When Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath roared in Vidhan Sabha on February 23, 2023 that he would put to dust criminals of all hues in the state, people were impressed, hoping finally the government was serious about ridding the state of mafias and criminals. “ Mafia ko mitti me mila denge,” he had declared, attacking the Samajwadi Party of sheltering criminals and mafias during its rule. But the drive against mafia in Uttar Pradesh, it seems, has degenerated into targeted killings of Muslims and selective dispensation of justice.
According to data released by the UP government itself, since Yogi Adityanath took over as chief minister the maximum number of criminals killed in police encounters are, it transpired, from the minority community. According to data of UP police from 2017 till date, on an average five encounter killings are reported everyday, and an overwhelmingly large number of those killed are from the minority community: 37 percent. In the first year of Yogi rule, 45 criminals were killed in police encounters, of which 16 were Muslims. During 2017-2020, a total number of 124 criminals were killed in encounters, of which 47 were Muslims, 11 Brahmins and 58 belonged to the OBC and Dalit castes. UP police had admitted that 37 percent of those killed in police encounters were Muslims. The figures were given by the UP police following the controversy after the killing of gangster Vikas Dubey in Kanpur in 2020. Dubey’s killings had sparked a controversy that the Yogi government was selectively killing Brahmins. It was then that the UP police released the data of 37 percent Muslims having been killed in encounters so far.
This explains the spate of killings: of mafia turned politician Atiq Ahmad and his brother Ashraf in police custody in Prayagraj on April 15, 2023 and also of his son Asad and his accomplice, just two days earlier, on April 13, 2023 in Jhansi. The pattern of killings is so stark that Samajwadi Party leader and former UP minister Azam Khan, who has been embroiled in a number of bizarre criminal cases ranging from land grab to stealing books from the library of that university which he himself established, expressed the apprehension that he too might be pumped with bullets any day. He said this while campaigning for the local body election a couple of days ago.
Azam Khan’s apprehension may not be totally baseless, given the way he has been hounded by the Yogi government. Khan, who defeated BJP’s Jaya Prada to win the Rampur Lok Sabha seat in 2019, had been booked for hate speech in 2019 and convicted in 2020 for three years. He was disqualified from Lok Sabha after his conviction. He spent 27 months in jail and is now out on bail. He has a number of other criminal cases going against him which include land grab, stealing books, forgery, and halting traffic. Interestingly, in the case relating to halting traffic, his son Abdullah Azam, too was held guilty along with him and convicted for two years of imprisonment which resulted him into losing his assembly seat too.
This speedy dispensation of justice in the case of Azam Khan and his son stands out in stark contrast to the infamous Haridwar dharma sansad case in which an open call for genocide was given by the Hindu speakers there, yet so far no action has been taken against anyone. Such selective dispensation of justice by BJP governments, not only of UP, but elsewhere too, does add to the charge of selective targeting.
The latest instance in the same context is the curious case of don turned neta Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who is also the head of Wrestling Federation of India, against whom seven female wrestlers of international fame, who have won medals at the Olympic games, Commonwealth games and other international tournaments, have levelled serious charges of sexual harassment. The female wrestlers first came out in the public in January this year when they first sat on a dharna at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. But the government seemed to simpl look the other way, mollycoddling the issue. They were told that a committee headed by Mary Com, would look into their charges. No action was taken against Brij Bhushan Singh who is a BJP MP, from Kaiserganj in Uttar Pradesh. He was simply asked to stay away from the Wrestling Fedearation till completion of the enquiry. Incidentally, Singh has 84 criminal cases of various degrees against him, including attempt to murder, dacoity, making illegal payments etc. He has also been named as an accused in the Babri demolition case.
But when there was no sign of the inquiry report, the wrestlers came back to the dharna at Jantar Mantar in April and this time also filed a petition in the Supreme Court which ordered the Delhi Police to file an FIR against Singh. Two FIRs have subsequently been registered against him, one of them under the POCSO Act too, but he continues to be the WFI chief as well as the BJP MP. The entire top BJP brass , including the prime minister, the home minister and the UP chief minister, who swears to annihilate mafia from UP, have remained tongue-tied.
Despite there being such serious charges, he continues to brazen it out, even putting the onus on the prime minister and home minister, saying if they asked him, he would resign. This puts a question mark on the UP chief minister’s real intent of wiping out the mafia from Uttar Pradesh. Does it not add to the charge that he has a different way of treating mafia based on their caste and religion? In fact, his political opponents have openly criticized him for going soft on mafia from the Thakur/kshatriya caste because he too is a kshatriya. Brij Bhushan Singh belongs to this category too.
Samajwadi Party leaders reel out the names of mafia from Kshatriya caste who have apparently been given a long rope by the chief minister: for example Brajesh Singh, a gangster from Varanasi, who has 106 cases of serious crimes against him, Dhananjay Singh from Jaunpur who has 46 criminal cases against him, the infamous Raja Bhaiya from Kunda, Pratapgarh, who has 31 criminal cases against him, all these dons have been left out of Yogi’s plan of action, despite the fact that serious charges of murder and attempt to murder are pending against them. In their cases the machinery dispensing justice seems to have halted. But in the case of Atiq, Ashraf, Asad, Ghulam, Mukhtar Ansari , Afzal Ansari and Azam Khan it spins doubly fast.