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On 5 December 1994, G Krishnaiah (IAS), the then district collector of Gopalganj district of Bihar and just 35 years old, was brutally assaulted and shot dead by a mob of over 5000. The mob that assaulted and murdered G Krishnaiah was carrying dead bodies of Chotan Shukla, a leader of Bihar People’s Party (BPP), formed by Anand Mohan – whose remission is being demanded. Chotan Shukla and few others were murdered by unidentified assailants on 4 December 1994. On 5 December 1994, after post mortem, the dead bodies were carried in a procession from Muzaffarpur to the ancestral village of Chotan Shukla and when the procession reached Khabra village (Muzaffarpur district), G Krishnaiah, who was returning from a meeting in Hajipur, was dragged out of his car and thrashed by the mob – before he was shot 3 times on his head by Bhutkan Shukla, the brother of Chotan Shukla. The mob that thrashed and killed an innocent civil servant was accompanied by several BPP leaders including Anand Mohan and his wife Lovely Anand.
The charge-sheet was filed against only 36 accused persons. The trial court[1] in 2007 (13 years after the incident) found only 7 guilty of offence of unlawful assembly with a common object of committing the murder and only 4 were found guilty of abetting the murder. All other 29 accused persons were acquitted of all charges. Out of 7 found guilty, 3 were sentenced to death and others were awarded life imprisonment. On appeal, the Patna High Court partially upturned the judgment and order of the trial court and interestingly, discharged all accused persons except Anand Mohan, who was found guilty of offence of abetment to murder because he encouraged Bhutkan Shukla to kill G Krishnaiah and avenge murder of his brother – G Krishnaiah had nothing to do with the murder of Chotan Shukla. The Patna High Court observed that the prosecution failed to establish that there was common intention to murder. Importantly, the Patna High Court converted death sentence of Anand Mohan to life imprisonment noting that this was not a rare of rarest case to award the death sentence. When the matter travelled to the Supreme Court, the court in 2012 (almost 20 years after the murder) agreed with the findings of the Patna High Court. So, out of 5000, only 1 was found guilty and served life term. It bears emphasis that the case against 36 accused persons was based mostly on the testimony of police officials (out of 25 25 witnesses examined by the prosecution, 17 were police officials), who were either with or behind the procession that killed G Krishnaiah. The role (and why they could not stop the mob from killing the IAS officer) of these police officials is yet unclear.
In March 2021, the Bihar Government rejected (and rightly so) the demand to remit the jail term of Anand Mohan. At that point, Janta Dal United (JDU) and BJP were in the government. Recently, Nitish Kumar, the Chief Minister of Bihar and JDU leader, announced in a rally in Patna that he is trying for the remission of jail term of Anand Mohan. The shift in the narrative is because of the change in the government, which is now headed by JDU and RJD. G Krishnaiah, at the time of his murder, was the district collector of Gopalganj district—the hometown of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Chief Minister of Bihar at that time and also RJD supremo. Ideally, RJD should have opposed the remission as it was during their rule that a civil servant was assaulted and murdered. But such is the nature of politics.
There were glaring gaps in the trial of accused persons. By any stretch of imagination, 1 person serving life term for murder and assault of a civil servant, when a mob of 5000 was present that day, cannot be justified. And by all counts, remission of the jail term will definitely be brutal and injustice. The Bihar of 1990s suffered tremendously at the hands of criminals and politicians and the wound is yet to be healed. Every attempt should be made to protect the new environment and the improved law and order situation. We owe this to G Krishnaiah and his family, who suffered because of senseless revenge politics of 1990s.
Some part of this article is taken from my story on my medium account where I have written in detail on the incident. Interested readers can read this story on medium through the link: https://medium.com/@rishi.thakur1103/murder-of-a-district-collector-901cbb323369. All facts are from the Patna High Court and Supreme Court orders.
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