Led by their Sirdar, sometimes dressed in a sari to represent the Goddess Kali, the men would assemble around a clay pot filled with liquor, their faces painted white, red or black. Armed with swords, muskets and pistols, provided by the great Zamindars of colonial Bengal and Bihar who had secretly raised them, the gangs would end their worship by marching out into the darkness to pillage. The hiss of a lizard, the bellowing of a bull, or a man sneezing signified danger. A jackal or a virgin girl crossing their path promised fortune.
Few men, colonial officials lamented, could be found to give evidence against the great 19th-century dacoits of Bihar and Bengal, like Sona Faqueer, Madhoo Chung, Jadoo Musulman, or Madhu Tautee. Former dacoits who were persuaded to turn approver then mysteriously disappeared.
Earlier this week, the Bihar government released politician Anand Mohan, who was sentenced to life for the murder of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer G. Krishnaiah, from prison—rewriting jail rules to allow those guilty of killing public servants to be released earlier than other kinds of murderers.
The release, engineered by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to aid his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) allies, illustrates the influence of gangsterism in Bihar politics. Entwined with the state’s toxic politics of caste, and the often-brutal competition for control of government spending and resources, the baahubali—literally, strong-armed—occupies an almost institutional role in the struggle for power.
Electoral politics didn’t create the gangster-politician, though. The failure—some would say by design—of the colonial and then independent states to conduct effective policing of organised crime made democracy just one more object for it to prey.
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A culture of crime
Long before mass politics began to reshape Bihar and its neighbouring states, effective rule lay in the hands of Mughal-era Zamindars, controlling vast estates. Even though the East India Company clashed with these feudal armies to raise revenues, historian Hetukar Shah writes, they came to see the Zamindars as valuable allies. A colonial official noted: “Though a Zamindar has no legal control over his people, he possesses greater effective control than a great landowner in England exercises over his tenant.”
From late in the 18th century, the East India Company began instituting the Permanent Settlement of Bengal, designed to maximise land revenues. The settlement broke the complex ties between landlords and the peasants—and made it less important for Zamindars to serve a policing function in their communities.
The dacoits of the 19th century, historian Surajan Das writes, drew in a bewildering array or matchlock-men and foot-soldiers who had lost their jobs in local official establishments, former soldiers of the Bengal nawabs, peasants in distress and even Zamindars who found themselves in financial trouble.
Local police would keep the dacoits well-informed of their operations, colonial records show, while Sirdars returned the favour by letting the authorities know where they were operating. “For twenty or twenty-five rupees,” the accused dacoit Sreemonto Ghosh told colonial officials, “ we could always get witnesses to say we were with them on the night in question.”
The dacoits with a cause
Following the deepening of economic hardship during World War II, banditry grew throughout Bihar. Large groups of criminals—in some cases invoking the name of the jailed MK Gandhi—began attacking Zamindars and traders. Fifty armed men appeared at a market near Patna in the summer of 1942, to raid the local grain-market. Freight trains were looted, while women and children helped bandits carry away pillaged food.
Left-leaning Congress militants, according to historian Vinita Damodaran, allied with dacoit gangs to begin a war of attrition against the colonial state. The so-called Azad Dastas, a revolutionary organisation formed by politician Jayaprakash Narayan, attacked police stations and treasuries, hoping to fund a full-scale insurgency.
The politicisation of violence accelerated in the 1970s as Maoist groups began setting up armed units to take on the might of the dominant castes and Zamindars. Large Zamindaris, scholar Arvind Das noted, had long operated militia to control rebellious rural labour. From mid-1975, killings of landlords and massacres of Dalit agricultural workers became increasingly ferocious, with the police using extra-judicial executions in an effort to crush the Maoists.
Fighting deepened in the following decades as caste began driving the course of Bihar politics. Each group competed to ensure its community could control spending, and minimise competition from others.
The anthropologist Jeffrey Witsoe noted that during Panchayat elections held in 2001, an armed gang played a key role in campaigning. Led by the Kalashnikov-wielding ‘Shiv’ and a sidekick armed with a hunting rifle, gang members would sit drinking tea in the village square and even play with children.
“I asked an older Rajput farmer why villagers tolerated the presence of goondas like Shiv,” Witsoe wrote. “The Bhumihars reside just over there,” the farmer replied, simply. The police were missing in action—and criminals took their place.
The missing police
Late in 1861, when imperial authorities first raised police forces for the province of Bengal, the emphasis was on keeping costs down. The division of Patna, the most populous in Bengal, hired 1,520 personnel to police its 1.2 million population. That meant each individual officer was responsible for some 789 people. Bhagalpur, with a population of two million spread over 20,000 square kilometres, had just 532 officers patrolling an average of 37 square kilometres, and 3,740 people.
The imperial police, historian Peter Robb notes, “remained a largely symbolic representation of power and order, playing its part alongside other such instruments rather than being a force for the detection and reduction of crime.”
Following Independence, a government survey recorded in 1953, Bihar accounted for a quarter of all dacoities. Little investment was made in the police department, though. Figures published by the Bureau of Police Research and Development show the Bihar Police remains the most anaemic force in the country. Even though the government has positions for 1,42,551 personnel, just 83,011 are filled because of budget constraints. That means there is just one officer available for policing every 147 state residents.
The state of terror
George Trevelyan, then an imperial civil servant and later secretary of state, proudly recorded in 1864 that policemen in bright blue tunics, yellow pantaloons, and red pagris could be “encountered at every turn of the road.” The force had all the coercive power, though, of the ornamental parrots. As scholar Milan Vaishnav has recorded in a superb work, organised crime proliferated across the political system. Each caste grouping manufactured its own criminals, and most parties utilised them to enforce their authority.
Anand Mohan had reason to feel aggrieved by his incarceration: UP gangster Atiq Ahmad, after all, was not convicted of any crime until 2019, and many politician-criminals have evaded conviction by the means well-known to their 19th-century forebears.
The story of Bihar gangster Rajesh Ranjan alias “Pappu Yadav” is also instructive. Emerging from a family enmeshed with a bizarre cult that involved ritual dances with snakes and human bones, Ranjan turned to small-time crime, and was once paraded around the town of Kosi by the police with a placard proclaiming him a thief. Later, though, Atiq Ahmad, assassinated earlier this month, began his career using terror to corner scrap metal contracts.
From the other end of the class spectrum came seven-time legislator Raghuraj Pratap Singh, better known as “Raja Bhaiya.” The child of a minor princely family, Singh was famously—if apocryphally—reputed to have fed his victims to crocodiles.
Large parts of India remain ruled by criminal cartels. The Constitution, it has been remarked, operates for just a few kilometres beyond the borders of New Delhi. Lacking the capacity to enforce law, India’s anaemic police system has condemned states like Bihar to a perpetual state of criminal injustice.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)