Why UP wants to bury journalist who was burnt alive
Several questions are being raised over the investigation into the gruesome murder of Shahjahanpur-based journalist Jagendra Singh, who was burnt alive, allegedly by the police at the behest of Uttar Pradesh minister Ram Murti Verma earlier this month.
Ever since Singh died at Lucknow’s Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Hospital on June 8, the state police has focused its energies on running a mudslinging campaign against the journalist. Right from the investigation officer to the highest levels of the police force, officers are blatantly indulging in the character assassination of the slain journalist. Their intention seems to be to justify the suspected criminal act of Verma, whose intolerance of criticism ostensibly led him to target Singh.
“Jagendra Singh was a blackmailer under the garb of a journalist,” said a senior police officer of the state, when I asked him about the case. “He was playing into the hands of the minister’s political adversaries," alleged another senior police officer, who also suggested that Singh was in a live-in relationship with a "shady" woman. And all that as if to say that the tirade could entitle a powerful minister to get him burnt alive.
To top it all, the UP police has been trying to convince all and sundry that Jagendra not only sprinkled petrol on himself but also set himself ablaze - all this in the presence of policemen who had purportedly gone to his house because of an FIR registered against him.
There is also an effort to establish that the minister was not present in Shahjahanpur the day Singh was killed. Their idea was to somehow legitimise the brutal killing of the journalist, who had dared the minister with his exposé about his alleged corrupt practices on social media.
More than a week has passed since Singh's death, but the police are yet to initiate any concrete action against the accused. The FIR against the minister was lodged only after pressure from the victim's family, who refused to cremate his body. It was only after mounting media hammering that the government suspended the four policemen who had raided Singh's house on the pretext of "questioning" him. However, no criminal action has been taken against them. What speaks even more glaringly of the double standard of UP police is the fact that an earlier FIR lodged by Singh against the minister's goons, who allegedly assaulted the slain journalist on April 28, has remained completely unheeded.
It is not as if the police in Shahjahanpur alone is being insolent. Even in Lucknow, cognisance has not been taken of a video in which Singh had pointedly named each of those who allegedly burnt him alive. Senior IPS officer Amitabh Thakur, currently posted as IG (civil defence), who personally recorded Singh's statement in a voluntary capacity, sees enough reason to treat the recording as a "dying declaration", which serves as concrete evidence under the Evidence Act. But the investigating officers are ignoring his opinion.
That systems in UP rarely work without a political push is evident in the police's approach. UP's most powerful minister and chief minister Akhilesh Yadav's uncle, Shivpal Yadav, had already made it clear that the government would not initiate any action against the minister until something "substantive" was found in the FIR registered against him and his cohorts.
The demand of the victim's family for a CBI probe into the incident was also overlooked on an interesting plea. "We have seen how we gave in to popular demand for a CBI probe and even sacked a minister (Raja Bhaiyya), but eventually he was given a clean chit by the investigation agency and re-inducted into the cabinet," a top Samajwadi Party leader argued. "The same thing happened in the Badaun rape incident. The CBI accepted the findings of the state police", he said.
Amidst the flow of these arguments, chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has not uttered a word on the issue, and neither has his "super chief minister" father Mulayam Singh Yadav. Thanks to their patronage, minister Ram Murti Verma goes scot free.