Phoolan Devi frantic to avoid arrest

Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow

Phoolan Devi is likely to be arrested soon, a fate India's bandit queen and Samajwadi Party member of Parliament is desperately trying to avoid.

Having lost a long legal battle in the Supreme Court, Phoolan Devi has been served with a non-bailable warrant by the trial court in Kanpur where as many as 55 criminal cases are still pending against her.

Phoolan Devi earned international attention when her gang allegedly gunned down 20 upper caste thakurs in Behmai village in Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur district on February 14, 1981. She eventually surrendered before the then Madhya Pradesh chief minister Arjun Singh in 1983. After spending nine years in Gwalior jail, she was shifted to Delhi's Tihar jail in 1992.

Two years later, her political career began, thanks to Mulayam Singh Yadav, then UP chief minister. Yadav, currently India's defence minister, withdrew all criminal cases registered against Phoolan Devi. Thereafter, she was formally inducted into Yadav's Samajwadi Party which fielded her successfully as its nominee for the Bhadohi parliamentary seat in the 1996 general election.

However, Yadav's decision to withdraw all cases against Phoolan Devi was challenged by V N S Sengar. The Kanpur lawyer took the battle up to the Supreme Court which did not interfere with the orders of both the trial court and Allahabad high court, quashing Yadav's decision to withdraw the cases.

Consequently, Sengar approached the trial court for issuing an arrest warrant. The warrant, issued on Tuesday, January 21, had not yet been served on Phoolan Devi as the court records still mention her place of residence as Gurhan ka purva in the adjoining district of Jalaun, which she abandoned nearly 15 years ago.

Sengar told Rediff On The NeT that he had submitted an affidavit to the court to make the necessary correction in her address. "Now it will be the duty of the state police to serve the warrant on her," he said.

But UP is under central rule, where Phoolan Devi's Samajwadi Party is among the constituents of the ruling United Front, so Sengar does "suspect some undue influence on the police."

"I am not giving up," the lawyer says, "and if the police fails to arrest her within 48 hours of the issue of the warrant with the revised address, I will be compelled to file a contempt petition against the police."

Phoolan Devi has been virtually on the run since the warrant was issued this week, hopping from one place to the other in UP. The manner in which she has been avoiding all and sundry indicates how desperately she is trying to avoid arrest. While someone at her Delhi home stated that she had gone to Lucknow -- where there was no trace of her --- some reports said she was spotted in Etawah, where she had gone to meet mentor Mulayam Singh. Subsequently, she is believed to have moved to an unknown destination in her parliamentary constituency.

Her counsel, Kanpur's leading criminal lawyer Nand Lal Jaiswal, maintained a brave front. "Who says we have lost the battle?" he asked. "How do you know we will not be able to save her?"

According to him, the UP police cannot arrest Phoolan Devi until January 31 when the special leave petition her lawyer has filed on her behalf comes up before the Supreme Court.

Special Trial Court Judge S K Srivastava, while issuing the non-bailable warrant, had ordered that Phoolan Deevi be brought to his court on February 4.

Criminologists in Lucknow are of the view that Phoolan Devi will first try to avoid arrest and look for some relief on January 31, failing which, she would be left with no choice but to surrender before the trial court on February 4.

Over the years, Phoolan Devi has evaded as many as 130 warrants for appearing before the trial court, as the Madhya Pradesh government first under Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister Sunderlal Patwa and then under Congress chief minister Arjun Singh, and UP governments both under the BJP's Kalyan Singh and Mulayam Singh did not care to co-operate with the court.

Advocate Sengar proposes to move a separate contempt of court petition against Patwa, Arjun Singh, Kalyan Singh and Yadav in this regard.