The forest closes in as the road becomes narrower. The vegetation along the Tikonia-Banbirpur road, leading up to the Nepal border in Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh, becomes thicker as the shadows cast by the teak and saal trees fluctuate with streaks of sunlight. Closer to habitation in the Nighasan area, the forests give way to fields, mainly of sugarcane and paddy. They are cultivated predominantly by the Sikh farmers of the region that is part of the fertile Terai belt. It was into one such sugarcane field that Ashish Mishra, son of Union minister for state for home Ajay Kumar Mishra, escaped after his convoy comprising a jeep and two SUVs allegedly ran over farmers dispersing after their peaceful protest, crushing four of them to death on October 3. An on-duty local journalist was also mowed down. Three others, who were in the vehicles, were allegedly lynched by the protesters.
This Election Season In UP, Lakhimpur Kheri Is The New Political Battlefield
The Opposition is hoping for a rich election harvest in Uttar Pradesh but Lucknow appears to be a long way from the killing fields.
Ashish, popularly known as Monu bhaiya, was arrested on October 9 on charges of murder, rioting and conspiracy after he failed to establish his alibi. He had claimed he was four kilometres away in Banbirpur—where the Mishras have their ancestral house—waiting for the annual ‘dangal’ (wrestling match) to begin. October 3 was an important day for him as deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya had agreed to be chief guest at the ‘dangal’ at Maharaja Ugrasen Inter College. Ashish’s father organises this event on Gandhi Jayanti every year, but it was postponed by a day this year to accommodate Maurya’s schedule. It was supposed to be a show of strength to showcase Ashish’s popularity in the area and pitch him as the BJP candidate from Nighasan seat in the forthcoming UP elections.
Slogans on a wall in support of Ashish Mishra’s candidature for the Nighasan assembly seat.
The hoardings and graffiti that greet one on entering the area are testimony to his political ambitions. “Yuvaon ki pukaar, Monu bhaiya ab ki baar (Call of the youth: this time Monu bhaiya),” screamed one of them. It was a given in this Brahmin-dominated area Ashish, 40, would carry forward his father’s legacy. A two-time MP from the area, Ajay Mishra was recently inducted into the Union cabinet as the only Brahmin face from UP. With Brahmins comprising over 12 per cent of the state’s population, the BJP wanted to ensure they found representation in the cabinet.
The convoy of cars that ploughed into the farmers had gone to receive Maurya. He was initially supposed to arrive in a chopper that was to land on the local playground. However, hundreds of farmers had congregated there to show black flags to the deputy CM and condemn what Ajay Mishra had said at a public meeting regarding their ongoing protests. Mishra, locally popular as Teni Maharaj, had proclaimed: “Aise logon se kehnaa chahtaa hoon, sudhar jao nahi to saamna karo aake… hum aapko sudhaar denge, do minute bhi nahi lagenge (I want to tell these protesters they should either mend their ways or face me. I will mend their ways. It won’t take even two minutes.)”
Local people in Lakhimpur Kheri and Sitapur
Maurya decided to travel by road instead, and finally cancelled his programme following the violence. Ever since it has been a spiral of grief for the families that lost their kin in Tikonia, and a shot of adrenaline for sundry political parties that rushed to pay their condolences to the bereaved. The tragic incident leading to the death of eight people has laid bare all the socio-political frailties. It has highlighted the underpinnings of caste in the state, the innate sense of entitlement among the socially privileged and the simmering anger waiting to erupt on the ground.
To manage the law and order situation, the administration banned the entry of political leaders and cut off internet services in the area to prevent the circulation of inflammatory videos. There was no police investigation for 48 hours after the incident. The Crime Branch forensics team arrived to inspect the unsecured spot, including the two charred vehicles, only on the third day, citing intermittent rainfall as an excuse. Bloodstains were washed away by the rain and the fire had already erased the fingerprints.
“We found two cartridges in the burnt jeep,” says Crime Branch officer Vidyaram Diwakar as he inspects the site. “We will match them with the weapon and nail the accused. We also have technical tools that will help pinpoint the location of the accused from the cell phone towers.”
On October 6, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was allowed to take a five-member delegation to meet some of the families of the deceased. His sister and party general secretary in-charge of UP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who was released from detention in Sitapur that day, was part of the delegation along with Punjab CM Charanjit Singh Channi and Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel.
They first visited the family of Lovepreet Singh, 19, the youngest protestor to die, followed by that of journalist Raman Kashyap. Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav also visited the families of Kashyap and the killed farmers. A Bahujan Samaj Party delegation led by general secretary S.C. Mishra met the families and constituted a team of lawyers to fight the case on their behalf pro-bono.
A villager at a police checkpoint on the Sitapur-Lakhimpur inter-district border.
Lovepreet’s body lay in a glass casket as his father Satnam Singh cleared a section of his paddy field, tears flowing from his eyes. He was making space to cremate his eldest child as his two younger daughters consoled their mother. “He promised me that he would be back by evening. I got a call from him when he was being taken to the hospital. All he could say was ‘papa jaldi aa jao’ (papa, come soon). But it was too late by the time we reached the hospital,” says Satnam Singh.
“He wanted a better life for all of us and was preparing for IELTS so he could go to Canada. What will I do with the compensation money? I want justice,” he says, his tears giving way to anger. While representatives of all political parties have visited his house to pay their condolences, there was nobody from the ruling BJP. “Only officers of the local administration, who came with the compensation cheque,” he says.
Bichhattar Singh, a septuagenarian farmer, doesn’t think there will be justice. “We do not matter as we cannot make or break a government. Monu bhaiya is a Brahmin and the community’s votes matter. Why do you think Teni Maharaj was made a minister at the Centre? Because they want the powerful Brahmin community to vote for the BJP. The government doesn’t care for Sikhs or for farmers. Haryana and Punjab are buying paddy from farmers at Rs 1,900 per quintal. We are not even getting Rs 1,100. We have lost all hope,” says the dejected farmer.
Home to nearly one lakh Sikhs—of the total 6.5 lakh population—Lakhimpur Kheri is often referred to as ‘mini Punjab’. Comprising just under three per cent of the total population of the district, it is the largest for any district in UP. They may not count for much in electoral terms, but the reverberations of the incident are bound to be felt in poll-bound Punjab and to some extent in Uttarakhand, with the adjoining Udham Singh Nagar district having a sizeable Sikh population.
Durga Devi, a Modi fan, at a bicyle repair shop at Bijnore chauraha.
Hari Om, who runs a tea stall in the Kheri area, believes Ashish Mishra would still win if he is given a ticket. “His arrest won’t make much difference. As long as Teni Maharaj is there, no other party can win from this seat,” he says. Ajay Mishra, who used to settle disputes in the village as a zila parishad member even before he joined the BJP and was elected as the Nighasan MLA in 2012, has the reputation of a ‘bahubali’ (strongman). His was the only seat that the BJP won among the nine in Lakhimpur Kheri. In 2014, he fought the LS poll and became the first Brahmin to win from the constituency that had traditionally sent Kurmi (OBC) MPs to the Lok Sabha.
Though the Lakhimpur Kheri incident may not dent the BJP’s electoral prospects in UP too much, it will make a difference in terms of perception. Sanjay Kumar, political analyst at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, believes the incident has pushed the BJP on the back foot. “The government conceding to the demands of farmers so quickly is an indication of that. It has definitely damaged the image of the BJP government in the state,” he says. According to him, it’s too early to say whether it’s a turning point in the run-up to the elections, but points to “dangerous signals” for the BJP.
The faultlines on the ground have certainly become deeper, something that BJP leader and MP from neighbouring Pilibhit, Varun Gandhi, warns about. Two days after he was removed from the party’s national executive, ostensibly for his vocal support for the protesting farmers, he tweeted: “An attempt to turn #LakhimpurKheri into a Hindu vs Sikh battle is being made. Not only is this an immoral & false narrative, it is dangerous to create these fault-lines & reopen wounds that have taken a generation to heal. We must not put petty political gains above national unity.”
Indeed, a narrative is being woven that many protesting formers were ‘Khalistanis’ sporting t-shirts with Bhindranwale’s picture. Pradeep Gupta, who owns the biggest sweets shop in the market, was managing Ashish Mishra’s campaign in Nighasan. “Some of them may have been genuine farmers, but many had come from outside, may be from Punjab, to create unrest here,” he says. “A farmer would never react the way those Khalistanis reacted by lynching the BJP workers.”
Family members of 27-year-old BJP worker Shubham Mishra say he was beaten up so badly that they could not recognise his face. “There are videos in which you can see farmers wearing Bhindranwale vests thrashing the BJP workers. We could identify Shubham only from his underwear. His clothes too had been torn away,” says his distraught father Vijay Mishra. “Just because he supported the BJP, does that make him less human? Does that give the farmers or Khalistanis the freedom to lynch him? Why didn’t Rahul or Priyanka visit us? Haven’t we lost our son? His one-and-a-half-year-old daughter didn’t even get to know him. What kind of justice is that?”
Shubham was Ashish Mishra’s classmate and had joined him to support his campaign. “He was a happy-go-lucky person who had transformed during the lockdown. He had become responsible and his business of construction material was looking up. Whenever his father asked him to do better, he would say laughingly that if he became any better, god will call him early as he is known to call good people early,” says his uncle Sanup Mishra before breaking into tears.
The UP administration never announced compensation for Shubham’s family or for the families of the other two slain BJP workers, Hari Om Mishra and Shyam Sundar. Compensation cheques were quietly sent to them. The Congress-run governments in Punjab and Chhattisgarh announced additional compensation of Rs 50 lakh each for the families of the deceased farmers and the journalist, but excluded the BJP workers.
“It is not about humanity or empathy. The Lakhimpur violence and the deaths have become election issues. ‘Ab ki baar Lucknow ka raasta Lakhimpur se ho kar jayega’ (this time the route to Lucknow will go via Lakhimpur),” says Amit Verma, Shubham’s neighbour. The issue, though, doesn’t seem to have much resonance outside Lakhimpur Kheri. The government’s future appears to be hinging more on economic indicators.
Officials handing over a cheque to the widow of journalist Raman Kashyap, at Nighasan.
At the Bijnore chauraha (crossing) on the outskirts of Lucknow, the discussion veers around the economic fallout of the lockdown, job losses, unemployment, inflation and the efficacy of the Yogi Adityanath government’s schemes. Vidyanshu, who runs a cycle repair shop near the crossing, says the lockdown set him back financially and he will probably take a long time to recover. “Corona ki problem to thi magar uss se zyada mehangai ki hai (Corona was a problem, but inflation is bigger),” he says. He lists out some government schemes that do not seem to be working properly. These include the scholarship scheme, Ujjwala, free power connection and the gaushala (cow shelter) scheme.
“There isn’t much awareness about the schemes,” says Ram Dayal Gautam, who has come to get his cycle repaired. “People got free gas connections and subsidy on purchase of cylinders for some time under Ujjwala, but we are all paying Rs 900 per cylinder now. The gaushalas are not working and cows are dying on the roads. Power connections are free, but power is expensive and supply is erratic.”
While they all claim the contest will be between BJP’s Yogi Adityanath and SP’s Akhilesh Yadav, there is some interest in what AAP is offering and its performance in Delhi. The Congress and the BSP are not occupying any mind space of the voters yet. “It is too early to say anything,” says Kaushalendra Kumar, a taxi driver in Lucknow. “Six months is a long time in politics. People will make up their minds in the last few days before the elections.”
Vidyanshu’s octogenarian grandmother Durga Devi wants the last word on the discussion – “Hum to Modi ko hi vote denge. Uska bolne ka tareeka bahut solid hai! (I will vote for PM Modi only. His speech delivery is solid).”
Lucknow is certainly far removed from ground zero at Lakhimpur Kheri.
(This appeared in the print edition as "The Killing Fields")