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HomeGround ReportsAllahabad’s descent took 3 decades. From Nehru’s legacy to Atiq’s crime capital

Allahabad’s descent took 3 decades. From Nehru’s legacy to Atiq’s crime capital

From being a retired people's haven to a crude-bomb making, gun-slinging mafia hub, West Allahabad's shift was so dramatic that the city’s identity changed.

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Prayagraj: Baba Awasthi, 65, is Prayagraj’s captivating storyteller. A Nehruvian Congressman, his freewheeling stories about the old days and ways of the city almost always get an eager crowd of listeners. On a recent morning, he sat in a city café, grinding tobacco in his palm and reminiscing an India-Pakistan cricket match and a speech by a Hindu Mahasabha leader.

That was the moment Prayagraj’s crime series started.

Around him, a bevvy of teenage men and women, hanging on to every word, gasped in disbelief and darting questions at him.

Awasthi was 16. It was the 1970s. He was returning from school when he heard snatches of Hindu Mahasabha Secretary Mahendra Kumar Sharma’s speech at Sewai Mandi. The neighbourhood’s loudspeakers resounded with his fiery speech about shifting Muslim loyalties when Imran Khan bowled. The crowd couldn’t decide what was more scintillating – his speech or the radio cricket commentary.

Nehruvian Congressman Baba Awasthi in the middle of a storytelling session | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint
Nehruvian Congressman Baba Awasthi in the middle of a storytelling session | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint

Suddenly, someone hurled a bomb, he recalled. And within a minute, another one. There was panic, and people rushed and ran about.

“That was only a noise bomb, but that was one of the incidents that marked the start of a political-criminal nexus that fuelled organised crime in Allahabad,” said Awasthi. Other elderly people at the café added their own anecdotes to the 1970s saga.

“Bombs are still made in Allahabad. Go to a few mohallas [localities], and you will find bombs in the dustbin,” said another patron at the cafe with the exaggerated cynicism of an old-timer who has seen it all.

From that bomb to gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmed’s dramatic killing two weeks ago, west Prayagraj’s streets and stories have been laced with violence among competing dons.

The criminal history of Allahabad, now Prayagraj, started with the Rajiv Gandhi era, when all the big infrastructure contracts started to pour in. It began with the illegal mining of stones at the Ganga basin peripheries and slowly entered the city with the emergence of land grabbers, gradually spreading its tentacles across the city.

At first, several Hindu gang leaders, including Maula Bukan and Jawhar Pandit, flourished in the southern part of the city. Atiq in western Allahabad in the mid-1980s epitomised the city mafiosi’s sway at its peak – robbing the rich and doling small favours to the poor, gathering Robin Hood-like mythology along the way. His crime capital groomed shooters, bomb experts and petty criminals in a region dominated by Gaddi Muslims, OBCs, Pals and Pasis.

Allahabad, earlier known for the Sangam pilgrimage, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Anand Bhavan, and Amitabh Bachchan, was by then a divided city – divided by crime, impunity and the glamour of the gun.

“The renewal of lease land contributed significantly to the emergence of the mafia. They ‘captured’ posh areas like Civil Lines where aristocratic people would live earlier. So all the money gathered through illegal mining was used here,” said Pankaj Kumar Srivastav, a political science professor at Allahabad University.

“The socio-cultural ecosystem of the city changed. If you visited Indian Coffee House, you would find aristocrats, retired judges [and] politicians. But now, if you ask anyone, they will tell you that Atiq’s son Asad would also go and sit there,” said Srivastav. They will also tell you that Asad was shot dead in a police encounter in Jhansi in April a few days before his father and uncle were assassinated in front of the police and TV cameras—a violent end to a family that climbed the city’s political and criminal ladder for decades.


Also read: Who drives Rajasthan’s raging gang wars? Young ‘foot soldiers’ in search of guns, gore, glory


From Nehru to Atiq

The shift was so dramatic that the city’s identity changed. What was once the Lok Sabha constituency of Jawaharlal Nehru and V. P. Singh, became mafia don Atiq’s election battleground in 2004.

The electoral break up of West Allahabad has set the political tone of the city—30 per cent Muslims, 15 per cent Kurmis and 15 per cent Pal OBCs. Historically, Gaddi Muslims were converts from the Yadav community, which impacted the affinity between Atiq and Samajwadi Party (SP) chieftain Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Even then, political analysts were not surprised when Atiq, a five-time MLA from Allahabad West, won the election to become Phulpur MP in 2004 on an SP ticket. By then, successive Congress leaders in the post-Nehru era had lost their grip on the constituency, having done little to improve living conditions. Crime had a stranglehold across several neighbourhoods.

Srivastava said that whenever there were Hindu-Muslim tensions, city residents would not pass through the neighbourhood of West Allahabad. It was a place to be viewed with suspicion and dread, and actively avoided.


Also read: ‘Murderer at 17, brutal mafioso’ with stint in Parliament: Atiq Ahmed, a story of crime & heartland politics


1989: When gangsters dominated elections

Sitting at the Indian Coffee House in Prayagraj’s posh Civil Lines, Awasthi called Allahabad a ‘trendsetter’. And then he joked about voting preferences.

“Localities of West Allahabad were controlled by mafias, and people would be divided on which mafia to vote for during elections,” he said.

The 1989 assembly elections changed the political fabric of West Allahabad in an almost irreversible way. It was also the first time residents here had two gangster candidates pitted against each other – Atiq and Shauk-e-Ilahi, better known as Chand Baba. Local goondas of the two ganglords would campaign door-to-door for their bosses—campaigns voters were too frightened to participate in.

There was a time when the notorious don Baba was Atiq’s mentor in crime. His writ ran in all the adjacent rural pockets too. Atiq did much of the pavement-pounding work for his guru, running around threatening people and collecting extortion money. But things changed when the boss went to jail. Atiq ran his empire with a free hand. By the time Baba was released, he saw a different Atiq.

A railway scrap tender changed Atiq’s fortunes, and he started dreaming of a career in politics.

1989 was an election like no other. It was a war of equals, but it was also a campaign dipped in betrayal and bad blood.

“Chand Baba was not ambitious till Atiq filed his nomination. Baba started creating havoc; he started throwing bombs at kotwalis or local police station headquarters,” recalled historian Heramb Chaturvedi, who taught at Allahabad University.

A retired senior UP police officer added that Atiq developed political ambitions while Baba was in jail.

“When Baba came out on bail, he warned Atiq not to contest and wanted to contest himself. That’s why differences crept in, and the two factions of Baba and Atiq were created,” Chaturvedi added.

A day before the results were announced, Baba was shot dead. The next day, voters learned that Atiq had defeated him by a huge margin. To this day, the murder case hasn’t been solved, though many in the police suspect that Atiq had a hand in his death.

Atiq became the undisputed king of West Allahabad, where politics was the handmaiden of crime. He retained the seat between 1991 and 1993 as an independent candidate and joined SP in 1996.

A ‘bambaaz’ culture is born

His rise groomed a culture of crime among the city’s youth elsewhere too.

“The culture was such that when you threw a bomb, you would become a hero overnight. There was no social media at the time, so information would be passed through word of mouth. Your name would excite locals who would gather to see you with folded hands,” added Awasthi.

What started with chakubaaz – men who roamed the streets with knives in tow– graduated to being bambaaz (bomb throwers).

In Allahabad University colleges, there was a rangbaaz culture of rowdy boys who instilled fear among students, and were always called ‘bhaiya ji’ by others. They dominated student politics for years, as showcased in movies like Haasil (2003).

Chaturvedi traces the rise in crime to the 1970s. The arrival of one ‘Raju Naxalite’ in Saidyapur was the spark in an already fraught Western Allahabad. Raju was a Naxal – hence the name—known for making bombs.

“He had to come to Allahabad to hide from the police. He taught criminals how to make crude bombs,” said the professor.

Young men with injured hands were a common sight, recalled Awasthi. They would carry crude bombs in their pockets, and often, the bombs would blast right there.

Crude bomb makers were known by the bombs they used to make, such as ‘Chippa’ and ‘Babu ji Dibba’.

“So many bombs were hurled, the police would take a week to gather the shells. They would say things like this on the streets,” Awasthi recalled. “The bambaaz started cropping up in every locality. The famous ones were Manoj Pasi and now, Guddu Muslim [Atiq’s aide]. Most were from the OBC and Muslim Gaddi communities.”

According to Chaturvedi, Bunty Guru from East Allahabad’s Daraganj threw the first bomb at Allahabad University in 1974. Chaturvedi said Bunty would throw a bomb just to create “bhaukaal” (ruckus) at the varsity.

“I was in history class when my professor stopped midway as there was a lot of noise. Then we got to know that a bomb had been hurled. It had a terrific impact as students started running,” Chaturvedi said.

The crude bomb cottage industry took off. Today, the city has a new name, but even as Prayagraj, it has yet to shed its bambaaz tag. Barely four years ago, crude bombs and raw materials were recovered from Allahabad University hostels. They make headlines regularly: ‘BJP leader escapes crude bomb attack’; ‘Crude bomb explodes near Atiq’s lawyer’s residence’. And youth continue to risk life and limb.

When actor-director-producer Tigmanshu Dhulia, who is now 55, grew up in the city, he said it was considered fit for retirement. But through these images of the afterlife oasis, he would also hear stories of bombs thrown at university campuses. His Allahabad was an intellectual hub, dominated by theatre and cinema, yet to emerge from its colonial hangover.

“Allahabad was seen as a city for retirement. There was no crime as we know now,” he insisted. “There used to be a lot of cultural and political activities. There was crime, but not as open and visible. I remember Chand Baba and Parshuram Pandey. We would hear their stories of crime,” Dhulia added. He visits his hometown once a year now, but sees no trace of theatre.


Also read: Atiq Ahmed was shipped out of UP. But this is how he ran his empire from Gujarat jail


Caste divide deepened faultlines

A rigid and resilient caste hierarchy added to the fraught situation.

“It doesn’t take very long to notice that public institutions tend to be dominated by people (mainly men) with conspicuous north Indian upper-caste surnames such as Sharma, Tripathi or Srivastava,” wrote economist John Drèze in a 2015 paper examining the dominance of upper-caste communities in key institutions.

These divisions were mirrored in residential layouts. According to social scientist and professor Badri Narayan, Dalits and OBCs mostly live on the city’s periphery in neighbourhoods such as Kasari Masari, Chakia and Rajpur.  For protection, they arm themselves with knives and swords.

In West Allahabad, the Pasis – one of UP’s largest Dalit communities – have gained a reputation for strength and revenge, he explained.  “They have always sided with the right spectrum of politics, and they would keep knives and swords handy, in case they were attacked by someone from the Muslim community.”

The death of a ganglord is followed by a scramble for power to fill the void. Currently, after Atiq, there is Bacha Pasi, an infamous gangster from West Allahabad who has also made it to the list of most wanted ganglords in UP.

Crime brought religious hostility with it, and neighbourhoods began to change. People began moving out of gang-prone, mixed-faith areas to safer ones. It was becoming unsafe for women. Middle-class parents didn’t want to raise their children in these areas. It was almost a stigma to belong to these neighbourhoods.

“When I used to live in that area. I would witness friction between the two communities on Diwali and Eid. There would be fights over loudspeakers, and the animosity increased after the murder of [lawyer] Umesh Pal,” said Archana, a professor at Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute.

Pal, whose death was allegedly orchestrated by Atiq, was a witness in the 2005 murder case of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Raju Pal. He had been murdered barely three months after defeating Atiq’s brother Ashraf to win the Allahabad (West) assembly seat.

Raju Pal, ex-MLA who was allegedly murdered by Atiq/Ashraf Ahmed | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint
Raju Pal, ex-MLA who was allegedly murdered by Atiq/Ashraf Ahmed | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint

The encounter deaths and assassinations that have played out in Prayagraj are the fallout of events that took place 18 years ago. It magnified existing faultlines and steered the city’s politics.


Also read: For gangsters of Porbandar, power is constant. It used to be guns, now its politics


‘Atiq got what he deserved’

Pooja Pal lost her husband, Raju Pal, just nine days after their wedding.

Pooja Pal, SP MLA and wife of ex-MLA Raju Pal | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint
Pooja Pal, SP MLA and wife of ex-MLA Raju Pal | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint

“Atiq Ahmed got what he deserved,” she said. Today, she is an SP MLA from Kaushambi. She recalled her husband coming home from work worried. Atiq wanted him dead; he kept “shooters” everywhere, he would tell her.

“And then he was killed. I was a nine-day-old bride,” recalled Pooja, sitting in her office in Dhoomanganj.

She’s convinced her husband was killed to end his nascent political lineage.

“The motive behind killing Raju was the assembly election. And also, the fact that Raju had no siblings and only a mother, they [thought] they could finish his politics. Little did he know that his wife would keep him alive,” said Pooja.

Theirs was an arranged marriage. “I got to know Raju and how he was after his death, through the people of his constituency and his family members. I had met him only once before marriage, ” she said.

The initials ‘RP’ are etched on her right wrist. She touches the tattoo as she speaks. “I got this tattoo made in 2011. The fight has not ended. Raju’s shooters are still out. I will get them behind bars,” said Pooja. Only then will she rest.

Prayagraj promises to be a new city now. It has taken encounter killings and assassinations for Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to proclaim “Na curfew, na danga, UP mein sab changa (No curfew, no riots, all is well in UP),” in Saharanpur this week.

On 29 April, Mukhtar Abbas Ansari, the dreaded Gazipur don, will reach Allahabad High Court for a verdict in a kidnapping and murder case.

Like the saying goes: ‘Picture Abhi Baaqi Hai.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)

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