A gang of four, three reporters and me, travelled all night in a taxi from Delhi to a place called Bhind, in Madhya Pradesh, and barely reached there in time to capture this picture and others of a lady dacoit, Phoolan Devi, who was going to surrender before the then-Chief Minister of the state, Arjun Singh. Other national and international media had also travelled there to get a glimpse of the famous ‘Bandit Queen’.
Our taxi had not even crossed the borders of Delhi when my co-passengers, two on my right in the back seat and one in the front sitting along the driver, started drinking, as well as offering drinks to the driver, which was not only against the driving laws but was quite scary. Thankfully, the driver, a young Serd, proved to be a veteran who never lost his balance like my co-passengers.
I was the first of my tribe to reach the place of surrender and position myself perfectly in anticipation to get this perfect picture of her when it actually happened. But I was totally disappointed when a short thin frail woman came forward with her empty gun to surrender. She hardly looked like a leader of a dreaded dacoit gang, nor like the ‘dasyu sundri’ that the media had repeatedly depicted her as.
Looking at such a physically weak woman, I couldn’t even believe that she could fire any shots from the gun she had brought along to surrender. From being repeatedly raped by several men in the ravines of Chambal, gang leader and murderer of 22 upper-caste men in a village called Behmai, Phoolan Devi became a lawmaker after getting elected to the Lok Sabha, and then got herself shot dead in front of her official residence as an MP in New Delhi.
From the day I first saw Phoolan Devi until this day, after an internationally acclaimed film was made by Shekahr Kapoor on her life, her stint at the Parliament and two books having been published on her life, I am still unable to understand what had caused so much media hype over this short, frail, seemingly ordinary woman to catapult her to international fame.
Her only achievement in her life, if it can be called so, was that once in the dead of night she landed up in a village with her gang members, asked all the men to come out, and shot them in revenge, as some of them had raped her earlier.
I’m not sure if all else was just media hype or her destiny.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and The News Porter bears no responsibility.
