The protagonist of this story is a fascinating and fearless, violent businesswoman who has risen to power and wealth in an extremely violent and male-dominated corner of North India. Locals often refer to her as “Lady Dabang” (the gangster lady). She is a remarkable woman. She arrived in the district when she was a teenager—escaping an abusive father from the nearby state of Madhya Pradesh.
She was forced to marry a man thirty-eight years older than she and gave birth to her first child at the age of fourteen. She started her dabang career by allegedly cutting the throat (so she is popularly known to have done) of a doctor and by allegedly killing a policeman. According to folklore they both tried to rape her. Locals say she was a prostitute. She said she was a health-care assistant. From working in the local hospital she moved on to act as a criminal broker and informer for the police and local big men; then she moved to land grabbing and joined forces with local property developers and the construction industry in the late 1990s.
Simultaneously, she started her political career. Allegedly through powerful “boyfriend-protectors,” she entered into local politics and subsequently moved on to contest state and national elections. She is now a multimillionaire thanks to land speculation and alleged appropriations of public funding.
Her story not only challenges both the underworld and standard society ethical code but, more crucially, exemplifies a mini-revolution in the local political economy gangsterism and politics in this part of the world. Western Uttar Pradesh has undergone tremendous economic and social transformations over the past two decades. Today more than two hundred million people live in the state, a fifth of whom are Muslim. The rest are mostly Hindu and divided broadly between three mutually antagonistic caste groups: the upper-caste Brahmins and Thakurs; the lower-caste Dalits; and the “other backward classes” such as the Yadavs.
This region of Uttar Pradesh has been increasingly perceived in the popular national perception as the Sicily of North India. Western Uttar Pradesh is widely known for its endemic violence; for being culturally shaped by the macho ethos of its dominant castes like Jats, Yadavs, Gujars, and Rajputs; for being marred by communalism and caste-based conflicts; and for poverty and underdevelopment. Available statistics and sociological studies have defined this area as the cradle of a “subculture of violence” and the home of “institutionalized riot systems.” However, what it is perhaps deeply misleading is the portrayal of this region as a poor provincial backwater. On the contrary, “money,” as informants again and again emphasize, “is not an issue here.”
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In 2014 a provincial town in the studied region was the place in India where the largest number of luxury packet holidays were sold. This is a land where fortunes have been made in one generation, where the divide between rich and poor is widening, and where upward mobility and entrepreneurship are fully entrenched in the imaginations and fantasies of the younger generations. It is one of the mofussil (provincial) and rural areas of the country where a twenty-first-century Indian version of the American El Dorado is taking place.
The economy of this region has been changed by the commercialization of agricultural land. Real estate prices are skyrocketing as a result of quicker access to Delhi, thanks to the construction of the Yamuna Expressway and to its proximity to the industrial and residential hubs of Noida and Faridabad. Demand from investors from Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat, and West Bengal, as well as global speculators, have intensified since the late 1990s.
These developments have given rise to an intense scramble for valuable economic assets and opened up a space for dabangs and their flexible organized companies to regulate and control the production and distribution of particular illegal commodities or services related to urban development and infrastructure expansion.
From Delhi to Agra on the national highway, shopping malls, gated townships, education complexes, flyovers, and religious temples and new ashrams run by international gurus are mushrooming. The area from Delhi to Agra includes Braj (the mythical Land of Krishna), which has been actively promoted by the government and private projects as a profitable religious and tourist hub. It is in this local booming economy that dabangs and their power syndicates pursue violent forms of capital ac cumulation through increasingly cartelized “land mafias,” “sand mafias,” “construction mafias,” “oil mafias,” or “water mafias” and “temple rackets.” The power syndicates involved in the area are many: they are also flexible, volatile, fragmented, and in constant flux.
To complicate their mapping, the sociocultural and economic area in which they operate overlaps with four states: Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, and Madhya Pradesh. Most local mafia networks are hence interstate criminal groups, which makes them difficult to police. Unfortunately, there is a complete lack of coordination between central and state police bodies. India does not have a national-level agency to coordinate the efforts of the state police forces and central enforcement agencies to fight organized crime.
“There is no agency to collect, collate, analyze, document, and function as a central exchange of information relating to international and interstate gangs operating in India and abroad.”8 It follows that by simply crossing the border into Rajasthan, a dabang who commits a murder in Uttar Pradesh can easily avoid being investigated, caught, and prosecuted. So, this area enjoys an extra layer of relative impunity due to its interstate geographical character.
High levels of crime live in symbiosis with routinized forms of social and political violence and conflicts. This is one of the regions of India where over the past two decades lower castes have politically challenged the domination of upper castes and where communal tensions have been at their highest. More specifically, over the past twenty years, Uttar Pradesh politics has been characterized by the struggles and shifting strategies of two major political groups: the Yadavs and Dalits and the two political parties with which each is respectively associated, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
Both Yadavs and Dalits have benefited a great deal from affirmative action policies, rising up to be the key protagonists of both India’s “second democratic upsurge” and its rising “patronage democracy.” Hence, the careers of contemporary dabangs have not only been shaped by economic liberalization or by their criminal skills or personal charisma but also by the opportunities created by a lively multiparty competition paired with a high level of communal and castebased conflict in the areas where they rule.
Democratic competition, as Wilkinson argues, produces a heightened scramble for monetary and political resources and turns money and muscle power into prerequisites for electoral success. Moreover, the need for muscle power is at its peak in areas with deep community divides where voters desire forceful representatives whom they perceive can protect their group-based interests most credibly. It has been established that political parties select criminal candidates in those areas where social divisions are the most contested, and this was precisely the setting for Lady Dabang to be approached by several political parties to contest municipal (nagar palika), state, and national elections from the late 1990s.
It was from this period that Uttar Pradesh started to witness the political rise of iconic bosses like D. P. Yadav in Aligarh, Raja Bhaia in Kunda, Ramkant Yadav in Azamgarh, the Ansari brothers in Varanasi, Mr. Tiwari in Gorakhpur, and, along with them, an increase in aspiring dabangs and enforcers across the state. It follows that by 2002 almost 50 percent of political candidates in Uttar Pradesh had criminal charges registered against them or were under investigation.
Criminal candidates won 206 of 403 seats, an absolute majority of 51.1 percent, and earned for the SP, which governed the state between 2002 and 2007, the title of “Goonda Raj.” The 2007 election to the Uttar Pradesh State Assembly marked the end of the SP’s rule and the rise to power of the rival BSP. Counter to what many had hoped for, this election was no less criminalized. Indeed, in 2007, the number of criminal candidates from both parties increased, and the winning BSP fielded the highest proportion of criminal candidates (34 percent).
The SP returned to power in 2012. Despite a vocal anticriminalization campaign launched by the Election Commission and several civil society groups (including the Anna Hazare movement), a total of 189 legislators, or 47 percent, of the 2012–2017 elected State Assembly had criminal charges pending against them (according to the affidavits they were now required to file by law).
This excerpt from ‘Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia’ has been taken with permission from Speaking Tiger.