Phoolan Devi, victim of violent times

By Harish Khare

NEW DELHI, JULY 25. During the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, I had travelled to the Varanasi belt and naturally found myself enticed to visit the neighboring Mirzapur-Bhadohi constituency, from where the ``bandit queen,'' Ms. Phoolan Devi, was making her debut as a candidate.

As it happened, that day her Congress rival's campaign office was being inaugurated. Since the candidate was a prosperous carpet dealer, the sprawling bungalow's lawn was covered wall-to-wall with carpets. It could accommodate 400 people; not more than 100 could be counted.

The Congress leaders made long speeches and sought to put on public display their district-level divisions. A visiting AICC general secretary exhorted the assembled local luminaries to close ranks and talked of the finer nuances of secularism.

The same evening, Ms. Phoolan Devi was visiting her campaign office in the same neighbourhood. Her office was on the second floor of an unfinished school building. The classroom could accommodate 100 people but was crammed with no less than 400. There was no fan. The atmosphere was stuffy, to say the least.

But this uncomfortable setting did not bother the candidate or her senior workers. For more than 90 minutes they talked the nitty-gritty of the contest. Difficult villages were identified, sulking workers cajoled; the words, language, and the body language spoke of a caste/class divide; there were frequent invocations of the Samajwadi Party leader, Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav's izzat (honour). The contrast between the two candidates could not be sharper; one symbolising the old fading, dysfunctional arrangement and the other representing the new, assertive political and social forces.

Her candidature made the old order in New Delhi rather uneasy; her eventual victory made even the liberals squirm. Many thought that if ``democracy'' meant having in Parliament the likes of Phoolan Devi, may be this kind of democracy was not worth it. But then the old order stood so thoroughly discredited - thanks to the excesses of the Satish Sharmas and the Sheila Kauls, and assorted hawala gallery - that the old standards of morals and manners could not be invoked to judge Ms. Phoolan Devi.

To be sure, Ms. Phoolan Devi was not the standard- bearer of the quest for empowerment. Mr. Yadav had shrewdly opted for her as his candidate because the sitting BJP parliamentarian was a formidable Thakur and had a reputation for not being averse to using muscle power. Ms. Phoolan Devi's past was sufficient to enthuse the people of the lower caste not be cowed down by the Thakurs' presumed lathi-power.

Nor was Ms. Phoolan Devi much of a champion of women's causes. She and the Samajwadi Party she chose to join did not - and do not - seek to rearrange the social and economic equations so as to make the political order a just and reasonable equilibrium. She, like the rest of her party, was easily coopted by the forces of status quo. Once the sensational coverage of the ``bandit queen'' tired itself out, her presence in the Lok Sabha ceased to have any social significance.

Ms. Phoolan Devi's violent death makes a sad end. In her pre- political days, she had been subjected to every possible humiliation and indignity that man can heap on another man (or woman); she was a victim of her violent times. But then her brutal killing only shows that the her entry and ``success'' in the political arena did not moderate the violence and inequity inherent in our social order. Like the rest of the political class, she was content to have the privileges and protection of the decrepit ``system,'' and that was not sufficient immunity against the hired gun.

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