The city of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh was recently in news for all the wrong reasons. Two policemen and 24 supporters of Ram Briksha Yadav, a maverick who claimed to lead India to its second freedom, were killed on June 3 when police went to evict them from Jawahar Park to meet the deadline set by the High Court. For two years, they were illegally occupying 60 acres of the park, thanks to a powerful politician who kept nudging officials to go slow with the eviction process. The BJP has identified this politician as Shivlal Yadav, PWD minister and uncle of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. He is not alone to lust for acquiring government land through surrogates and dubious means. The list of his compatriots is too long to keep pace with, across all states in India.
While land grabbing is relatively easier, removing encroachment is hazardous since politicians and administration collude together. And, if religious groups get involved, the difficulty multiplies manifold. An incident of 2001 will be worth recalling here. Worried over illegal occupation of the CPWD land that ran along the premises of R&AW, the security establishment sought the government’s approval to clear the area lest it was used to target the agency’s building and set up listening devices to intercept its electronic communication. Subsequently, a day and time was fixed and forces began moving towards the site at 2.30 am. Within 15 minutes, however, the Prime Minister intervened and it was called off. I later learnt that the Congress President advised the Prime Minister against the eviction following a call received from Syed Imam Bukhari.
The Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s reaction has been typically self-serving. He transferred SP and DM, ignoring the fact that they presided over a politicised and dysfunctional administration that did not permit officials to act decisively and with clarity of purpose. No other DM or SP could have done anything different or better under the circumstances. In another farcical move, he announced a commission of inquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge basically to breathe easy. Its findings in all probability are going to add nothing to what we already know nor its recommendations will bring any fundamental change in working of the administration, police or the Special Branch. We will surely hear it claiming that the police did not go to the park adequately prepared, the Special Branch failed to provide precise intelligence on maverick’s firepower, and the administration read the situation wrong. What the commission will not do is expose politicians for encouraging encroacher’s thuggery.
It is an eternal dilemma for any district police chief to decide when to act and how much force to use particularly when its cadre is corrupt, caste-ridden and heavily politicised. Even in the best of times, going for pre-emptive strike is a difficult choice to make. A legendary policeman, veteran at handling law and order situations for 32 years, once advised me sternly to be patient and wait for evidence to emerge in the form of injured and dead policemen, burnt vehicles, charred houses and looted shops if I did not want to fail the judicial scrutiny. Years later, when I lobbed this advice to a high court judge, he wryly said that it indeed had merit. No wonder, the Mathura Police hesitated for two years to act and police everywhere is afraid of nipping agitations in bud.
Blaming the Special Branch will again be an exercise in self-deception. It is equipped neither to penetrate cult groups like that of Briksha’s nor produce actionable intelligence to mount an effective counter assault. It is manned by disgruntled policemen who cannot get posted to police stations. They are also not trained for conducting intelligence operations and run sources. Their interception capacity is severely limited and there is no internal mechanism to evaluate their inputs regularly. In the absence of proper support, guidance and encouragement from equally disgruntled seniors, they pick up merely bazaar gossips. It will, therefore, be grossly unfair to hold the Special Branch suffering from such institutional handicaps, guilty of failing to report on Briksha’s arsenal and his violent intent.
Akhilesh Yadav may not have a vision, but he can try a few things like professionalising the Special Branch on the model of IB and R&AW, albeit on a pragmatic scale, creating an environment to enable the administration to act without fear and reining in his colleagues from patronising land grabbers and criminals. It is unlikely he can do any of these things. So, let’s wait for another Mathura to happen.
Former special secretary, Research and Analysis Wing
amarbhushan@hotmail.com