A chill ran down my spine as the cold, hard gaze of Phoolan Devi fell upon me when she was brought out of the Chambal ravines in Bhind in 1983 to surrender. She looked pale, but her eyes were sharp and piercing. She held a .302 calibre rifle lightly in her hand and a dagger hung at her waist.
Being the closest to her as she alighted from the bus, I asked what she felt about surrendering. She did not reply, only glowered at the group of journalists; we all fell back. Nobody asked another question.
Less than five feet tall, dressed in a khaki shirt and trousers, her dishevelled hair held back with a red bandana, there was nothing regal about this dacoit ‘queen’. But her demeanour was that of a leader, even her two colleagues, one of whom was described as her paramour, seemed to be under her command as they were shifted from the bus to a school in Bhind. She had been charged with, what came to be known as “behmai hathyakand” (revenge killing) of 22 thakurs in a U.P. village, including two men who had allegedly raped her. Phoolan later claimed that she herself had not fired a single shot.
It had taken months of negotiations by the then Bhind Superintendent of Police, N.K. Singh, to bring around Phoolan and her companions. And when she laid down her arms before Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Arjun Singh on a cold February afternoon, he rose from his seat to receive the arms. She barely looked at him turning to the cheering crowds, her raised hands folded in greeting.
One of the foremost conditions she had laid for her surrender was that she should not be handed over to the Uttar Pradesh police. “This is my first condition,” she told us later, adding that she knew “what U.P. Police had done to [dacoit] Hasina”. When a journalist quizzed Phoolan about her involvement in the Behmai killings, she shot back, “Tu tho wope?” (Were you there?). She was foul-mouthed and didn’t utter a single sentence without abuses.
She wanted the government to take care of her mother, sisters and uncle, who visited her when she surrendered. She sought agricultural land, a house and police protection for her family while she served time. She also said that none of the surrendered dacoits should get the death penalty.
Phoolan spent 11 years in jail before Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh withdrew all cases against her. She was released in 1994.
Two years after her release she won the Lok Sabha elections from Mirzapur on the Samajwadi Party ticket. She again won from there in 1999. She was a sitting MP when she was killed outside her home in New Delhi at the age of 38. On Friday, the main accused, Sher Singh Rana, was convicted by the Delhi High Court.
