Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (43 page)

The surrender was carefully negotiated—not to say choreographed—with Phoolan, still armed, walking out of the ravines and coming to the surrender site to perform obeisance to portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu goddess of power, Durga. Bollywood music blasted from loudspeakers, then quieted. Finally Phoolan stepped to the podium, wearing her trademark red bandanna—a latter-day echo of Garibaldi’s red shirt—and raised her .315 Mauser rifle above her head. The crowd of nearly ten thousand that had gathered roared.

Phoolan had insisted on more than just a showy surrender. She had been a skillful negotiator with the police superintendent, insisting on the return of her father’s land that had been stolen by her cousin Maiyadin. In addition, she requested that her brother be given a government job, and that the family be allowed to keep her goat and cow. The demands were hardly excessive; indeed, in the public’s eye they seemed far more in line with simple justice. It was a shrewd move by Phoolan, which burnished her public image. Despite her illiteracy and inexperience in such matters, she seems to have had an innate grasp of the nuances of branding. In any event, the surrender ceremony of the bandit clearly foreshadowed the rise of the politician.

She was to be a progressive legislator, not just a firebrand, following a path very much in line with Eric Hobsbawm’s assertion that “social bandits are reformers, not revolutionaries.”
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But before any part of this bright future could unfold, there was prison. After the surrender ceremonies Phoolan was bundled off to jail in Gwalior, where she spent the next eleven years. She was never tried or convicted on any charges.

Her fellow gang members did agree, after some years, to be tried on a range of charges. But none of them had to do with the massacre at Behmai, as no witnesses were willing to come forward—and all the gang members were acquitted. Phoolan viewed with scorn their willingness to be tried, and remained a tiny but haughty prisoner. Finally, in 1994, as the fast-growing political muscle of the hundreds of millions of lower-caste Indians, more than three-fourths of the electorate, was finally being flexed in a significant way, Phoolan was pardoned. Instead of returning to the ravines, she decided to run for political office.

*

In 1996 the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata movement swept into power, breaking the nearly half century of control that the Congress Party had exercised since Indian independence. Phoolan, now thirty-two, ran as a candidate of the Samajwadi (i.e., Socialist) Party, based in Uttar Pradesh, and proceeded to win a seat in the lower house of the Indian parliament. Among other things, public office gave her immunity from prosecution against the many charges still pending against her for the years of
DACOITY
.

Phoolan had spent the time between her release and the national elections cultivating her brand as a woman who was simply seeking justice. In the process she turned herself into one of the most celebrated figures in the country. Curiously, more than a century earlier, Abd el-Kader and Garibaldi had become global celebrities, but in a burgeoning information age replete with well-tooled feminist tropes, Phoolan’s fame was largely limited to India. Even there, views were mixed. Perhaps this was because of her criminal past, particularly her leading role in the Behmai massacre.

But it was not only her rap sheet that kept Phoolan’s fame from spreading like Abd el-Kader’s or Garibaldi’s; she took some actions of her own that limited, or at least clouded, perceptions of her. At a petty level there were charges of abuse of office in the form of nepotism and cronyism, and of arrogance as seen in her use of clout to reroute trains on the already chronically cluttered Indian rail system in order to ease her own travel. Then there was her famous feud with the producers of the 1994 film
BANDIT QUEEN
, supposedly based on her life and directed by Shakhur Kapur. Phoolan took great issue with the film’s claim to be a true story and succeeded in having it banned in India—hardly the way to promote one’s brand.

Her great objection to the film was that it presented her, as she told the journalist Mary Anne Weaver, “as a sniveling woman, always in tears, who never took a conscious decision in her life. I’m simply shown as being raped, over and over again.” When Weaver pointed out that she had indeed been subjected to terrible sexual abuse, Phoolan replied with great force:

You can call it rape in your fancy language. . . . Do you have any idea what it’s
LIKE
to live in a village in India? What you call rape, that kind of thing happens to poor women in the villages every day. It is assumed that the daughters of the poor are for the use of the rich. They assume that we’re their property. In the villages the poor have no toilets, so we must go in the fields, and the moment we arrive, the rich lay us there; we can’t cut the grass or tend our crops without being accosted by them. We are the property of the rich. . . . You will never understand what kind of humiliation that is.
¹⁴

Her point was that sexual exploitation was a fact of life for the poor women of India, almost all of whom become similarly scarred and yet most of whom persisted, finding their way in life even in the face of this awful injustice.

Phoolan dedicated her legislative efforts to trying to end such practices through the force of law, but she had only modest success in curtailing such long-standing, culturally tolerated customs. Beyond the treatment of women, she also fought hard—again with modest results at best—to improve the lot of the poor by bringing them clean water, electricity, education, and medical care. Her appeal at the polls was also problematic: she was voted out of office in 1998, though reelected in the following year.

Thus her life continued to unfold. She had become a Buddhist “to escape the perpetual damnation of the Hindu caste system.”
15
She lived in comfort in a government-supplied home and often walked to her work in parliament. She married again, though just how happily remains a subject of speculation and dispute. Nonetheless the rhythms of her life were flowing in a kind of harmony that could hardly have been expected, given her rough beginnings. On July 25, 2001, the old life seemed to reach back for her when three men approached her as she came home for lunch after a morning’s legislative work. They gunned her down on her doorstep and made good their escape via a waiting car.

In the following days, responsibility for the assassination was alternately claimed and denied, but the reason for the murder seemed clear: it was vengeance for the Behmai massacre. The widows of the men killed at Behmai praised those who killed Phoolan, none of whom have ever been convicted of the crime. As for
DACOITY
itself, the practice lingers on in India but in ever-diminishing proportions. Phoolan’s nation has come into the twenty-first century, it seems, determined not only to make its mark internationally as a commercial and politico-military power but also to pursue many of the reforms she fought for at home.

Like Garibaldi, Phoolan was a nation builder, another example of how this process may be pursued from the bottom up. In her case, the use of social banditry in pursuit of reform ties her closely to the “healthy” mode of criminal activity that supports the rise of justice in modern states through the deeds of the leader who, in the words of Reinhard Bendix, “fuses personal courage and largesse with an implacable ruthlessness.” The temptation is always there, Bendix notes, to explore the darker side of banditry, lapsing into practices like those of the Sicilian mafia that tended to shore up the power of the corrupt few and “support or extend their dominion over the population.”
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Phoolan managed to avoid being drawn to this latter realm, which was perhaps her greatest triumph.

In her last years Phoolan suffered the smears of those, including rival
DACOITS
, who claimed she had become a gang leader only because of her relationship with Vikram Mallah. In the West, the equivalent criticism of a successful professional woman would be that she owed her advances to her husband, father, or other male benefactor. True, Phoolan initially learned her fieldcraft from Vikram, and her status as his consort had much to do with her ability to form and lead a new gang of her own.

But these facts do not diminish her accomplishments. Phoolan
WAS
a highly skilled
DACOIT.
She could run all night through the maze of ravines, shoot with great accuracy, and displayed a mental toughness that was clearly forged in the crucible of her early years. While she acknowledged the importance of her connection to Vikram, she used a reference to India’s famous woman prime minister, Indira Gandhi, to make the point that, however one comes to power, one must be able to exercise it skillfully. As Phoolan told Mary Anne Weaver, “Wasn’t Indira Gandhi Prime Minister of India? Yes, if she had not been Nehru’s daughter, she might not have been, but she lasted in office far longer than he did.”
17

Men often rise to positions of power and authority on the basis of their lineage and connections—a look at the Bush and Kennedy clans in the United States should suffice to confirm this—but ultimately they succeed or fail, make their mark or don’t, on the basis of their own merits. So it will be with future generations of women leaders. So it was with Phoolan in her limited world that ranged from the ravines to the halls of government.

Whatever the limits imposed on Phoolan’s scope of operations and time in the field, her mastery of the art of the irregular should be unquestioned. She proved as indomitable and as skilled in bush tactics as Robert Rogers, the great leader of rangers in the eighteenth-century North American wilderness. Her ruthlessness in rising to leadership as a bandit rivals that of Mina, the pioneering Spanish
GUERRILLERO
. And her ability to elude her vastly more numerous pursuers, for years, compares favorably with the evasive maneuvers of the great Boer insurgent Christiaan de Wet. Phoolan even went a step beyond all of them in terms of her ability to translate her field operations into political power—not the highest office, but an actual place in government as a reformer, helping break her society’s bonds of class, caste, and gender. She will likely be seen as a guiding spirit of India’s social modernization, a process that will surely be the key to this remarkable country’s rise to the ranks of the world’s great powers.

Beyond what her story has to say about the development of Indian society, Phoolan’s career may well have heralded the renaissance of social banditry as a world phenomenon. For what we call the “age of terror” is one replete with examples of insurgents and avengers. In the course of blurring the lines between crime and terrorism, these bandits are giving fresh energy to irregular warfare as well. But Phoolan was hardly the only exemplar of this emerging trend.

CHECHEN LION:
ASLAN MASKHADOV

http://exhibition.ipvnews.org/photo_119.php

For nearly two hundred years, Russians have been trying to gain and sustain control over Chechnya, a small land located in the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas. Their efforts began in 1816 when a cousin of Denis Davydov, General Alexei Ermolov, made the first incursion. He achieved little lasting success, but the Russians did not give up on their plans for conquest. The conflict resumed in earnest in 1829 and continued for thirty long years of irregular warfare, finally culminating in the surrender of the Chechen leader Shamil. He was a contemporary of the great Algerian insurgent Abd el-Kader and had actually met him briefly when they were both still young men, before their lives were overtaken by war. Shamil was the classic insurgent type of bandit—as opposed to the “noble robber” and “avenger” types—what Eric Hobsbawm has called “the primitive resistance fighter.”
1
His defense against invasion was epic and highly skilled, often running rings around Russian forces—literally—a situation depicted so searingly by a veteran of this fighting, Leo Tolstoy, in his wonderful novella
THE RAID
.

In the decades after Shamil’s surrender, social bandits, insurgents, and avengers continued to flourish, and the Russians never felt secure about their control of the Caucasus. The Chechens proved, again and again, that they were among the best natural fighters in the world. Their strength was augmented by the Sufi brand of Muslim mysticism that had come to their country several centuries earlier, giving them a profound, powerful faith to accompany their fighting spirit. They struggled against tsarist rule, then, after the Russian Revolution, against Communist control. They were still resisting Russian suzerainty in the late 1930s, even as the great fascist threat loomed.