Question for Mulayam clan: Who helped Mathura squatters thrive?

The Jawahar Bagh conflict in Mathura proved to be a kind of ‘Jalianwala Bagh’ for Superintendent of Police Mukul Dwivedi, SHO of Farah police station Santosh Yadav, and several others. Twenty four people, including the two police officers, were killed and over 40 people were injured in clashes during a drive to evict illegal occupants of the land in Mathura district.

The deceased police officers, alongside other fellow servicemen were pitted against an armed murderous mob that owed its allegiance to a hitherto unknown outfit – the Swadheen Bharat Subhash Sena (SBSS). There could not have been a worse manifestation of lawlessness than this in the most populous state of the country.

Worse still, was the fact that the response from the Akhilesh Yadav government was simply pathetic. All it could do, was to announce an ex-gratia payment of Rs 20 lakh per family of the deceased, and to order a magisterial probe.

An otherwise mighty minister, Shivpal Yadav – Akhilesh’s uncle and ruling Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s younger brother – appeared to be completely clueless at the media briefing held on Friday, and was unable to convey the state government’s position to the public at large.

He didn’t speak even a single sentence of substance that could instil confidence among the people of Uttar Pradesh – a state where not even the lives of senior police officers like the SP and the SHO could be protected, that too when they were on duty carrying out orders of the high court and the state administration, to evict the ‘outfit’.

This so called spiritual-social outfit had actually been a nuisance in the area – using violence as means to browbeat lowly officials and staffers of various government departments – they are one of the most blatant examples of unauthorised occupation, of around 200 acres of green space.

Shivpal’s sole defence was that the miscreants were outsiders, but the fact remains that the leader of this outfit, Ram Vriksh Yadav, was from Azamgarh in eastern UP.

The only noteworthy thing Shivpal Yadav did in his media briefing was to shift the blame for this shameful incident to the “communal forces” – an allusion to the BJP for supporting the Arajak Tatv (miscreants). The magisterial probe will look for lapses, if any, he said.

The fact that the SBSS members charged on the police, not hesitating even a bit in aiming and shooting bullets at SP Dwivedi and SHO Yadav, and that they charged at other policemen with various firearms, is an indicator that the outfit are not like any ordinary encroachers, and are a murderous group with sinister designs. The SBSS also claimed a  spiritual connect with Baba Jai Gurudev.

The outfit made some of the most irrational and outlandish demands, which no government worth its name would negotiate even for a moment.

Two years ago, in April 2014, this group had come to occupy parts of Jawahar Bagh on the pretext of resting for two days, while marching from Satna in Madhya Pradesh to New Delhi. But then they never left the place, and captured the whole of the Bagh and turned it into the headquarters with some kuchha-pucca structures.

The state administration did nothing to evict them. The matter reached the high court and appropriate orders for eviction were first issued in May 2015. Again, the state government didn’t fulfil its obligation to carry out the higher court’s order, both in letter and in spirit.

The question remains, however, that how could the law enforcement agencies and the state allow this over-ground Sena to grow, store arms and ammunitions to use against the state machinery in the heart of the holy Mathura city. Even the loss of 24 lives, including two senior police officers, have not stirred the conscience of the Samajwadi Party-led state administration.

UP is preparing to go to Assembly polls early next year, and the politics from now on is bound to be played around this incident.

But, it’s time that the Akhilesh Yadav government spared a thought on how it has run the state so far, particularly in the law and order scenario – where the police force attaches greater importance to locating the stolen buffaloes of Azam Khan , than on intelligence gathering and upgrading itself as a force.

Hundreds of armed hooligans were, after all, squatting at the Jawahar Bagh for over two years. It is simply not possible that the police were not aware of their retaliatory intentions and capacity. Either the UP Police is grossly incompetent, or someone at the top in the government was giving it tacit patronage till things got out of hand.

As a political party, the BJP is free to make as much noise as it wants , but the fact remains that both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his designated number two in the union government, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, represent UP and thus they can’t merely keep questioning the Samajwadi Party government. The BJP, too, had a duty to perform.