Published in Open magazine in June 2015
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| The late Jagendra Singh, a journalist from Shahjahanpur district of Uttar Pradesh |
Like
many others over the past week, these visitors too have reached Khutar village
in an SUV with its windows rolled up. The journalists lounging around the tent
shake off their hibernation and follow their cameramen towards the parking
spot. Three people, well in their fifties, alight from the vehicle and walk
towards the heart of the assembly, where members of Jagendra Singh’s family are
staging a dharna.
A
local journalist, apparently a mediator between the visitors and the family,
introduces the new arrivals as members of the Press Council of India (PCI). The
family had been told to expect them. Abandoning the makeshift dais, they make
their way to the twin-storeyed house across the street. Under the glare of
media cameras, the PCI team follows them inside. The doors shut behind them.
Most journalists retreat to their spot under a peepal tree.
Twenty minutes later, the team heads back to its
egg-on-wheels. Questions are flung at them. Answers, at first, are avoided
before an official statement is issued to pacify the clamouring journalists.
While the father Sumer Singh, elder son Rajvender and daughter Rachana are back
at the dharna, the
mother Suman and younger ward Rahul are nowhere to be seen. I walk to their
house and spot the two leaning against a courtyard wall, pacifying the sons’
aunt, Lovely Singh.
“...what
was the point of shouting at them?” Rahul is saying.
“They
come here, ask questions about what happened—to you, me, others. They have all
seen him after he was set on fire, saying who was responsible. And yet they all
want to conduct investigations,” the aunt rants. “Why can’t they just punish
the minister right away?”
Seeing
his mother shrivel up in a corner, Rahul reiterates the importance of their
‘fight’, one they are putting up “without food or water, under the hot sun”.
Lovely refuses to be consoled but keeps mum. Finally, Rahul tells her that
she’d better compose herself. Some mausi
has come to meet her. “Hogi koi
mausi,” Lovely replies, dismissively.
Rahul
and I walk back to the living room to pick up the threads from where we left
off last. In the next hour, he would tell me about the attack on his father
Jagendra Singh, a social media journalist, by goons allegedly working for Ram
Murti Singh Verma, UP’s minister for dairy development. The attack of 1 June
was allegedly coordinated by the minister’s henchmen with the help of the
police. Around 2.30 pm, some six men had forced their way into Singh’s house in
Shahjahanpur, pinned him down, poured petrol on his torso and set him on fire.
Eight days later, he died in a civil hospital in the state capital. Many
believe it was the price he paid for his relentless reportage against the
minister.
Rahul
repeats this tale at least six times a day to the media. All of 21 years, he is
a savvy man who knows what they want. He has names and contact numbers at ready
recall; photo-graphs of his father, print-outs of his reportage, documents of
police complaints and a list of his father’s friends are kept handy as well. He
also participates in prime-time TV debates, proffers sound bites and puts forth
the family’s demands: monetary compensation, government jobs for the two
siblings and a CBI probe of his father’s death. He is the one who would, on 22
June, accept an invitation to meet Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav along with his
father at his office in Lucknow—for what’s widely seen as a compromise. There,
he would accept the offer for government jobs for both siblings, compensation
of Rs 30 lakh and an arms licence in exchange of ending the dharna and calling off the
demand for a CBI probe.
“The
Honourable Chief Minister has asked us to trust him and we have agreed,” he’d
later tell me over the phone, the reverence in his voice a far cry from the
contempt of politicians he’d displayed a week ago. “Rajyapal Ram Naik. Mahamahim (His Excellency)
Rajyapal Ram Naik,” he had said once, using emphasis to heap scorn on the title
as he recalled a recent conversation he’d had with the Governor of UP.
But
for now, as we resume our places on plastic chairs in the living room, Rahul
turns to me and smiles: “If his younger sister is like this, imagine what my father
was like.”
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|
Rajvendra
Singh (L), son of the deceased journalist, along with his grandfather at the protest venue
|
While
UP famously has the country’s largest number of newspapers, social media has
emerged a powerful—if not always credible—circulator of information. One such
blip on the screen was Jagendra Singh’s news portal on Facebook, Shahjahanpur Samachar. The
lanky 46-year-old had had more than a decade of field experience, a part of
which was spent with a prominent Hindi daily Amar
Ujala, before he launched the portal four years ago. News updates
appeared daily on his portal—mostly centred on crime and civic issues. Among
his base of nearly 5,000 subscribers were politicians, bureaucrats and
journalists of hyper-local and regional dailies.
“Even
after all these years, most of our household expenses are borne by my
grandfather,” says Rahul. A retired post- master, Sumer Singh’s monthly pension
is what feeds the family of five and funds the education of his two grandsons
and a granddaughter. “[My father] earned when, at times, newspapers carried his
articles. Sometimes, people advertised through him or offered him Rs 100-200 in
exchange of publishing a news report.” But his wants were few and he was a man
of integrity, the family insists. That the journalists he groomed went on to
become richer than him; that the family couldn’t afford to have a TV in their
house until Rajvender received one as dowry, these things never bothered him.
In 2007, he got a job with a local daily at Shahjahanpur and moved to a single-
storied house in Awas Vikas Colony.
If
one scrolls down the news-feed of Shahjahanpur
Samachar till 18 April, one would notice what is frequently cited
by the family and local journalists as the genesis of the tragedy. In a
detailed exposé, the minister is alleged to have colluded with a district
supply officer to siphon off 275 tonnes of wheat every month. It was one of the
first of several reports Singh had written against Verma, an elected MLA of the
ruling Samajwadi Party from the same district, till the end of May. These range
from illegal mining and land grabbing to sexual harassment.
On
the evening of 28 April, as per the FIR filed by Singh at Sadar police station,
a motorcycle intercepted his near Awas Vikas Colony, and five men emerged who
battered him with sticks, fracturing his leg. One of the accused he named was
Gufran, who is known in media circles as a close aide of the minister. On 12
May, local journalist Anil Kumar Bhadoria filed an FIR at Kotwali police
station against Singh for assaulting and kidnapping him. It was an intimidation
tactic by the minister who had doled out favours to Bhadoria, Singh countered,
and rubbished the allegations. Undeterred, Singh continued his anti-minister
reportage and rhetoric, and on 28 May, reported an anganwadi worker’s allegations of rape against
the minister, Bhadoria, inspector Prakash Rai of Kotwali police station, Gufran
and a certain BK Dixit. It was apparently the last straw.
“He
had never tried to approach Murti for his side of the story,” says Rohit Yadav,
who runs a portal called Shahjahanpur
Khabar. Yadav, who claims to have been close to Singh, was whom the
latter had rung up for help right after the April assault.
Meanwhile,
the anganwadi
worker had started receiving dire threats if she didn’t withdraw her
application. On the instructions of her lawyer Virendra Pal Chauhan, who had
taken up her case at Singh’s request, she went to the office of Superintendent
of Police Babloo Kumar. Around 2 pm, she submitted a letter detailing the calls
on her number, and came out. It is at this point that the narrative gets truly
murky, with contrasting accounts of the administration and of the aggrieved.
In
the second week of June, a chilling video clip (as posted above) featuring Jagendra Singh went
viral on social media. You see him lying shirtless on a stretcher, swaying in
agony, his burnt body covered with a white cream. The ends of his fingers look
like reeds. “If they had come to arrest me, why did they have to set me on
fire?” he weeps.
“Who
all were there at the time?” a man is overheard asking.
“There
was Shri Prakash Rai, some five or six policemen and Gufran,” says Singh. “If the
minister and his goons had a grudge,” Singh adds, “they could have beaten me
instead of pouring petrol and burning me.”
Shortly
after, the local media approached Prakash Rai, who was in charge of Kotwali
police station and had led the team to Singh’s doorstep. (He has been suspended
since.) He refuted the charge, stating that the team had gone to arrest the
journalist on the basis of Bhadoria’s FIR. Finding his house locked from
within, the cops decided to scale the wall. By then, Singh had set himself alight.
The policemen, by Rai’s account, doused the fire and took him to the local
hospital and he was shifted to a government hospital in Lucknow the same day.
“What
about the [anganwadi
worker]?” asks a journalist. “She was already inside the house,” Rai replies.
The
police later registered an FIR against Singh for an attempt to commit suicide.
The worker, whose rape allegation had still not translated into an FIR at the
time in spite of three interventions by the judicial magistrate, was made party
to the case and charged with abetting the crime.
The
Singhs’ version differs. Jagendra breathed his last on 8 June after having
given numerous statements to the media. During this period, they drafted an
application along with Chauhan detailing the sequence of events and addressed
it to the district magistrate, superintendent of police and the state
government. It was a request to register an FIR against the perpetrators. It
was only on 9 June, once the family refused to cremate him (in protest), that
the complaint was registered.
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| Suman Singh, the wife of Jagendra, rendered inconsolable at one of the ceremonies after his death |
“I
was there when it happened,” says Rajvender, who says he had travelled to the
city to fetch medicines for his grandfather a few hours after his father and
brother left. Around 2 pm, he decided to visit his father at home when he saw a
police jeep, with the anganwadi
worker and six policemen, and a Bolero with the minister’s henchmen, including
Gufran, outside.
“Some
of the men scaled the wall and entered. In a few minutes, we heard my father
yelling for help. The men were beating him,” says Rajvender. He, along with the
worker and policemen, started hammering the iron door till the bottom half was
bent out of shape. They crawled into the house courtyard through a gap. The
woman hurried into the house, but he was held back at gunpoint, he says.
Through a window, he adds, he saw that his father had been set on fire. “It
happened within five to seven minutes. When they came out, the policemen had
put out the flames with blankets. Since the lock refused to budge, they crawled
out of the space we had made in the door.”
The
woman told Rajvender she would attend to Singh and asked him to fetch his
family from Khutar.
On a
visit two weeks after the incident, I find the Awas Vikas Colony house locked
from the outside. Two policemen take turns with two more to keep a vigil round
the clock. None of the neighbours speaks to me on record. However, they
independently state that while people had turned up in droves to witness the
commotion, nobody saw Rajvender anywhere at the crime scene.
Singh’s
lawyer Virendra Chauhan confirms my suspicions. “The FIR has been written
differently from what had happened. We have planted him there,” he says.
Advocate Nutan Thakur, an activist who practises in the Lucknow High Court,
says this is a common tendency. “Testimonials given by eyewitnesses at the time
of crime are often retracted during investigations and hearings. So advocates
tell their clients to show one of their own people present on the spot. A
family member is more difficult to break.”
That
leaves only one eyewitness to the case: the anganwadi
worker who was present according to both versions. The aforementioned video
clip was shot in the Shahjahanpur hospital on the day of the immolation. It
shows the woman telling Kumar what had happened: “It started after I submitted
the application to you. They put me in a car, took me [to Singh’s house] and
poured petrol on him. On the way, Gufran grabbed me by my neck and molested
me.”
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| A policeman on guard outside the residence of Jagendra Singh, a place where the alleged attempt to murder took place |
After
Singh’s death, the woman reiterated her statements to the media. However, she
soon went incommunicado. The police posted their personnel outside her
residence which, by Kumar’s claim, was on her own request. By media reports,
she was taken to a magistrate on 17 June where she—an accused in the police’s
FIR, an eyewitness in the family’s—changed her stance to say that the
journalist had immolated himself on learning that the police had come to arrest
him.
Despite
persistent attempts, Open
has been unable to contact Bhadoria, the anganwadi
worker or Ram Murti Verma. In the second week of June, an internal circular of
the Samajwadi Party forbade its office bearers from talking to the media. The
five policemen accused by the family had, in the interim, been suspended. The
UP government has handed the case over to the DIG of Police at Bareilly.
A
visit to the Superintendent of Police’s office has much to reveal. “We have
constituted a team involving the additional SP, a police inspector and officers
from the crime branch to investigate both the FIRs,” says Babloo Kumar. He
insists that the accused cannot be said to be absconding. None of them has been
arrested, though.
During the investigations, the Shahjahanpur police claimed to
have found seven FIRs registered against Singh, charging him with assault,
theft and extortion. “I couldn’t find any FIRs registered against the minister,
not even the one you told me about,” says the police officer, referring to the
one listed in Murti’s affidavit submitted to the Election Commission, admitting
a case against him related to ‘assault’ and ‘insult with intent to provoking
breach of peace’. I later recheck if the said complaint was registered in his
jurisdiction. The place of the FIR reads: ‘Criminal no. 1409A/09, Thana Sadar
Bazaar, Shahjahanpur.’
A few days later, I call the police officer again. “We
haven’t come to a conclusion yet,” he tells me. “But based on the findings till
now, it seems like a case of suicide.”
On
the day I meet Inspector General of Police (Civil Defence) Amitabh Thakur, he
is fresh off staging a dharna
outside the Director General of Police office in Lucknow. Around six months
ago, shortly after his wife moved an application against the UP Mining Minister
Gayatri Prajapati for facilitating illegal mining, a “false complaint” alleging
rape was registered against the couple.
“My situation is so similar to
Jaginder’s. It seems like these occurrences are a rule, not an exception,”
Thakur says. Among journalists, he has the reputation of being an upright
officer who often invites trouble for standing up against corruption. After
graduating from IIT-Kharagpur, he joined the Indian Police Service in 1992, and
by 2010, had been transferred as many as 22 times.
Thakur
has been tracking the case and also visited the family after Singh was admitted
to hospital. It was on one of these visits that he recorded Singh as he lay on
his bed, his body an ulcerous red. Though Singh found it hard to speak, he was
determined to share his story: “They first beat me, then abused me. They said,
‘You dare write against Ram Murti? You are the one who has accused him of
rape.’”
“In Uttar Pradesh,” says Thakur, “it’s like this: show me
the person, I’ll show you the rule.”
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