Print Email to Friend| From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 09, Dated 03 Mar 2012

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MEN IN WHITE - PART ONE

The Man from the Badlands

In Ghanshyam Anuragi’s village, people are killed for the silliest of reasons. Anuragi himself narrowly escaped a bullet, running away to the district town at the age of 18

A veteran debut Anuragi piled up 2.4 lakh votes from Jalaun in the 2009 election ALSO READ Time to Rock the Vote It pays to Get your Feet dirty Meet UP: The New Bihar Vote Of Confidence: Profiles Of Young Politicians Aashti Bhartia Roli Books 192pp; Rs 195

YOU’LL NEVER hear another story like mine. No other MP could have come from the place, the background, I’ve come from,’ Ghanshyam Anuragi tells me, before answering any of my questions. I first read about Ghanshyam Anuragi, the Samajwadi Party Member of Parliament (MP) from Jalaun, Uttar Pradesh, in an Indian Express article on candidates from central Uttar Pradesh. It said Anuragi had been charged in a ‘double murder’ case in Hamirpur (although the case has now been dropped).

I went to meet Anuragi at his official house on North Avenue in Lutyens Delhi, feeling a little on the edge. ‘Hamara gaon kuch dabang type ka gaon hai (Our village is a fearless, ruthless kind of place),’ Anuragi says, when I ask him about the murder case. ‘Murder kya hai, hamarey gaon mein? (What’s a murder, in our village?)’ he asks, ‘Har roz kisi na kisi ka murder hota hai (Every day someone or other gets killed).’ For all talk about murder, Anuragi is short and soft-looking. He still seems amazed to find himself where he is, at his own house on North Avenue. ‘Zara zara si baton mein ladai jhagda ho jaata hai, hamarey gaon mein. Zara zara si baton mein, logon ki jaaney bhi gayee.’ (Over the smallest of things, people get into a fight in our village. Over the smallest of things, people have been killed).’ Land issues, stolen crops, inexplicable pride, the smallest dispute can lead to murder. The Express article, which included Anuragi, mentions other candidates from central Uttar Pradesh, former mafia, and others with all kinds of cases pending against them.

A list labelled the ‘Bad Boys of UP’ includes candidates from the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and one from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). An SP candidate from Hamirpur has 19 criminal cases against him, including a five-person shoot-out in the local market (he was later acquitted). A BSP candidate, formerly with the SP, has a total three dozen cases against him, including, shockingly, an attempted attack on Chief Minister Mayawati at a guesthouse.

There are cases involving extortion and looting. The incumbent BJP candidate, Bhanu Pratap Verma, who fought opposite Ghanshyam Anuragi from Jalaun, also has six cases booked against him, including cases of destruction of ballot papers and one for falsely framing the chief of district police for the murder of a young boy.

The constituencies of Uttar Pradesh, at the heart of the country, are the badlands of Indian politics, where outlaws assist political power, and the landscape is bleak. The Hindi movie Omkara, Vishal Bhardwaj’s masterful adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello, was based here. Omkara is the head of mafia for a local politician, a member of the state Legislative Assembly; Omkara helps his boss get elected to Parliament by trapping his opponent in an MMS sex scandal. When his boss becomes MP, Omkara replaces him in the state Assembly elections.

‘In the brutal heartland of Uttar Pradesh,’ Omkara’s publicity ran, ‘lives a Shakespearean anti-hero called Omkara…’ Central Uttar Pradesh is also part of Bundelkhand, an area comprising some of the poorest, most fallow parts of the country. (Most farmers have tiny landholdings [less than one hectare] and only 50 percent of farmed land is irrigated; gun-holding mafia divert irrigation water to their own fields. Because of the state of the law, industrialisation in the area is low. After agriculture, beedi-making is the largest source of employment in Bundelkhand.)

In Bundelkhand, droughts last for years together; animals, even people, Anuragi says, regularly die of thirst. From time to time, Bundelkhand raises demands for a new state, for separation from the rest of the country, arguing that its problems aren’t being heard in New Delhi.

Anuragi is from Kheda Sila Jit village in the Rath tehsil (block) of Hamirpur district. His parents were ordinary people, he tells me, from the Kori caste, traditionally weavers, now part of the Scheduled Caste (SC) list. His father farmed. His five brothers and sister now farm or run small shops in the village. ‘They just about earn their daily living’. Anuragi’s brothers and sisters studied up to middle school. ‘Our parents hadn’t studied, but they always wanted us to. My brothers made excuses not to go to school, that they have a headache or something or the other, but I listened to them,’ he narrates. Anuragi, the youngest child of seven, is the only one to have made it through high school and college.

When I push him, Anuragi begins to tell me how he got around to becoming an MP. At first, he’s vague; unsure what to reveal; later, as he relaxes, he tells his story animatedly.

In Kheda Sila Jit, Ghanshyam’s village, an upper caste boy raped a lower caste girl. It was a serious but not exceptional crime for the area. Everyone in the village knew that the crime had been committed and who had committed it. The head of the panchayat (village council), Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra, called a meeting to decide a punishment on the rape case. A drum was beaten through the village, calling a panchayat meeting at 10 am the next day. The council met and by noon, announced the punishment. The panchayat decided the boy who’d committed the crime would have to do four things as punishment: he’d do uthak baithak (do squats while holding ears) ten times; ganga snan (bathe in the Ganga) to cleanse himself; apologise to the girl’s family; and finally, they said, ‘usko muh kala karke gaon ghumaya jaye,’ Anuragi finishes — he’d have to blacken his face with soot and parade around the village to show his guilt. It was a comprehensive but, again, not exceptional punishment. It established the boy’s guilt, but didn’t penalise him in any other way. Before the meeting, the family whose son had committed the crime had said they’d abide by whatever decision the panchayat took. But, once the panchayat announced its decision, the family said their son wouldn’t do any of the above; they refused to recognise the punishment.

The panchayat then decreed that if the punishment was not respected, no lower caste person would go to any upper caste family’s house to work — in protest. The village came to a standstill. After a few days, the Pradhan Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra, Anuragi narrates, called another meeting of the village council. At that meeting, the panchayat decided to ostracise the family of the boy who’d committed the crime. The panchayat deemed the family ‘untouchable’: no one would drink water from their well or eat at their house; anyone who entered their house would have to bathe as soon as they came out.

The case began in 1984 when Anuragi was a young boy, just 12 years old.

Anuragi stops now, reluctant to dig up his story, but I beg him to continue. He was walking to the railway tracks one day, when he saw someone shoot at the Pradhan. He ran to the police station shouting, ‘Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra ko goli lagi (Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra has been shot).’ ‘Police bhagat aayi (the police came running),’ Anuragi remembers, lapsing into UP dialect.

The men who’d tried to shoot the Pradhan scattered; Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra was saved. The family who’d sent the shooters to kill him pulled Ghanshyam in for questioning. They roughed him up, asking why he’d interfered and why he’d called the police. Anuragi said he had had no idea what was happening and managed to get off.

Soon after, Basir Mussalman, a close associate of the Gram Pradhan who’d lived with him, was killed. Later, over the course of two years, two other people, Ramprasad Ahlwan, an untouchable, and Gulab, a Rajput, were shot at and killed. Both were associates, supporters, of the Gram Pradhan.

Local loyalist Mulayam Singh Yadav supported him even after he lost the 2004 Lok Sabha election

‘Finally, they killed Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra,’ Ghyanshyam says. ‘Main maukey pey tha’ He happened to be around at the time of the shooting, bathing outside, and witnessed the murder. ‘About 80 people were present in the area. Many shots were fired. In the end, they dragged the body away.’ There were close to a hundred people standing around when Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra was shot, but no one was willing to testify in the murder case. No one wanted to challenge the family that had shot him. Anuragi, about 15 years old by then, went home and mentioned to his father that he had witnessed the murder.

His father said that in that case, Anuragi should testify. ‘So I testified,’ Anuragi recalls nonchalantly. They were lower caste and the sarpanch had been trying to deal justly with a crime against a lower caste family, so his father felt they must support the case.

The four murders happened separately, over a few years. Anuragi was present when two of the victims — Basir Mussalman and Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra — were shot, so he became the only witness for both the murders. However, no one was willing to testify in the other two murders; the family had turned all witnesses hostile. Anuragi decided to testify for the other two cases as well.

‘Such dabang people had killed them,’ Anuragi tells me, mulling over the case now, ‘and no one was willing to testify in their trials. So I became a witness for all these murders.’

‘Why were all these people killed?’ I ask Anuragi, at some point, re-tracking, trying to make sense of the killings.

‘I don’t know why, in my area, people are killed for the smallest things,’ Anuragi ponders slowly; he has no explanation for the murders, ‘They had raped an untouchable woman and he, the Sarpanch, and some people, had gone against them, so they killed him. They killed a good man.’ The family behind the murders tried everything to make Anuragi withdraw his testimony. At some point, they accused Anuragi in another murder case (the charges the Express article mentioned). ‘Usmey mujhe bhi farji bana diya, mujhe bhi fasa diya. (They accused me, got me stuck also). I haven’t slapped anyone to date,’ he insists.

Anuragi went to jail, then got released on bail. He was adamant about appearing in court. ‘I didn’t care about the charges. At the time, I didn’t have it in my head that I’d become MP.’ That case got buried eventually, Anuragi tells me; other people testified he wasn’t there and the case was dropped.

Then they tried to shoot Anuragi.

The court hearing was in 15 days and he wasn’t withdrawing his testimony. ‘The man standing behind me died. Half my body was paralysed; I would have died, but I recovered.’

Family bedrock Anuragi’s wife is a professor at Hamirpur College

Ghyanshyam was 18 when he got shot, in 1990, six years since the first shootings. He lay in the district hospital, recovering, for a month. ‘Still, I testified. I even testified against the man who shot at me. He got life imprisonment. The man who I testified against for the Basir murder, he too got life imprisonment.’ Another accused in the four murders, those of Basir Mussalman, Ahlwan, Gulab, and Pandit Bharatkumar Mishra, also got sentenced for life; some of the accused went free. After he recovered, Anuragi moved away from the village to the district capital, Hamirpur town. ‘I couldn’t live in the village,’ Anuragi says, ‘they would’ve killed me had I stayed there. I couldn’t fight them. I could only testify against them.’

Power was on their side, political power (the then MLA was from the same community as the family who had perpetrated the murders and was a friend of theirs) and, therefore, the police.

Anuragi completed an MA in Hamirpur. Later, he also got a Law degree from Bundelkhand University.

THE GRAM Pradhan or sarpanch election in Kheda Sila came in 1995 and the seat was reserved for SC/ST candidates. By then, the murder case had wrapped up. Anuragi was still living in the district town. ‘People came to me and said,’ Anuragi recalls, ‘you fight the election.’ ‘Us samay key sarpanch hamsay ranjis mantey the (the Sarpanch at the time considered me an enemy),’ Anuragi shares, ‘I said, who’ll vote for me?’ Up till then, in Kheda Sila Jit, the sarpanch had always been from one community; the same caste had always won elections. ‘Usi samaj key neta hotey the (politicians were from that community, only).’ That was how it was and it went unchallenged. The Kheda Sila seat had been reserved for SC/ST candidates, but the old sarpanch was backing his own proxy candidate.

‘They [the village people] said, you don’t come to the village. Just file your nomination papers, we’ll make you win. I filed my nomination papers and left immediately. Next, I went to the village the day votes were polled. The day of voting, I stayed in the village. Then, I came running back to Hamirpur.’ By then, Anuragi feared for his life.

‘When the counting happened, I won. All castes voted for me. I got 1,400 votes and the total votes polled in the village were 1,900.’ Anuragi was 23 when he became sarpanch.

In Kheda Sila Jit, Scheduled Caste reservation and the upheaval in political status quo it brought made room for new, unexpected alignments.

‘People felt I had supported them in a time of weakness,’ Anuragi says, remembering how the village elected him. ‘They said he’s such a small boy but he’s not intimidated by them. Marney ke baad bhi usney logo ka saath diya (he supported people even after their death).’ They said, ‘risk liya usney (he took a risk).’ ‘Woh Zila ka sabsey charchit case tha jismey main gawah bana. (That was one of the most discussed case in the district)’, Anuragi explains.

Four people from different communities, including the head of the village council, had been flagrantly killed. Over six years, no one else had dared to testify in the cases. Everyone in the district had come to hear of Anuragi, the young boy who had had the guts to be a witness in the controversial murders.

***

IF SOMETHING happens to someone and no one is with them, and they’re feeling threatened, and, at that time, you support them, people talk about it,’ Anuragi narrates. It has been, perhaps, his biggest learning in politics. ‘They say, he supported us, gave us courage against people in power. This man who’s from a small family, he’s giving us strength.’

Tending business The MP likes to involve himself in daily activities

During his term as sarpanch, Anuragi also become a local caste leader for his Kori caste. He’d speak at caste meetings, spread awareness amongst his community on the importance of children’s education, on girls’ education, on putting an end to dowry and other such social subjects. A retired DIG Brigadier Muk Chand, then a member of the state legislative council and of the same Kori community, came to know Anuragi through the caste meetings and introduced him to ‘Netaji’ (Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party), Anuragi narrates. Mulayam Singh made Anuragi Area President of the Samajwadi Party. He began organising initiatives for the party. Anuragi fought the Zila Panchayat (District Council) election from the SP and won. Next, he fought the election for Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh (District Council President), the biggest post in the District, and won. ‘All the Central government schemes go through the Zila Panchayat,’ Anuragi explains, ‘and are headed by the Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh.’ Then, when the 2004 Lok Sabha election came, ‘Netaji (Mulayam Singh Yadav) said, you fight the election. I said, the Lok Sabha election is very big. He said, no, you fight it.’ Jalaun, the reserved seat Anuragi was asked to fight from, was an entirely new district, 100 kilometres from Hamirpur where he lived.

In his first election, Anuragi managed to get 1.68 lakh votes, but the two-time incumbent from the BJP, Bhanu Pratap Verma, won by 26,800 votes. When Ghanshyam went to meet Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mulayam Singh was unwavering. “He said, ‘You should work hard and win the election next time’,” Ghyanshyam narrates. ‘So I said, sir, I’ll stay there only.’

Anuragi took a house on rent in Jalaun.

Over the five years he was out of power, Ghanshyam lived in Jalaun, going from village to village, to public events, marriages, cremations, invited or uninvited. If he found about an event at someone’s guest house, Anuragi tells me, he’d turn up there.

‘I went to the post-mortem house regularly. If there’s a road accident, or someone kills themselves, or someone dies, or someone’s wife dies, at that time, people need support. Sometimes the doctor causes delay, sometimes you need help to move the body, sometimes there’s no wood to even cremate the body.’

Anuragi would liaise with doctors and the administration to provide support to the distraught and confused families at the post-mortem house. ‘I would also go to the hospital every single day.’ He’d talk to the patients and to the doctors. Someone would complain she wasn’t being given medicines, or that he wasn’t put on the drip and had high fever, or that no doctor had come to see him. Anuragi would stand around, talk to the doctor, make sure the patient was taken care of.

A band of people usually followed him about. ‘Mujhe pone-do lakh vote miley the, log jantey the ki mere chahney wale the (I had gotten about a lakh and a half votes, so people knew me and I had supporters),’ he says. He had been the SP candidate with the second highest number of votes; he had influence with the administration and the doctors. He would also go to the police station almost every day, to find out if anyone needed support with a case. The police often trapped an innocent man, beat someone up. Other times, someone would get raped, someone killed, and the police would refuse to file an FIR.

Voice ringer Anuragi created a flurry in Parliament with a speech on Rahul’s UP yatra

Some crime happens every day, Anuragi says offhandedly, and the police often refuses to file an FIR. ‘FIR kya? Police kya?’ he recounts, indignant. ‘Police key thaney mein anyay hota hai! (What’s an FIR? What’s the police? Crimes are committed in the police station itself!)’ Anuragi would arrive at the police station, with his band of supporters, put pressure on the police to file an FIR. He’d liaison for families there and follow up on cases. Anuragi did regular rounds of the postmortem house, the hospital, and the police station, the nodes of local power and vulnerability, for five years, till the next election.

Meanwhile, he collected donations (a sack of wheat, plates, a cupboard) and organised weddings for 150 couples who were too poor to get married themselves. He also supported Bundelkhand University students in a protest. ‘Main charchey mein rahta tha (I made sure I was involved in local discussions),’ Anuragi adds. He’d give quotes to the papers and bytes to local channels on every local debate. After a full five years in Jalaun, in the 2009 election, Anuragi managed to beat the three-time BJP MP Bhanu Pratap Verma by a wafer margin of 7,600 votes. It was a huge win for Anuragi. His first election he’d gotten 1.7 lakh votes, this time he’d gotten 2.4 lakh votes. But when he hadn’t contested in Jalaun, he tells me, the Samajwadi Party had gotten only 69,000 votes.

***

ANURAGI LOOKS back on his political career with satisfaction. ‘I’ve come from the lowest political rung, the village panchayat, to the highest, Parliament. I’ve crossed every level and come. I’ve learnt how development can be done at every level. How you fight a fight.’ He talks about schools he’s gotten built as a Gram Pradhan, under state government schemes, and since becoming an MP, about railway lines he’s gotten sanctioned, about water issues, and a gutsy speech on the drought in Bundelkhand he gave in Parliament last year.

Anuragi describes the SP party’s core issues as farmers’ debt, education for girl children and employment. I ask about the constant jumping back and forth of candidates between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh and Anuragi laughs, ‘Kabhi logo ko lagta hai ki yeh party kharaab hai, toh bhago. Kabhi lagta hai ki is party mein burey din aa rahe hai, toh bhag niklo (Sometimes, people feel this party is bad, so they run. Sometimes, they feel bad days are ahead for this party, so get out of it.)’

Recently, the Samajwadi Party has been undergoing some turmoil in its top leadership, with the exit of Amar Singh and the entry (and also exit) of Kalyan Singh.

Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam Singh’s son, 38 years old and MP from Kannauj, is the supposed heir to the Samajwadi Party. Akhilesh has been appointed Uttar Pradesh president of the Samajwadi Party, but he’s yet to acquire an identity of his own. But Anuragi, predictably, showers praises on him. ‘He’s very knowledgeable, very easy to get along with. Everybody in the party is eager to meet him.’

I ask Anuragi what he thinks of Rahul Gandhi, the supposed heir to the Congress party; I mention his organisation building in the Youth Congress, his Youth Congress membership drives in Uttar Pradesh, and his effort to give tickets to new, grassroots candidates. ‘Itni tezi nahi dikhayi de rahi unmey (I don’t see that sharpness in him),’ Anuragi insists.

He asks bemusedly, ‘What issues has he (Rahul Gandhi) taken up? Sometimes, he’s going to a university, saying “hello, hi.” Sometimes he’s at this one’s house, he’s eating their food, he’s drinking their water; he’s here, he’s there. Are these issues?’ Anuragi asks chuckling, ‘Okay, you tell me. Talking about farmers, is that considered work?’

In the 2010 spring session of Parliament, Anuragi recounts, he gave a speech on Rahul Gandhi’s Bundelkhand yatra (march). Rahul Gandhi said he’d do something for Bundelkhand, but he came, travelled extensively in Bundelkhand, ate and drank our water there, but ultimately did nothing, Anuragi said in his speech, he has not even returned to us the food and water that he and his 50,000 followers consumed in Bundelkhand. ‘Is Rahul Gandhi a liar?’ Anuragi asked sensationally in Parliament.

Rahul, Congress President Sonia Gandhi, and the prime minister were present in the House, he says. Sonia got up and asked him to apologise. You’re using unconstitutional language, she said; as Ghanshyam narrates this episode now, he marvels over the flurry he’d caused. Meanwhile, Mulayam Singh and the SP started protests outside Parliament over the ineffectiveness of the relief package. (Championed by Rahul Gandhi, a Rs 7,500 crore Drought Relief Package to Bundelkhand was announced by the Congress party in November 2009 for the year 2009-10; but it was reported in 2010 that, at most, only 9 percent of the Central funds allotted had been utilised. The Congress blamed the BSP state government for not making use of the funds, while state parties blamed the Congress central government for not deploying the funds properly.)

***

ANURAGI’S FAMILY now lives in Hamirpur town, he tells me, an hour’s drive from Jalaun. His wife also fought elections once and was elected to the district council, but she’s now a professor in Hamirpur college. His young son is in school in Hamirpur and his daughter is a boarder at the Navodyaya Vidyalaya, the government school for gifted children. Anuragi’s private secretary, a former neighbour, now travels with him everywhere.

Even today, Anuragi tells me, he tries to keep himself in the news. He gets involved in everything. He visits everyone. He still turns up at weddings uninvited and goes to the hospital and the police station. ‘If I want to start a cleaning drive, I pick up the broom and start cleaning myself. I come from nowhere, so it doesn’t bother me to do these kind of things.’

Anuragi’s journey is, without a doubt, unique. He is the only young MP I met to have started at the village panchayat, the first rung of Indian elections, and made his way to Parliament. Others — Meenakshi Natarajan, Ashok Tanwar — had started out in the Student Congress, made it to the Youth Congress, but they’d eventually been picked up by Rahul Gandhi to fight directly for Lok Sabha elections. Anuragi is the only one to really know life in a village first-hand. The others, even those who’d grown up in rural areas, had lived most of their adult lives in cities. Anuragi has experienced first-hand how government, law, and administration pans out in rural areas. He speaks openly of the whimsical and brutal way the police works in the districts, about the carelessness of government hospitals. Most MPs address their constituencies in large meetings and, sometimes, briefly, in smaller groups. Anuragi is the only one who seems, over the years, to have met and collected his voters almost one by one. As soon as I’d first sat down with him, Ghanshyam Anuragi had told me I wouldn’t find any other MP with a story like his.

I thought he was just being melodramatic, but his claim holds true. Anuragi’s story turns out not only stranger than that of other MPs I meet, but stranger still than fiction.

Men In White - 1/4 The first of a four-part series on young politicians, extracted from Aashti Bhartia’s upcoming book | Next Week: Jyotiraditya Scindia