Ranvir Sena country angry as King is in jail

In Ranvir Sena country, it doesn’t matter that Singh, who was arrested in Patna on Thursday after eluding the police for eight years, is wanted in more than 25 massacres and 36 criminal cases.

It doesn’t matter that the divide in his village is so deep that the landless Dalits keep to the eastern side, and don’t cross over unless it is absolutely necessary.

What does is his violent defence of the land owning class, his ‘‘sacrifices’’ to protect his own.

So the village that named Singh as its mukhiya when he was just 17 is tingling with anger and a sense of injustice at his sudden arrest. ‘‘We don’t know how and why he was caught. But he did roam around freely in Patna,’’ said Ajay Kumar, a farmer.

In fact, villagers got suspicious when the 40 policemen manning the picket that has been stationed in the village for the past eight years pulled out last week. Then, his brother Shambu Nath Singh sneaked out of the village three days ago.

Singh’s own wife remains in hiding while his two sons—Satinder who is a BSF havaldar and Indu Bhushan, a contractor—occasionally visit the village.

Singh has a cult status in the village where most of the land owning farmers freely admit their membership to the Ranvir Sena. The irrigation facilities, the drainage system, the school building, the administrative block are all credited to Brahmeshwar Singh.

In fact, he is the biggest landowner in the village: apart from the 100 bighas, he owns two houses and a car. Villagers have taken over one of his houses, while his younger brother, Shambu Nath Singh, lived in the second one with his wife and children.

It’s all this land that made him the target of the Naxalites in 1992. ‘‘The Naxalites asked him, why do you have so much land when we have none,’’ said Rabinder Choudhary, one of the Ranvir Sena’s founding members who lives in the neighbouring Belaur village.

The militia was formed in Belaur in August 1994 after a skirmish between the CPI-ML and landlords. One person died, the Ranvir Sena was born.

Belaur is also home to some of the accused in the several Dalit massacres that have charted the Ranvir Sena’s consolidation. ‘‘We will kill all the Yadavs,’’ says an unrepentant Baka Baba, an accused in the Saratua massacre.

But some of the founding members complain of factionalism, of infighting among the cadre. ‘‘The infighting is like the fight between Subhash Chandra Bose and Gandhi,’’ says Choudhary, also an accused in the Saratua massacre. ‘‘But people like Brahmeshwar refuse to bend. For them, bloodshed is the only way.’’