NOTHING SEPARATED THE MUZZLE from his temple except for a bit of that trademark white safa around his head, tied the same way his tangawallah father perhaps used to in the blazing-hot summers of Allahabad back in the day. A gun coming out of nowhere, a flash of burning light, a staccato burst and the burly Atiq Ahmed, Uttar Pradesh’s dreaded mafia don, and his brother Ashraf, slumped to the ground. With them crumbled an empire of crime that had long metastasised to other parts of the body politic—including a term in the Lok Sabha, and several in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. A ganglord-politician’s murder on live TV was dramatic enough to find space in the world press, and perhaps an unwanted deviation from the narrative being crafted by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath. But even if by unintended association, that infamous freeze-frame has become a moment that encapsulates an epic battle of the law—in all its shades of black, white and grey—against the entrenched network of mafiosi that has choked the state’s political economy for decades. It’s a battle that has cleared parts of a lawless jungle while also leaving a cloud of questions in its place and pushed at the edges of the definition of justice while scripting a new chapter for it.
It’s also a battle that the chief minister has been waging ever since he came to power in the country’s most populous state in March 2017 with a blueprint that has been evolving and attaining a dual layer of sophistication not always visible on the surface. At one level, like the tough-talking, straight-shooting sheriffs of popular lore, the saffron-clad Yogi’s police force has written a penal code marked out by bullets—on April 13 in Jhansi, Atiq’s son Asad Ahmed became the 183rd criminal to be killed in an ‘encounter’ with the police. In a policy that went hand in hand, the state government has also seized and demolished property worth over Rs 2,500 crore said to be illegally acquired by gangsters.
CRACKING DOWN ON THE GANGS OF UP
Even as he unleashed ‘zero tolerance’ against criminal gangs, Yogi also pursued a more textbook version of justice that has gathered pace in his second term. Behind the gunsmoke and the dust raised by bulldozers, he put into motion an overhaul of the entire police force, judicial system and state administration. Over the decades, a vast netherworld of crime and an extended network of 1,105 minor dons who lord it over their niches—30 in illegal mining, 228 in illicit liquor, 168 in cattle trade, 347 in shady land transactions, 18 with their talons in education rackets, and 359 miscellaneous ones. Exhaustive dossiers were then prepared on the dramatis personae, detailing all infractions, so as to zero in on each crime lord’s vulnerabilities.
