ON 16 DECEMBER—a day that has come to be associated with the 2012 gangrape of a young physiotherapy student in Delhi—a trial court in Delhi announced verdict in another case of rape, by a former Bharatiya Janata Party leader. The court convicted Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a member of the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly, for rape and intimidation of a minor. Sengar was convicted under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or POCSO. The court reprimanded the Central Bureau of Investigation, which investigated the crime, among other reasons, for delaying the registration of offenses against Sengar. The CBI had halted the progress of the case against the legislator, the apex court said, without a concern for the anguish of the survivor and the ordeal suffered by her family. On 20 December, the BJP MLA was sentenced to life in prison.
About a year and a half earlier, in April 2018, a two-judge bench of the Allahabad High Court passed an order for the immediate arrest of Sengar, who was then a member of the BJP. A minor in his native village, Makhi, in Unnao district, had accused him of raping her in June 2017. She had further alleged that his cronies had gang raped her.
In the months that followed, the minor had attempted various times to have Sengar and his associates held to count, only to be discouraged, intimidated and threatened by the local police and the administration. She approached the chief minister Adityanath, but so massive was Sengar’s clout that even after the chief minister’s office forwarded her complaint, Unnao district officials refused to register an FIR against the legislator. The high court judges wrote in their order: “The disturbing feature of the case is that the law and order machinery and the government officials were directly in league and under the influence of Kuldeep Singh.” A report by a Special Investigation Team on the charges, the court noted, revealed “how police personnels and doctors were/are under the influence of Kuldeep Singh and how they tampered with evidence and tried to create terror and intimidated the prosecutrix and her family members.” The court had then directed the CBI to look into the allegations.
The days preceding the high court’s order had seen shocking turns related to the allegations against Sengar. On 3 April 2018, the Makhi Police arrested the minor’s father for a two-decade old case of possessing unlicensed arms. In collusion with the local police, Sengar’s brother, Atul, and his accomplices beat the father before he was taken into custody. On 8 April, the survivor attempted to self-immolate in front of the chief minister’s office, demanding protection for her family. The next day, her father died in police custody, owing to his wounds. The post mortem showed that he had suffered various external injuries on his body. On 12 April, amid a rising public outcry for his suspension, six MLAs lobbied in support of Sengar with the chief minister Adityanath, who in turn discussed the matter with Amit Shah, then the BJP president. Coming a day after this meeting, the order whipped up a media frenzy. By the evening, local news channels were speculating that Sengar would be arrested that very night, and began following him around.
What resulted was a dramatic display of Sengar’s dominance. At around 10 pm, with reporters and media vans crowded outside, the legislator and some of his supporters met the strongman politician Raghuraj Pratap Singh, popularly called Raja Bhaiyya, at the latter’s residence in Lucknow. The meeting fueled rumours that Sengar would surrender soon, before the police could arrest him.
Just before midnight, the legislator headed towards the residence of the senior superintendent of police—the district chief of police force—with the media in tow. In a show of strength and support, four Thakur legislators accompanied Sengar: Akshay Pratap Singh, a member of the state legislative council, or MLC; Anil Singh, an MLA from the Purva assembly of Unnao district; Shailesh Kumar Shailu, an MLA from the Gainsari assembly, who is also Sengar’s brother in law; and Yashwant Singh, a former MLC.
Under the glare of bright lights and TV cameras, Sengar confronted an inspector guarding the SSP office, asking to be let in. “Channel ke saathi keh rahe hain bhagoda”—Our friends on the news channels are calling me a fugitive—Sengar told the police officer. The harried inspector tried to pacify the legislator and assured him that he need not worry. “If the administration is looking for you, you will know,” he said. Sengar addressed him as much as the cameras: “I have come to request SSP sahab and our friends in the media, when you need me, call me, I’ll come.” Firmly saying, “thik, namaste!” Sengar left the premises. Despite court orders for his immediate arrest, the police only arrested him the next day. He has been in jail since.
The arrest did not end the survivor’s ordeal. Earlier this year, on 28 July, along with two of her aunts and her lawyer, she was on the way to meet her uncle, who was lodged in a Rae Bareli jail in connection with several cases filed by the Sengar brothers. A truck with a blackened number plate hit the car she was in. Her aunts, one of whom was a key witness in the case, died. She and her lawyer were first taken to a Lucknow hospital and later airlifted to the AIIMS Trauma Center in Delhi. She was discharged in September.
After the accident, it emerged that in mid July, the survivor’s mother had written a letter to the then Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, saying that Sengar’s accomplices had continued to intimidate her family. Finally, the Supreme Court took cognisance of the cases. On 1 August, it transferred four cases related to the incident, including the rape case against Sengar and the accident case, to a trial court in Delhi, asking it to conduct daily hearings and wind up these cases in 45 days after the commencement of trial. The court directed the CBI to complete investigation in the accident case within a fortnight. At first, the investigative agency charged Sengar and nine of his aides in connection with the accident case, with criminal conspiracy, murder and attempt to murder. In October this year, the CBI dropped the murder charges from the case.
Sengar is a four-time MLA who has represented four different constituencies in Unnao district over the last two decades while contesting elections from three different parties—a rare winning feat in Indian politics. Even Raja Bhaiya, one of the most influential Thakur leaders in Uttar Pradesh, has been an MLA for six terms from a single assembly constituency, Kunda. Sengar has previously represented the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party—two strong contestants in the state politics—in the assembly. The last assembly election Sengar won was in 2017, from Bangarmau, a Muslim-majority constituency in Unnao district, as a member of the BJP. This was also the first victory for the saffron party in Bangarmau since Independence.
Sengar’s sway in state politics and his nexus with the police and administration cannot be explained by merely tracing his political connections. I spoke to over a dozen political leaders, police officials and also referred to court records. What emerged was an image of a powerful Thakur leader, with a strong, feudal hold over panchayat-level bodies, who is politically indispensable for leaders looking to win elections in the region. This, combined with the muscle power Sengar is believed to exercise through his brothers, Atul and Manoj, allowed him not only to resist public outrage and political pressure and exert his influence from inside jail, but to avoid answering for his horrific crimes against a young woman and her family.
IN COMING TO ITS OBSERVATIONS on Sengar’s influence and the allegations against him, the high court bench had relied on the report of an SIT constituted by the state police. The SIT had been formed on 10 April, after the minor’s father died, and delivered its report the next day.
The minor told the SIT that Sengar raped her at his home on 4 June 2017. Between 11 June and 20 June, the court noted she told the SIT, Sengar’s men kidnapped her. She said a neighbour, Shashi Singh, had misled her with the offer of a job. Shashi’s son, Shubham, and another man named Awdesh raped her repeatedly. When she tried to escape, she was beaten and intimidated, the report said. Shubham kept the minor in his home during this period, where, she told the SIT, she was raped multiple times. She alleged that she was then sold to a person in Agra for Rs 60,000. On 20 June 2017, the police found her and brought her back to the Makhi police station. “It is alleged that en route, she was continuously threatened and warned by the police officials to say whatever she would be instructed or else her father shall be killed as has been directed by Kuldeep Singh,” the court noted.
It further stated, “She was not examined by the Doctor, rather, the Doctor advised to maintain good relation with Kuldeep Singh.” The report said the minor told the SIT that the Makhi police never took cognisance of her version of the complaint. So, though the local police registered an FIR against Shubham and Sengar’s other loyalists for gang rape committed against the survivor between 11 June and 20 June, the police did not name the legislator in it.
The minor’s family then approached the Lucknow police in June 2017, which refused to register the case too, the report said. She then wrote to the chief minister’s office in August. A special secretary to the chief minister forwarded the complaint to a local superintendent of police, directing him to investigate and report back in a week. Even then, no case was registered against Sengar. “Despite the said complaint being endorsed by the office of the Chief Minister, nothing was done,” the court noted. “At the behest of Kuldeep Singh, rather, coercion was being exercised upon the prosecutrix and her family members not to proceed with her complaint.”
In February 2018, the minor’s mother reached out to a district court in Unnao to have their complaint registered. The court’s proceedings moved slowly, taking months. In the intervening period, the report said, “several false cases were lodged against father and family members of the prosecutrix … to pressurize them to fall in line with the dictates of Kuldeep Singh.”
While the hearing in the district court continued, according to the report, Makhi police arrested the minor’s father on 3 April 2018 for a two-decade old case, allegedly for possessing unlicensed arms. Sengar’s brother, Atul Sengar, and his men, as per the report, beat up the father before handing him over to the local police. In collusion with the legislator and his men, the police kept the father in its custody. He died on 9 April. “One day before the death of the deceased-father, prosecutrix attempted self immolation in front of the Chief Minister’s residence due to the frustration received by her and the family at the hands of the law and order machinery of the State, in particular, district Unnao,” the court noted.
On 11 April, without waiting for the district court’s order, the police finally registered a case against Sengar for raping the minor. Based on the SIT report, the police also registered a case in the death of the girl’s father. The next day, the government recommended that three related cases—the alleged gang rape by Sengar’s men, and the death of the minor’s father and the arms case against him—be handed over to the CBI.
The court expressly criticised the approach of the state authorities towards the cases. The government had recommended a CBI investigation only into the three cases registered in April 2018, but not into the rape case against Sengar. The court said, “The manner in which the entire incident, starting from 4 June 2017 alleging rape by Kuldeep Singh till the FIR came to be registered against him on 11.04. 2018, we find that every incident was intermingled.” The court said, “No explanation was offered for leaving the first FIR.”
The advocate general, who appeared on behalf of the government, had further argued that the authorities could not arrest Sengar merely on the basis of the FIR until they find credible evidence against him. To this, the court said, “The approach of the learned advocate general not only exudes an unpleasant favor, but raises doubts about the bona fides of the police authorities at the highest level.” The high court ordered the arrest of Sengar and his men and also ordered CBI to reopen the gang-rape case. After the midnight drama at the SSP’s residence, the CBI arrested Sengar on 14 April.
KULDEEP SINGH SENGAR entered politics in 1987, when, in his early twenties, he first became the pradhan, or village head, of Makhi. The village, where the legislator grew up, is his maternal grandfather’s home. Before him, his grandfather ruled Makhi as its pradhan for several decades. Since Independence, only twice have Sengars not held the post of Makhi’s pradhan. Sengar forayed into assembly politics in early 2000, and his mother took over from him. Presently, his brother Atul’s wife, Archana Sengar, is the pradhan.
A senior Uttar Pradesh politician, who knew Sengar’s grandfather and saw the legislator’s rise in politics, spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. “In the beginning, Kuldeep with his brothers used to do vasooli”—extortion—“from passenger buses.” The senior politician, who is now a BJP member and a longtime legislator. He recounted an incident about Sengar’s personality that illustrated how he built up his image in the early days. “I was an MLA then. When I used to go to the court for people’s work in Unnao, Kuldeep would tell me that I should just visit his home and have tea whenever I went there. Initially I wouldn’t understand why he insisted for my visit every time,” the senior politician said. “Later the locals told me that since the police often went after him”—for his illegal activities—“he wants you to sit with him and be seen with you.”
Ganga Bux Singh, a veteran leader who was twice elected to the legislative assembly from the Hadha constituency—once from the Congress and once from the BJP—is understood to be Sengar’s mentor. Hadha was one of the assembly seats which ceased to exist in 2008, after the election commission enacted a delimitation plan. Singh now lives a retired life but continues to be a member of the BJP.
Sengar became a member of the Youth Congress in the late 1990s. Sengar “was very ambitious and in hurry to become an MLA,” Bux Singh said. Bux Singh was then the president of Unnao district Congress committee. “When the membership campaign was taken up in the Youth Congress and internal elections were held, Kuldeep wanted to become a member of All India Congress Committee”—the central leadership of the Congress party. “I told him I can’t decide that and only a central leader can take that decision. So I spoke to my senior and told him about Kuldeep’s will.”
Bux Singh said was told that Sengar is “too young to become a member of AICC. Let’s make him a PCC”—Pradesh Congress Committee, the state-level body—“leader for now.” Sengar did not take kindly to this decision and left the party.
In 2002, Sengar became an MLA first time from Unnao Sadar, as a member of the BSP. Between 2002 and 2007, UP politics was going through a tumultuous phase. The state saw two chief ministers—the BSP chief Mayawati and the SP head Mulayam Singh Yadav—within five years.
Shashank Shekhar Singh, whose father Ajit Singh was also a strongman Thakur leader and a two-time MLC from the SP and the BJP, told me, “During 2002-2007, the SP was trying to poach in Thakur leaders from BSP. My father had also helped Mulayam Singh Yadav in breaking away many MLAs from BSP and bringing them into the SP fold.” Shashank was the BSP candidate from Bhagwantnagar in the 2017 assembly election in UP. He lost the contest.
Sengar, too, shifted to the SP during this phase. The person responsible for bringing him into the SP was an influential Thakur leader within Samajwadi party: Arvind Singh Gope, an MLA from the neighboring Haidergarh constituency and the only Thakur leader in Mulayam Singh’s cabinet in 2003. Gope is Sengar’s brother-in-law. Sengar’s family connection with Gope helped him emerge as a Thakur leader in Unnao between 2007 and 2012, Shekhar said.
From the beginning of his career, Bux Singh said, Sengar was in hurry to establish himself as a leader of the Thakur community—a powerful caste group in UP politics, of which the chief minister Adityanath is a member as well. Sengar was keen to grab all the region’s savarna votes—comprising largely the Thakur and Brahmin communities—before another Thakur leader took over. Bux Singh, a Thakur himself, told me that he also suffered politically for not being a “bahubali”—typically a political strongman with criminal connections that strengthen his power—and eventually lost his hold on his savarna constituencies.
Many leaders I spoke to said that Sengar’s rise filled in a gap in Unnao’s upper-caste politics, and coincided with a weathering in the region’s Thakur leadership. Before Sengar, Deepak Kumar, a Thakur muscleman who was also an MLA from the SP, ruled the roost in Unnao. Kumar had been unwell for a while, and died in 2014. Before him, it was Ajit Singh— Shashank’s father. Ajit Singh was murdered in 2004, at his farm house. With both of them out of the picture, in recent years, Sengar emerged as the unchallenged Thakur leader of Unnao.
Deepak Kumar’s wife, Manisha, who contested 2017 assembly election from Unnao, told me that Sengar was afraid to cross her husband when the latter was alive. In a similar vein, Shashank said that his father enjoyed a greater popularity among people than Sengar. The legislator became powerful because “he had no opposition,” Shashank said. “There was no one to challenge him.”
Sengar’s involvement in extortion and illegal mining is established local folklore, and he is understood to have strengthened his shadow empire of power and influence during his time in the BSP and SP. Surya Narain Yadav, the president of the Unnao district Congress committee, has known Sengar since his days in the Youth Congress. Yadav noted that Ganga Katari, the riverbed region that is notorious for illegal mining, fell in the jurisdiction of the Unnao Sadar and Banagarmau assembly constituencies, both of which Sengar has represented. Sengar had been an MLA from three out of four unreserved assembly constituencies in the Unnao Lok Sabha constituency: Unnao Sadar, Bangarmau and Bhagwantnagar. The fourth seat, Purva, is represented by his now confidante and a fellow Thakur leader, Anil Singh. Anil was among the four leaders who accompanied Sengar on his midnight visit to the SSP’s residence in Lucknow, before his arrest. Sengar won Unnao Sadar on a BSP ticket in 2002 and then Bangarmau and Bhagwantnagar, both as an SP member, in 2007 and 2012 respectively. During his time as a leader in this region, Yadav said, Sengar “probably came in touch with new mafia groups and started giving them patronage.”
In 2016, Laxmikant Bajpai, then the president of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, lodged a complaint with the state Lokayukta, or corruption ombudsman. Bajpai named over a dozen SP MLAs, including the then state minister Gayatri Prajapati, in an illegal mining scandal of thousands of crores. Sengar was reportedly among the accused, and reaped benefits to the tune of Rs 125 crore.
Bajpai did not confirm or deny his subsequent party colleague’s inclusion in the list. He told me that he compiled the corruption cases into 42 files and gave these to the Lokayukta. He said he had left the files with the party’s office after leaving the president’s post in 2016, and no longer had copies. A video report in Dainik Bhaskar noted that nobody dared to complain about Sengar’s involvement in illegal mining owing to his proximity with administrators and the police.
Several leaders also told me that the minor’s father and uncle once worked for Sengar and had been involved in illegal activities. Many said that the father and the uncle stopped working with Sengar in early 2000, when they challenged Sengar in Pradhan’s election in the village. The duo later left Unnao and had been working in Delhi.
By 2015, Sengar’s empire in Unnao was so strong that he was ready to defy even his party leadership if not he was not given what he wanted. In the zila panchayat election in January 2016, Sengar wanted to field his wife, Sangeeta, on an SP ticket. The party, however, decided to nominate Jyoti Rawat, the wife of another Thakur MLA, Jayprakash Rawat. Sengar did not pay the party’s decision any mind. His wife entered the race, and Sengar put his might behind her candidature. Sangeeta won the election and continues to be the district president of the Unnao zila panchayat.
So well known is Sengar’s ability to win seats in the Unnao Lok Sabha jurisdiction that even Hriday Narain Dixit, a Brahmin leader who is currently the speaker of the UP assembly, had to turn to him to win a seat in the 2017 election. Between 2012 and 2o17, Sengar was an MLA from Bhagwantnagar. He decided not to run for the seat in 2017 and backed Dixit instead, ensuring his victory. According to Shashank, Dixit, who had by then lost four consecutive assembly elections, won only because Sengar let him fight from his seat. Dixit “isn’t very active in local politics but he holds a huge post,” Shashank said. Vacating his seat for Dixit “made him Sengar powerful.”
That election marked a turning point in Sengar’s political career—he joined the BJP, and won it a crucial seat in Bangarmau, from where he had earlier won on an SP ticket. An MP candidate from Unnao, who lost the Unnao Lok Sabha to the BJP candidate Sakshi Maharaj in 2019, said that Sengar “doesn’t belong to a party, he uses party, depending on what is going to happen in the political scenario in the coming future … Such people don’t live with an ideology.”
Soon after winning from the BJP, in April 2017, Sengar was seen sharing a stage with the chief minister Adityanath, Dixit, and Raja Bhaiya, at a book launch. At a public event in Unnao, in February 2018, Shivpratap Shukla, a former minister of state in the finance ministry in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first cabinet, revealed the story behind Sengar’s shift to the BJP. Though the FIR against Sengar was yet to be registered, the allegations against him were well known. Yet, the former minister upped Sengar’s stature. Shukla said that even when leaders were jostling to get ticket from BJP for 2017 assembly elections, Sengar did not approach BJP to join it. Gesturing towards Sengar, who was sitting on the stage, Shukla continued: “It was me who personally went to his home and asked him to join the party. Only then, he has agreed.”
Sengar has won the party valuable victories. Anil Singh was key to such a win. In March 2018, in the election for the Rajya Sabha seats from UP, Anil, then a BSP member, voted in favour of the BJP. Anil had won the 2017 assembly election from Purva seat on a BSP ticket. Sengar poached Anil away ahead of the election. The latter’s vote was crucial in snatching away at least one seat from the BSP. The BJP won 9 out of 10 Rajya Sabha seats that election. The BSP president Mayawati soon expelled Anil officially. Justifying his vote to the journalists, Anil had said: “A Kshatriya is supposed to always fight for the right, protect others. That is what I have done. I did what I did for the people who voted me.”
Sengar’s capability to win someone any seat in Unnao was not limited to his being a free legislator, and seemingly undiminished by jail. He was instrumental in ensuring that the BJP leader Sakshi Maharaj won the Unnao seat in the latest general election—held close to a year after Sengar was arrested. In May 2019, after his win in Unnao was announced, Sakshi Maharaj went to meet Sengar at Sitapur Jail in Unnao, to thank him. He told journalists, “Sengar is one of the most popular lawmakers, so I came to thank him after the elections.”
Udayraj Yadav, a four-time MLA from Purva who lost his seat to Anil in 2017, said he approved of Sakshi Maharaj’s act. Sengar’s wife “is the president of Unnao Zila Panchayat. She campaigned for Maharaj, so she must have done so at the direction of Kuldeep,” Udayraj explained. “So if Sakshi Maharaj went to thank him, it’s not a big deal.”
After Sengar’s expulsion from the BJP in August 2019, the media began to raise questions about his continuing membership of the UP assembly. Dixit told a newspaper that Sengar would not be disqualified. A suspension or even expulsion from a party, “per se, didn’t automatically lead to disqualification of any legislator,” Dixit said. He said that legislators could only be disqualified if they voluntarily give up the membership, if they defy their party leadership’s order on a vote, or if they are convicted in a criminal case by a court. Without a conviction, Sengar has retained his MLA post even behind bars.
FOR OVER A YEAR after his arrest, the trial in Sengar’s case continued at snail’s pace at a CBI court at Lucknow. In the first two weeks of July 2018, according to news reports, the CBI filed its chargesheet in three cases—the rape allegations, the gangrape and the death of the minor’s father—one after another. The agency charged Sengar with kidnapping, criminal conspiracy, abducting and inducing a girl, among other charges, under the Indian Penal Code. It also charged him for sexual assault on a minor under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. Shashi Singh, the neighbour who had taken the minor to Sengar’s home, was also charged as an accomplice. In the case of the assault on the minor’s father, the agency charged Sengar’s brother Atul as well as other associates of Sengar’s.
In August, one of the witnesses, Yunus Khan, a grocer in the village, died mysteriously. Khan was a witness to the assault on the minor’s father—Atul and his men beat the father in front of the entire village. The minor’s uncle alleged that Khan had been poisoned. The court direct that Khan’s body be exhumed for post mortem, but his viscera report did not show any traces of poison.
The minor’s family, however, had started questioning the CBI’s integrity only a month after Sengar’s arrest. Her mother submitted an affidavit to the Allahabad High Court, saying that the agency was not conducting a fair investigation into her husband’s death. The court, in turn, asked the CBI to submit a status report in a sealed cover to the judges.
A year later, on 12 July 2019, the girl’s mother wrote to Chief Justice of India that Sengar’s men continued to intimidate the family and that they needed protection. Later that month, the truck with the blackened number plate hit the car in which the minor, her family members and her lawyer were traveling to Rae Bareli.
On 1 August, Ranjan Gogoi, the chief justice of India at the time, took cognisance of the incident and ordered an enquiry into the delay in delivering the mother’s letter to him. The CJI, with two other judges, also ordered CBI to investigate the accident case and file its report within two weeks. At the time, four cases related to the rape and subsequent incidents were being heard by a CBI court in Lucknow. The CJI transferred these trials to Delhi’s Tis Hazari Court. It asked the district court to also hear the accident case once the report was filed. It fixed a deadline of 45 days to finish trials in all the cases. The apex court also directed the Central Reserve Police Force to provide protection to the survivor and her family, as well as to shift her uncle from the Rae Bareli jail if the jail authorities were concerned about his security. In September 2019, the survivor’s statement was recorded by holding a court at the AIIMS Trauma Center, where she had been airlifted on the Supreme Court’s instruction. “It was Kuldeep Singh Sengar who conspired to have me killed in the car-truck crash on the Rae Bareli highway,” she told the media. “There’s little doubt about this.”
ONE REASON behind Sengar’s winning streak across constituencies in Unnao is said to be his hold on panchayat-level bodies, most of which are headed by his loyalists. Two weeks after the Supreme Court’s order, the president of the Ugu Nagar Panchayat, in Unnao district, put out an Independence Day advertisement that featured Sengar alongside pictures of Modi and Adityanath.
The president, Anuj Dixit, said he put out the advertisement at his own cost and would do it again as long as Sengar was his MLA. Ugu falls in the Bangarmau assembly constituency. “Sengar is an MLA of our area that is why his photo is there,” Anuj told the media. “Till the time he is our MLA his photo can be put up. I am not a member of any political party and what they say, does not concern me. I have not mentioned any party in the advertisement.”
The same month, the chairperson of Bhagwantnagar city corporation, Rinku Shukla, was caught on camera bribing jail staff to let him meet Sengar at the Sitapur Jail. A gram pradhan of a village in Unnao district, Rakesh Mishra, was also caught on camera speaking to jail staff to let him in.
According to Shashank, Sengar’s administrative management through panchayat bodies was the reason the former lost the assembly election in 2017. Since Sengar’s wife headed the zila panchayat in Unnao, Sengar had the “power of the district president.” The legislator “floated tenders for all works—which was related to my constituency Bhagwantnagar— before the election,” he said. Shashank said that Sengar then stopped payments to contractors for those tenders “so that he could control them and also the people”— candidates, workers, leaders—“from breaking away from the party.”
The leaders I spoke to believed that the illegal activities allegedly executed by Sengar’s brothers plug other gaps—such as a funds crunch, or hostile rivals–in running his empire in Unnao uncontested. The legislator’s brother Atul is accused of firing at an additional superintendent of police, Ramlal Varma, an Indian Police Services officer, in 2004. Varma is said to have raided the Ganga riverbed on a tip-off where Atul was carrying out illegal sand mining. Though he was hit with three bullets, Varma survived the incident.
Varma, now promoted to the director inspector general rank, confirmed to me that the incident took place, but declined to name anyone or to comment on the Sengar brothers. In the first week of August, Varma had told NDTV that he had to file an RTI with the government to learn about his case and that the case diary was stolen from the local police station. Soon after that interview, Varma stopped speaking publicly. He told me, “Actually I’m not in a position to give you any version without the permission of my higher authorities … I don’t know what happened to the case.”
When insisted, Varma said, “You can understand it can snowball into a disciplinary matter.” Varma’s comments suggest that he had been asked to refrain from speaking to the media about something that almost took his life in the line of duty.
Several local leaders I spoke to told me that Kuldeep’s both brothers, Atul and Manoj Sengar, were also involved in illegal mining, using illegal means to win railway contracts, and extortion from transport, hotel businesses and parking lots. Across party lines, all leaders I spoke to said that Sengar’s brothers were notorious for their criminal activities. Some even believed that Sengar himself was not involved in any wrongdoing, but that his brothers may have dragged him into it. But there were many who said that his brothers could not have enjoyed the impunity were it not for his patronage. On the condition of anonymity, a veteran leader from Unnao told me that Sengar had lately been telling those who visited him in jail that he was in trouble because of his brothers. When I asked Bux Singh about this, he said he did not buy it because Sengar “could be in trouble once or twice, but then he can also publicly say that he didn’t have to do anything with them. But, he never did it.”
I could not speak to Sengars’ family but Kuldeep’s brother-in-law, Shailesh Singh Shailu, an MLA from Gainsari, claimed that all charges against Sengar and his brothers are not true. He described the cases as “a political conspiracy.” By contrast, the high court had noted: “It is clear that accused have done everything that is possible to create terror in minds of victims, to tamper with evidence and kill the father of the prosecutrix, in the presence and with the connivance of the police.”
SENGAR HAS BEEN SENTENCED to life in prison. Under the POCSO act, he was convicted for the offence of being a public servant committing penetrative sexual assault on a child. The four other cases—related to the murder of the survivor’s father, the gang rape of the survivor by Sengar’s cronies, the illegal-arms case against the father and the accident in which survivor’s two aunts and driver were killed while the woman and her lawyer were severely injured—are still going on. The court acquitted Shashi Singh, who had been charged as an accomplice.
Sengar had submitted to the Delhi court that he was not in Makhi at the time the rape took place. While announcing its 16 December verdict, the court noted that Sengar’s alibi was not proved “even by preponderance of probabilities.” The testimony of the survivor, the court said, “has been unblemished, truthful and has been proved to be of sterling quality to arrive at a conclusion that she was sexually assaulted by accused Kuldeep Singh Sengar.”
The court also said that the CBI had “selectively leaked” information from the witnesses’ statements to put a cloud over the complainant’s case. The judge noted, “It appears that somewhere investigation in the instant case has not been fair qua victim of crime and her family members.” He added: “In my considered opinion, the investigation has suffered from patriarchal approach or inherent outlook to brush the issues of sexual violence against children under the carpet apart from exhibiting lack of sensitivity and humane approach.”