Acid test

Walk around in Bhagalpur and you can piece together the grimy story of crime and punishment. Devraj Khatri remembers his story. ‘‘It was in 1980. I was at the Akash Nagar junction when inspector Mehtaji and DSP Sharmaji along with 20 policemen surrounded me. ‘Give him Gangaajal,’ Sharmaji said. I was overpowered and acid thrown into my eyes,’’ says Khatri, who was then put in the Bhagalpur jail. He denies ever having been part of a crime syndicate. ‘‘I worked as a weaver and the police suspected me in a robbery,’’ he says. But the local people don’t agree.

Bhagalpur still maintains that Operation Gangaajal tamed the criminals who had earlier always escaped because of their connections. One by one they landed in Bhagalpur jail, some living to repent and some like Patel Shah to swear incessantly.

‘‘Once it all became public, we were taken to the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi but none of us ever got back our sight,’’ Shah takes minutes to complete the sentence, interspersed with abuses for anonymous targets.

Khatri lives off the Rs 750 government pension—allotted to 31 of the victims—in a slum at Ishak Chak in the town. His 15 year old son Aswani Kumar supplements the income by distributing gas cylinders and daughter Pinki Kumari is his eyes. At least 10 of those blinded are still around. Bhola Chowdhary sells toddy near Barari, Chamaklal Rai lives in Banka and Lakhan Mandal in Echari. Umesh Mandal lives near the Bhagalpur University. Patel Shah lives in the town’s main market.

The residents say Bhagalpur in the Seventies and Eighties was worse than even the fictitious Tejpur town in Gangaajal. ‘‘We would not dare come out after 5 p.m. They plundered, raped, killed and terrorised us like hell,’’ says a woman librarian in a Patna library who lived in Bhagalpur.

Jha’s film captures this public sentiment and the dilemma of a police officer who wants to be lawbound but can’t. ‘‘Give every criminal Gangaajal,’’ is the mantra that Purshottam Mishra and the librarian chant with as much conviction as the characters in Gangaajal.

‘‘Of the 14 policemen, 13 were acquitted and reinstated in service,’’ says R K Mishra, a lawyer. Mishra remembers two accused being produced in a Bhagalpur court room in 1982, with blood dripping from their eyes. ‘‘I asked the magistrate to prosecute the policemen but he refused. Then I wrote to Advocate Kapila Hingorani in Delhi and The Indian Express brought the issue into national focus and the Supreme Court Chief Justice took it as a writ,’’ says Mishra.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the Express endeared themselves to the people of Bhagalapur. In Gangaajal its equivalent is the impartial editor of Tejpur Express who’s illtreated by the town’s residents for writing against the police.