Politic-Economic-Society-Tech

Deadly karma

Bandit leader, folk heroine, and latterly MP, Phoolan Devi’s assassination brought India to a halt. But for a woman with many enemies, her violent end seemed inevitable, reports Ian MacKinnon from New Delhi 

A woman who achieved world-wide notoriety from the barrel of a gun yesterday met her end in the same unseemly fashion. India’s infamous "Bandit Queen" was shot dead in a hail of gunfire outside her official residence in the capital, New Delhi. 

For Phoolan Devi, just 36, her death in a pool of blood outside the elegant Lutyens-designed bungalow had a strange, circular quality about it. The film of her life had shown how, as a teenager in the 1980s, she had ordered the massacre of 22 men in revenge for her gang rape. 

The callous act had set the illiterate girl from a poor family on course for a tumultuous life that saw her become ruthless bandit, folk heroine, prisoner and finally an MP, where she fought in a quieter way for the down-trodden. Thousands of low-caste Hindus revered Devi as a goddess who would rescue them from caste discrimination. But to many upper-caste Hindus, Devi was a ruthless killer who had despatched more than a score of upper-caste men. 

It’s an unlikely tale that could really only happen in India. But in a country of a billion people she is not alone. Her male counterpart in the south of India, Koose Maniswamy Veerappan, is still at large and taunting the authorities, most recently with his kidnapping of the film star, Rajkumar, last year. 

Yesterday Devi’s leading role in plots that seem to owe more to Bollywood than real life, ended abruptly. In and out of Indian Parliament as an MP over the past five years, Devi was hit three times in the head, when the trio of masked men opened fire as she stepped out of her car. 

The illiterate woman, whose party represented low-caste Hindus in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was dead on arrival at hospital. A bodyguard assigned to her was also wounded in the attack. 

Last night police had cordoned off the area outside her residence less than a mile from parliament, as her colleagues in the Samajwadi Party accused the government of a security failure. One even hinted at a political conspiracy by Uttar Pradesh’s ruling party. 

Devi came to prominence in the early 1980s when she led a gang of bandits in the ravines of the Chambal Valley, near Kanpur, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. For more than three years she evaded police and caused headaches for inept and corrupt local politicians, as she and her band roamed the countryside on horseback robbing travellers apparently at will. 

In that time the woman who became a local heroine was accused of 48 major crimes, including 22 murders, looting and kidnapping for ransom. She allegedly carried out the murders of men from the land-owning Thakur caste in 1981 in a massacre in revenge for being gang-raped, beating and sexual molestation. 

Devi always denied the charges. When she finally gave herself up to police in 1983, she did so on her own terms - the most important being that she would not be hanged and serve only a maximum of eight years in jail. 

She was able to call such tough terms because even then the police had no idea what she looked like. She was eventually released in February 1994, though she was never tried or convicted during her eleven-year imprisonment. 

Not long after she found herself at the centre of controversy again over the film of her life Bandit Queen. To her dismay the film, whose screenplay was written by the Booker-prize winning novelist, Arundhati Roy (later the author of The God of Small Things), told how she had fallen into her life of crime because she had been molested and raped by the Thakur men. 

Devi always maintained that she had ended up as a bandit - a dacoit as they are known in India - initially because of mistreatment by her own family, which had been impoverished when their land had been stolen by an uncle and cousin. When Devi fought back, her uncle had arranged her kidnapping, which was how she came to be leader of her own gang. 

Devi, born in the Jalaun district of Uttar Pradesh, had terrorised her upper-caste oppressors, but had redistributed her ill-gotten gains among the poor in Robin Hood-type fashion. It’s a version the Indian government refutes as bunkum. 

None the less, the internationally acclaimed film conveniently ignored Devi’s version of events, instead following the tale laid down in the biography of the same name by the author Mala Sen. She later admitted she had only talked to Devi once, briefly in court. Directed by Shekhar Kapur, who later won an Oscar for Elizabeth, the film chose to go with the more alluring story told in the biography of revenge by a low-caste Hindu seeking to right the wrongs perpetrated against her by high-caste men. 

Devi, ironically backed to the hilt by Roy even though she had penned the script, contested what she said was a distortion of her life in the Delhi High Court, though she never won any satisfaction. 

The row also sparked a long-running rift in print between the combative Roy and Channel Four’s Indian commissioning editor, Farookh Dhondy. He accused Kapur and others of ignoring inconvenient truths in pursuit of a good story that ultimately distorted the facts. Kapur, in response, said he had no need to talk with Devi as it would interfere with the artistic integrity of his movie. 

However, the 1995 film was what brought her international fame. Veerappan, that other bandit who has stalked the jungles of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka for more than two decades, has often fancied emulating Devi in celluloid. The man who was latterly dubbed the Bandit King, as the mirror image of Devi, is every bit as cunning and ruthless as Devi once was. 

In his time he and his dwindling band of sandalwood smugglers and ivory poachers have decimated the forests and wildlife, murdering villagers, forest rangers and police who got in his way. Like Devi he, too, desires to portray himself as some kind of hero among poor villagers, who keep his whereabouts secret out fear or respect. 

Veerappan, 57, is able to roam the jungle almost at will. Security chiefs even once consulted the Indian Space Research Organisation to find out whether he could be tracked by satellite imaging, though were told it was not possible. Their inability has allowed him to kill 32 policemen, 10 forest wardens and 77 villagers. Many of the hapless peasants were mutilated or beheaded on suspicion they were informers, a stark message to any who might think to give his position away. It is a fear that has allowed him and his band of brigands to expand their trade, killing a reputed 2,000 elephants. 

Yet despite Veerappan’s ruthless tactics - five villagers paid with their lives merely for aiding the arrest of the bandit’s wife, Muthulakshmi - in the eyes of many low-caste Indians he is also seen as a Robin Hood figure. He distributed some of the proceeds from his lucrative smuggling exploits, even helping some impoverished villages build temples. It is a role he clearly cherishes, seeing himself as the lead in a romantic struggle. 

It is that attraction to glamour and the implausible that seems to have led him to kidnap south India’s biggest film star, 72-year-old Rajkumar, last year. Rajkumar was finally released after 108 days, but only after India’s hi-tech city Bangalore had been beset by days of rioting by outraged fans. 

Two years earlier during an another kidnapping Veerappan - he of the luxuriant handle-bar moustache - had at one time demanded as part of the ransom that a film be made of his life. The parallels between his aspirations and that of Devi were not hard to spot. 

After all, it was through the fame she achieved from the film Bandit Queen that she was elected an MP in 1996 for the Uttar Pradesh seat of Mirzapur. She lost it in the general election two years later, but in 1999 regained her position and had been working away quietly representing low-caste Hindus. 

Asked once by an internet news reporter what she missed most about her life as an outlaw, Devi replied, "The power and authority". The image lodged in public consciousness is of Phoolan Devi in combat gear standing before a roaring crowd of thousands of supporters after she gave up her arms. Then she married a businessman and seemed to turn into a demure housewife who wore brightly coloured saris, bangles and nail varnish. 

Despite being seen as a militant symbol of women’s rights, she fought to block a controversial bill seeking to reserve one-third of the seats in parliament and state assemblies for women. 

Devi had been in parliament yesterday morning before she went home in the early afternoon where the three masked men were lying in wait. One of the gunmen was hit in the shooting and hospitals around the capital were put on alert last night. 

A stream of politicians arrived at the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in the Indian capital as news of her killing spread. Television news networks showed images of relatives weeping over her body, of which only the disfigured and bloodied head was visible. 

There were no immediate clues as to the motive for the killing, though clearly her earlier career as a bandit had won her many enemies. Perhaps it is ironic that the death of the former villain and alleged murderer led to the suspension of parliament as a mark of respect when word of her death filtered back to shocked MPs in the house. 

source:  The Scotsman Online, July 27, 2001