This was published, edited, here.
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| Rosalia - foreground - sitting outside the polling booth in Lapa. |
"They say Lapa is home to criminals. To them I say, Jharkhand is full of criminals. If criminals lived in my village, would we have such a peaceful election?" she said outside the school, booth number 18 within Torpa assembly constituency as the number of votes polled shot up to 132 in the third hour at 10.10 AM, from 11 and 70 each in the first two. The booth in Lapa, within Karra block, had 1047 registered voters from the village's five hamlets.
Even Rosalia - a resident of Lapa's Sarnatoli hamlet in which the school is located and who is also the president of Barkaspur panchayat - would not easily admit to the existence of the forces that have helped Lapa help pretend peace existed on Tuesday morning.
As it turned out, the village's most famous product had visited the previous night. "Dinesh told me to vote for the Jha-Pa candidate. I told him Jha-Pa would merely go and support a larger party and that we should support one of the two national parties. He just repeated that we have to vote for Jha-Pa," said an individual who claimed to have met with Dinesh Gope on Monday night.
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Dinesh Gope is the supremo of the People's Liberation Front of India, the largest left wing extremist splinter group in Jharkhand. Gope was born in the Morhatoli hamlet of Lapa. At times during this year, the PLFI was so virulent that it exceeded the CPI-Maoist in terms of violent incidents. The organisation, which has of late become all about the collection of protection money from individuals and enterprises, is often blamed to be the primary reason why Jharkhand has topped the country in LWE-related incidents in 2012: PLFI rarely fights the security forces and instead prefers to mostly kill civilians alleging them to be police informers. The PLFI is active mainly in the South Chotanagpur division - Khunti, Simdega, Gumla, Ranchi and Lohardaga districts.
The PLFI, which supported its former Zonal Commander Paulus Surin's successful bid from jail to be the Torpa MLA in 2009 on a JMM ticket, has abandoned him this time. Gope was reportedly angry with Surin's inability to successfully lobby the Hemant Soren government to lift a police picket outside a school owned by him. The PLFI has instead supported Jharkhand Party - Jha-Pa to villagers - candidate Suman Bhengra in Torpa. This will only raise the blood pressure of Surin, who never camped in Torpa during his tenure, instead preferring to travel all the way to his quarters within the state assembly campus each night.
The PLFI's support to Jha-Pa only raises suspicion that the party has now become a proxy for the extremist organisation. This should eventually lead to questions about its legality - Jha-Pa chief Anosh Ekka and MLA of Simdega district's Kolebira is currently in jail for a murder he allegedly ordered the PLFI to commit. Ekka, a former minister who is also a candidate, has long been suspected to be the main source of funding and political power to the PLFI. Ekka has also nominated his wife Menon Ekka to the Simdega constituency. Those who have heard the police's recording of tapped conversations between Ekka and PLFI area commander Vikram Gope claim Gope - and his bosses were reluctant to murder para-teacher Manoj Kumar, but had to carry it out on Ekka's insistence.
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Only the Jha-Pa managed to campaign within Lapa: this newspaper spotted a single cloth-banner featuring Ekka's picture on a tree in the village. "The Congress tried to come in, but some boys from the sangathan [PLFI] threatened them en route and turned them away," said a villager. Lapa is located on the border of Karra and is at the intersection of Ranchi's Lapung, Khunti's Torpa and Gumla's Kamdara, which makes it a tough spot to police. Across the river that runs along Bakaspur panchayat is Kamdara's Banpur, where the PLFI allegedly killed seven people on November 3. Gope was reportedly present for the massacre.
Rosalia was a government teacher and anganwadi sevika before she was elected unopposed. She does not deny the PLFI had a hand in it. "They insisted that I should be the mukhiya. I declined, but they kept coming back. I was scared, I even told the police station incharge that I would not contest," she said. Later, the police named her in an FIR along with multiple local self-government representatives for being allegedly PLFI supporters. The case against her has since been dropped. "I finally told the party that I will leave my good job and contest if they made sure I was elected unopposed. I didn't want to be the laughing stock of the village at this old age," she said.
On Tuesday, Lapa did not have the booth agents of any party: it would have been wasteful, because the villagers had already been told whom to vote for. The village received electricity only in November: they thank outgoing legislator Paulus Surin for it. Youngsters were conspicuous by their absence in the queue outside the booth. "A large number of villagers are out of the state, working as labourers. My son in working in someone's farm in Punjab," said Barla, who lost another son to migration: "He died the same day he arrived in Goa to work at a seafood-processing factory. They could not even send back his body."
Barla insists she does not support the PLFI. "I will not even contest in the next panchayat elections. I admit I have not been able to bring vikas to this village; I am taking solace in the fact that I managed to get 25 ration cards issued in my panchayat," she said. An individual who is familiar with the governance of the panchayat said the PLFI demands anywhere between 5-10 percent "levy" on every expense. "We don't even have shops in Lapa. The party asks for money even from them. The panchayat representatives are afraid to be corrupt for one major reason - if the party hears they take money, they will demand cuts from them, too," said the villager.
Barla refused to talk about how the PLFI interferes in local administration. However, she chuckled when she talked about how she managed once to convince Gope to do the right thing. "His boys were taking supplies away from our four public distribution shops. I managed to meet Dinesh and pleaded with him not to trouble the poor villagers. They stopped," she said.
Despite all this, Gope - a Yadav - retains the support of a large number of people in his village. "He took up a gun to resist the Rajputs of Barkatoli [one of the five hamlets of Lapa]. The Rajputs were troubling our girls, stealing our things and looking down on us. Now, they are scared," said the villager who refused to be named for this story.
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