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COVER STORY: PHOOLAN
DEVI
The Will That Never Was
Her
lawyer, Kamini Jaiswal, who fought a three-year-battle to win parole for
the surrendered dacoit, now says that Phoolan had wanted to make a will
disinheriting her husband. "It seems she was anticipating her death.
She had spoken about preparing a will several times. But somehow we never
got down to doing it," Jaiswal told India Today.
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LEAD MOURNERS: Mulayam and Amar Singh (in dark shirt) bear Phoolan's
body
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As the Delhi Police launch a hunt for the assailants,
a few suspicions have also been raised about the involvement of several
SP workers. Uttar Pradesh DGP A.K. Sharan says a man named Sher Singh
Rana, "whose car was used in the execution of a crime in Delhi, was
absconding with his family from his Roorkee residence". Rana had
lodged a false fir with the Dehradun police last year stating his car
had been stolen. Police sources say Rana and Uma Kashyap came to Delhi
and met Phoolan on the morning of her death. On Friday morning, the Dehradun
police arrested Rana and discovered that he and Pankaj were one and the
same.
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TRIAL BY NUMBERS
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1963--Born the fourth
child of Moola and Devi Din at Gurha Ka Purva in Jalaun district,
Uttar Pradesh. Is married to 30-year-old widower at 11 years.
37Acres of land
seized from her father by his cousin Gurdayal which led to a feud
and the first arrest of Phoolan at age 16.
20 Thakurs gunned
down in Behmai on February 14, 1981 by Phoolan's gang as revenge
for the killing of her lover Vikram Mallah.
1982 Uttar Pradesh
CM V.P. Singh offers a bounty on Phoolan's head: Rs 10,000 for the
bandit, dead or alive.
8,000 People watch
her surrender on February 12, 1983, in Bhind, Madhya Pradesh, to
chief minister Arjun Singh. She is sentenced to three years in Gwalior
Jail for possessing weapons.
1994 Mulayam Singh
government orders withdrawal of all pending criminal cases against
her in Uttar Pradesh. Released from Tihar Jail on parole after 11
years without trial.
10 Months after
being elected to the Lok Sabha in 1996, she goes underground as
her parole ends and the court refuses bail. Loses seat in 1998 but
re-elected in 1999.
57 Criminal cases
still pending against her for murder, looting, kidnapping and dacoity
at the time of her death on July 25, 2001 at the hands of three
gunmen.
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Phoolan's killing was followed by a messy argument
over her funeral, much political grandstanding and solemn tribute-paying
by her new set of colleagues. Even the prime minister turned up. But the
"true legacy" of Phoolan Devi cannot be compressed into the
phrases normally used to summarise her story: from bullet to ballot, from
banditry to Buddhism, from revenge to reinstatement, from bandit queen
to backward caste icon. Hers is a life rendered extraordinary by a set
of personal, social and political circumstances: overpowering caste and
gender inequality and oppression, a rampant gun culture and finally the
criminalisation of politics. Phoolan was a blend of all of these cultures,
not just one single strand.
What is certain is that after an adolescence
in which she experienced both sides of brutality, Phoolan won for herself
the right to define her life. One of her lawyers says that the most remarkable
feature about her was "her endless, boundless ways of reinventing
herself". This was sometimes at the cost of reality. Back in the
early 1980s she never called herself a dacoit, but a baaghi (rebel). In
the Lok Sabha Who's Who, Phoolan Devi is described as a "housewife,
agriculturist and farmer" and the only reference to her past comes
in a cryptic comment that she was "detained in various prisons on
fake charges for 13 years". Phoolan was disdainful of conventional
niceties and lived by her wits. During her much-publicised spat with the
makers of Bandit Queen, she made the incredible claim that the film-makers
had not met her at all.
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VICTIM: Sita Devi, now 20, bears witness to Phoolan's rage in Behmai
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Her political colleagues say there remained a
contradiction in her dealings with the world, between a complete disconnection
with her past and the unexpected returns to places she had left behind.
Congress MP Mabel Rebello remembers how during a recent visit to Uttar
Pradesh jails, Phoolan grilled jailers about facilities for women inmates.
"She referred to problems which none of us knew first-hand. She was
speaking from her own experience." She could disarm other women MPs
by asking them for tips on dressing or embarrass them with a volley of
crude language and questions. When asked what she missed most about life
as a dacoit, the MP from Mirzapur said, "Power and authority..."
It was not a very peaceful coexistence; she told biographer Mala Sen she
often felt like she was still working with crooks and thieves. At the
same time, she used the opportunities politics gave her, using foreign
travel to shop, particularly for gold jewellery.
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