In 1999, on a monotonous bus journey from Lucknow to Allahabad to unwillingly (and by my own reason also unnecessarily) represent my father at the wedding of a long forgotten and wholly dispensable cousin, I was woken by the sudden jolt caused by the brakes. Tried more by reluctance than tedium, I angrily asked the bus conductor what we were supposed to do at the roadside dhabha near Pratapgarh, where we had halted, when Allahabad was barely half an hour away. The conductor, a 40-plus man wearing a grey safari suit of the yore with oiled hair and a streak of betel-red spittle foraying out of the right corner of his mouth (I am not very sure if he had the famed black leather bag also slinging from his wrist), told me in a singsong way which sounded more like a threat than a suggestion: “Kuchh kha lijiye sir. Raja Bhaiya ka dhabha hai. Yahan toh sabko rukna padta hai. (Eat something here. This dhabha belongs to Raja Bhaiya. Every vehicle has to halt here.)”

Of course, he was lying. But what had become the undeniable truth by then was the fact that Raja Bhaiya was looked upon by the crooks as their leader and protector.

And if even after 20 years of his existence in Uttar Pradesh politics, despite being a criminal primarily all along, Raja Bhaiya still remains a politician whose services seem indispensable to the current chief minister Akhilesh Yadav (so much so that he was brought out of prison to be made minister in charge of prisons), that conductor was perhaps a clairvoyant. He had anticipated his rise and rise in UP politics, while I believed all along that though criminals can rise in politics ephemerally, eventually they fall and perish.

Raghuraj Pratap Singh, alias Raja Bhaiya, now divides his time between jail and council of ministers, depending on who holds power in the state.

The murder charges against Raja Bhaiya, who resigned as the state food and civil supplies minister on Monday, are not the first and certainly not the most glaring. In 2007, an Uttar Pradesh police officer who had gone to the Allahabad high court saying he and his family were being harassed by the state government ever since he acted against Raja Bhaiya was killed in what authorities called was a road accident. As the circle officer of Kunda in 2003, the deceased RS Pandey had raided Raja Bhaiyya’s palace on the orders of then CM Mayawati and had arrested Raja Bhaiya’s father Uday Pratap Singh. The matter is now being investigated by the CBI.

In a raid, the police also recovered an AK-56 rifle and a skeleton from a pond in his residence. The skeleton was allegedly that of one Santosh Mishra. It is believed that a scooter-borne Mishra lost his life for allegedly refusing to give way to Raja Bhaiya's cavalcade. In another incident, Rajendra Yadav, the prime witness against Raja Bhaiya in the Santosh Mishra case and in another case under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), was gunned down in Kunda on February 3, 2004.

The murder took place when Raja Bhaiya and his father were being produced before the courts in Kunda and Allahabad, respectively. 

In 2002, on an FIR filed by dissident BJP MLA Puran Singh Bundela of alleged kidnapping and threatening with dire consequences, Raja Bhaiya was arrested on the orders of then chief minister Mayawati. The state government later declared him a terrorist, and he was sent to jail under POTA, along with his father and cousin Akshay Pratap Singh.

Akshay managed to get bail subsequently but Raja Bhaiya’s pleas were rejected on several occasions.

However, all POTA charges against Raja Bhaiya were dropped within minutes of the Mulayam Singh Yadav government coming to power in 2003. Later, however, the apex court debarred the state government from dismissing POTA charges against him.

Even when POTA was repealed in 2004, the court again refused to release him. But as Mayawati and Mulayam governments took turns to manage the state, Raja Bhaiya continued his journey from jail to ministries and back.

In the interim, his brand of goonda politics has only risen. He wields considerable influence over five assembly constituencies in the Pratapgarh region: the actual candidate may never speak, at times not even mentioned in his speeches, when the don-turned politician is present in election rallies in this region. Voters in the region never had a choice. The fear of Raja Bhaiya’s murderous ways has always been maintained, and even promoted, by his henchmen as a brand.

In such a scenario, policing in Pratapgarh has always been a challenge. How can one police a district where the biggest criminal, and also their hero and protector, is the serving minister whose writ is forced by an army of henchmen to become the law?  

Deputy superintendent of police Zia Ul Haq, who was shot dead allegedly by Raja Bhaiya’s associates on Saturday, does not come as a surprise to those who have known his lengthy criminal record. According to details, Haq rushed to a village in Pratapgarh whose head had been shot over a land dispute. However, when he reached the village to investigate the violence, he was himself mysteriously killed.

Allegedly, Haq’s body was dragged through the village by four of Raja Bhaiyya’s associates. Parveen Azad, the slain DSP's widow, also named Pratapgarh district panchayat chairman Gulshan Yadav, Raja Bhaiya's driver Guddu Singh and two others, Rohit Singh and Hari Om, as accused in her complaint. The complaint states that they had killed Haq at the behest of the minister.

Criminal cases against Raja Bhaiya are just ordinary matters. And prison all along has only been his second home. His brand of goonda politics is indelible in UP, at least as long as the present set of political players dominate the scene.