Long shadow of Phoolan Devi’s legacy on Mirzapur
MIRZAPUR: On the banks of the Ganga in Mirzapur’s Purana Bada, a group of three Nishad men are talking about their heroes, and inevitably, one in particular. Sanket Nishad is 18 and his voice quivers with excitement. “What a time it must have been. They must have approached the villages they wanted to attack through rivers at night. A group of Mallahs against the might of the Thakurs. And a woman that led it all. Vaah,” Nishad says. His father next to him, Pratap Nishad, is calmer, less enthused by the violence. But it was a different time, he says, one which required different methods of resistance. “Koi kuch bhi kahe. There has never been another Mallah leader, someone who brought us as much justice, as much pride, as Phoolan Devi,” he says.
That Phoolan Devi is still such a subject of conversation in Mirzapur, 62 kilometres from Varanasi, is far from surprising. The woman that earned the moniker “Bandit Queen” and became one of India’s most storied figures was born in Jalaun in Bundelkhand in 1963, and as a victim of child marriage and rape ran away from home to join a band of dacoits that operated in areas around Chambal. Within her gang, by the late seventies, caste and the repulsion at a woman leader had begun to play a role, and Devi was allegedly confined and raped by upper caste gang members for three weeks in Behmai on the outskirts of Kanpur. She escaped, and after creating another gang comprised only of Mallahs descended on Behmai village, queued people up and shot dead 20 men in what came to be called the “Behmai massacre”. Two years later, Phoolan Devi surrendered. But in 1994, the Mulayam Singh Yadav government took back all the cases against her. Two years later she fought and won a Lok Sabha election on an SP ticket, completing her transformation into a mainstream OBC leader. In 1998, she lost the polls, but in 1999, came storming back to power. Her constituency? Mirzapur.
Pratap Nishad begins to talk more quietly, with sadness, as the Phoolan Devi story now finds itself meandering towards its tragic end. In 2001, Devi was shot at nine times outside her bungalow in Delhi, killing her. The man convicted of killing her, Sher Singh Rana, said he had exacted revenge on the killings of the upper caste men in Behmai. “If her life was so violent, maybe God felt that her death would be too. Make no mistake, I am not in favour of violence. But she faced so much. She was the first leader that told us we could stand up to the Thakurs. They could not stand to see that so they raped her, and eventually killed her. She created a solidarity among the Nishads,” he said.
Cut to 2022, and that Nishad solidarity that Devi helped create is now a crucial non-Yadav OBC votebank in Uttar Pradesh. Even as the Samajwadi Party attempts to tap in to anti-incumbency and break the fearsome social coalition that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had built both in 2017 and 2019, the BJP hopes that its alliance with Sanjay Nishad of the Nishad Party, fighting 16 seats in UP will prevent any break in its Nishad votebase. Mirzapur, once known for a flourishing carpet industry is a good laboratory for this churn, not only because of the Nishads, but also because of a considerable presence of Kurmi voters. Its Member of Parliament, for the past two terms, has been Anupriya Patel of the Apna Dal (Sonelal), a party that represents the caste.
On the dusty road outside the office of the Divisional Commissioner
of Vindhyanchal in Mirzapur, Rameshwar Bind shakes his head furiously. His cart that sells chapati and sabzi has no customers. He does not want to hear that Sanjay Nishad of the Nishad Party is a BJP ally. The leaders can all go to purgatory, he says in words that are unprintable. “Have these leaders seen how we live? Price rise has killed everything. From ₹300 a day, my margin has come down to ₹100 a day. People don’t have enough money to spend 15 rupees on my thali. I had to throw goods worth two thousand rupees yesterday. What do I feed my four children? I want a change in government,” Bind says.
About ten kilometres away, in Purana Bada, Satyendra Yadav and Rahul Patel, 23 and 25, have their own long lists of grievances against the BJP government. Both are unhappy with unemployment, and the lack of “bharti” (entrances). Both are unhappy with the rising prices. And both are unhappy with stray cattle. Yadav and Patel are sitting at a small dhaba by the highway owned by the former, just before a two laned dilapidated bridge across the Ganga leads into Mirzapur. Yadav’s stall is ideal for weary travellers, and both spend hours listening to their conversations. Patel says, “Do you know what most people say when they come now? How extensive the fields upon fields of mustard are. But who is to tell them that farmers have been forced to grow mustard instead of wheat because the stray cattle find the flower bitter, and don’t attack the fields as much? I have two bighas of land, and pay ₹4,000 a month to two men who spend all night chasing away the cattle.”
But angry as they both are, Yadav and Patel will vote differently when Mirzapur goes to polls on March 7. Yadav of course wants to see a Samajwadi Party government. But Patel, a Kurmi, will vote for the NDA alliance. “It is very difficult to vote outside your caste here. Anupriya Patel has become the biggest leader of Kurmis, and the community is with her,” Patel says. Yadav smiles and interrupts him. “There is still a week left. Bhakti toh chhoot gayi hai, vote bhi kabhi na kabhi toh badlega. (He has given up his faith in BJP. The vote will turn some day too.)”
It is precisely this which is the challenge for the SP-led alliance in
UP. It is not as if anti-incumbency doesn’t exist, or that there are no fractures in the BJP’s social coalition. The Samajwadi Party has tied up with Apna Dal (Kameravadi) led by Anupriya Patel’s mother and Mukesh Sahni, the Biharbased Mallah leader of the Vikassheel Insaan Party has also been campaigning in eastern Uttar Pradesh, attacking the Nishad party for nominating very few people from the caste. The key, however, is whether there is enough of a shift to overcome what are immense 2017 and 2019 leads. In both 2014 or 2019 for instance, Anupriya Patel won her Lok Sabha seats with a margin of over 200,000 votes. In 2017, the five Mirzapur seats saw four BJP and one Apna Dal win, all with margins of over 40,000 votes.
Back next to the Ganga, Pratap Nishad has an explanation, rooted in lived reality, of why the Nishad’s stick together. In UP’s landscape, the social contract between an individual and politics, or the administration is broken. Only in numbers is there any strength. “Let me put it like this. If I, a poor farmer, go to the tehsil office for some work by myself, they will send me from room to room, or kick me out. Only when I go with several people will any work get done. Only when someone from my caste is in power is that possible. The Nishads must decide together who to vote for...The first person that taught us this, was Phoolan Devi.”