Raja Bhaiyya had nowhere to run, or rather he chose not to. He couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams that Mayawati would hold him by the scruff of the neck and tie him up with POTA. Akhilesh Singh proved to be more pragmatic. No false bravado for him. The moment he realised that the Chief Minister had claimed his flock of seven Congress MLAs, made them her own and chosen to spite and snub him, he took the next flight out. When the police were planning to raid his house in Rae Bareilly — in true Mayawati copybook manner — to arrest him on February 6, the leader of the breakaway Congress group was flying out of Lucknow to an undisclosed destination. ‘‘I am in a situation where only two paths are visible — life or death,’’ he told his friends and family on his cellphone, minutes before becoming an absconder for the state police. Failing to arrest him, the police have done the next best thing — they have gone for his men. On Saturday they arrested Amit Swami, who had allegedly confessed that he was ‘‘engaged’’ by Akhilesh for executing a murder in Rae Bareilly last year. Akhilesh, against whom 43 cases have been registered so far, including 11 of murder and three under the Gangster Act, is a history-sheeter with the Rae Bareilly police. It runs in the family. His father, late Ghunni Singh, was also a history-sheeter and the grandfather had allegedly been declared a dacoit during British rule. With such illustrious lineage and an equally commendable track record, he stayed out of the reach of the long arm of law by using his political clout. In fact, he gave Indira Gandhi in Rae Bareilly his valuable support when she used to contest from that constituency and extended the favour to Arun Nehru. But when Mayawati recently invoked the National Security Act against him and put him in jail, the Congress — which had even made him the deputy CLP leader earlier — lost no time in expelling him, and now he is on the run. ‘‘Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya, who is facing POTA is not a criminal (take that with a pinch of salt) but Akhilesh is a criminal by birth,’’ says Manoj Kumar Pandey, chairman of the Rae Bareilly town board. His brother, Rakesh, was murdered on May 3, 2002, and Akhilesh had been named as an accused. ‘‘He has built up a private army — Akhilesh Singh Youth Brigade — which spreads terror in entire Rae Bareilly, the place from where he had been elected MLA three times since 1993 when he first won on a Janata Dal ticket.’’ According to local sources, the first-ever case was registered against him in 1984, one of murder. Since then many cases have been lodged against him but he managed to evade arrest using his political clout which extended beyond the Congress which was his home since 1996. But Akhilesh gained notoriety as a co-accused in the Syed Modi murder case along with Sanjay Singh and Amita Modi in 1988. His car had been used for the murder of the badminton player. As he gained a profile in the world of crime, his assets swelled. Till 1988, he owned 27 bighas of land in Lallupur village and a four-room house, but now he has a bank balance of Rs 14.50 crore (as per police records), three petrol pumps, one palatial house under construction in Lucknow at Gomti Nagar with an estimated cost of Rs 1.5 crore, 350 bighas of land in Lallupur, immoveable property worth Rs 50 lakh in Rae Bareilly town, a hotel and a market worth Rs 2 crore in the town,’’ said Dinesh Singh, former head of Harchandpur village who has lodged an attempt to murder case against Singh. Mayawati must now be looking at confiscating all this to bring Akhilesh out of his hiding place. Like Bhaiyya, for the first time in his life he stands to lose.
