank report: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/187721467995647501/pdf/105884-BRI-P157572-ADD-SERIES-India-state-briefs-PUBLIC-UttarPradesh-Proverty.pdf
8 people ate grass to survive: ndtv.com/india-news/in-drought-hit-uttar-pradesh-the-poor-are-eating-rotis-made-of-grass-1252317
9 statues of herself: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17254658
10 ‘That’s why … young generation leading the party’: caravanmagazine.in/reportage/everybodys-brother-akhilesh-yadav
11 a third of the politicians … had a criminal record: adrindia.org/content/lok-sabha-elections-2014-analysis-criminal-background-financial-education-gender-and-other
12 this figure amounted to over half: rediff.com/news/report/fifty-four-pc-of-akhilesh-yadavs-cabinet-has-a-criminal-record/20120413.htm
13 the rule of criminals: blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/03/20/samajwadi-partys-goonda-raj-appears-alive-and-well/