Don’t politicize crime in UP

Murder, the natural culmination of gang war, is being exploited by politicians and posed as a law and order problem. At the same time, I would reiterate that I am neither justifying the brutal murder or Krishnanand Rai, a muscle man, nor am I glorifying Mokhtar Ansari for what he has done and stands for.

Leaders like Mr LK Advani and Mr Atal Bihari Vaypayee will go by what the local BJP unit has to say. But that does not change the facts of the case. For instance, the fact that the Uttar Pradesh Government led by Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav acted swiftly, a First Information Report was filed, and the accused were arrested displays an unambiguous commitment to an impartial inquiry and neutrality in dealing with such incidents.

The media, however, tried to project the killing as a law and order problem and Mr Rajnath Singh began a dharna. Ironically, Mr Vajpayee, who came to flag off the Nyay Yatra to focus on the alleged lawlessness in the State, went on to compare the situation in Uttar Pradesh with that in Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Bihar.

This is a peculiar phenomenon in present day politics. Newspapers and magazines will publish anything. For instance, one magazine published an interview with Mr Romesh Bhandari, whose hostility towards a particular political party is well known, and subsequently there was quite a hullabaloo in Parliament on the basis of this interview. Such media coverage and subsequent political response should be avoided, as gun-toting, trigger-happy mafia dons have no political orientation.

This will become crystal clear if we elaborate the list of those who were killed during President’s Rule or during the BJP-BSP regimes. In 2002, Mansur Ahmed, SP MLA, was murdered during Mr Rajnath Singh’s reign in broad daylight within the compound of Raj Bhavan amidst hundreds of MLAs. Laxmi Shankar Yadav, a former Minister and PCC president, was killed when Mr Motilal Vora, then Governor, was at the helm of affairs.

I am not referring to these killings to absolve the present Government of its failure in protecting Krishnanand Rai, but to illustrate that such incidents are not new. This violence can be checked by an unconditional pledge by political parties to desist from patronising criminal elements, and not by Mr Rajnath Singh’s political stunt of sitting on a dharna to take on the Samajwadi Party Government.