Fierce Struggle for Spoils of Slain ‘Bandit Queen’

The life of Phoolan Devi, “the Bandit Queen,” was a losing battle against bad men, and even now that she is dead, two of them are fighting to take all she had.

Three masked gunmen killed Devi, 37, last month at the gate of her official residence, a decaying bungalow with a high-class address. It was a modest perk for a member of Parliament who had made her name as a gangster demanding respect for the poor and the weak.

The legend of the Bandit Queen, the low-caste fisherman’s daughter abused at every turn until she took up a gun and allegedly avenged her gang rape by killing 22 high-caste men in 1981, had made Devi very well off for a woman of her lot.

After the book deals, the feature film and the never-ending gifts, Devi left an estate worth more than half a million dollars, including two farms and $200,000 in cash, according to the police.

But she never got around to writing a will, so now the knives are out as people who played their part in an epic life, such as her first and last husbands, fight to carve up what she owned, and take swipes at each other in the process.

Umed Singh married Devi soon after she got out of jail in 1994, and she then tried to divorce him. Now he is suing to get control of her property, which her mother, three sisters and a brother claim is rightfully theirs.

He has also filed notice of a $110,000 defamation lawsuit against Devi’s younger sister, Munni Devi, 27, that claims she and her family accused him of being involved in his late wife’s killing. Police have not named Singh, 36, as a suspect.

“They have made false allegations of murder,” Singh said in an interview.

Then Putti Lal, the villager who had bought Devi as a child bride at age 11 and then beat her so badly that she ran away, called a news conference at his lawyer’s office to announce his claim to the sole right to inherit her property.

Devi, whom Lal bought for a cow, a bicycle and about $2 in cash despite a long-standing law banning marriage to child brides, never got a legal divorce from him, he said.

It is a spectacle that would have disgusted Devi, especially Singh’s claim that she was devoted to him, said the dead woman’s lawyer, Kamini Jaiswal. Devi had tried to divorce Singh, but he didn’t cooperate, and she twice complained to New Delhi police that he beat her, the lawyer added.

The couple “had massive rows” in her office, Jaiswal said, and at least one argument was so bad that the lawyer threw Singh out. Devi kept saying, “Somehow I want to get rid of this man” but never found the courage to tell him to leave, the lawyer said.

“For somebody who had a bandit’s background, she was very conscious of the public,” Jaiswal said. “Initially, when she came to me I used to tell her: ‘If you can’t stay with him, just get rid of him. All you need to do is throw him out of the house.’

“But she said to me: ‘Oh, what will people say? What will society say?’ It was something she clung on to, this public image of hers. You can’t blame her. She’d only suddenly got it and didn’t want to lose it.”

In the end, the Bandit Queen, a heroine to so many women around the world for standing up to men who tried to keep her down, couldn’t conquer a feeling of inferiority born of an ancient stigma: her low caste.

“It’s quite unbelievable where she got that courage from--and how it disappeared,” the lawyer said. “She had a childlike innocence about her.”

Police have arrested three men, and detained at least four others for questioning, in connection with Devi’s killing. Local reports say the man named as the chief suspect was a youth worker in Devi’s Samajwadi Party, but party leaders deny that. Police are continuing their investigation.

Ten of Devi’s relatives, including the mother who sold her as a child bride, still live in the home where she was killed. Singh returns most nights to sleep in her bedroom, with five bodyguards posted outside, according to Devi’s sister Munni.

She spoke while sitting cross-legged on the floor next to her mother, Mulla Devi, 70. The men in the room sat in armchairs, under ceiling fans that slowly churned the damp air.

The white living room walls had large patches of concrete gray, where the paint had chipped away. The TV stand, which doubled as a small shrine to the Bandit Queen, tilted to one side on a broken leg.

Munni Devi insisted that her sister registered all of her property in the names of her mother and brother, who are determined to fight Singh in court.

“This is a conspiracy which he is trying to play,” Munni Devi said. “We have no money. That’s why he expects we won’t be able to fight this case and we’ll land up in jail. He thinks we are village idiots.”

Singh said he is waiting to hear a formal response from Munni Devi before deciding whether to proceed with the defamation suit against her.

Munni Devi has another date in court Monday because a magistrate has declared her a threat to the peace, and to Singh, whom she “abused and threatened with dire consequences,” according to the summons.

The accusation stems from an argument that broke out when, according to Munni Devi, Singh sent a truckload of his political supporters to chant slogans when Devi’s family was still mourning in her home.

The mounting court battle hasn’t silenced Munni Devi, who is shaping up to be Singh’s main political rival in the contest to fill her sister’s seat in Parliament.

She accuses him of mistreating Devi, which Singh denies.

“There were lots of beatings,” Munni Devi charged. “There are two or three reports in the police station against him.” Phoolan Devi’s lawyer confirmed that she had complained about Singh’s alleged abuse to police at the Chittaranjan Park and Gulmahar Park stations.

Devi often complained that Singh drank too much and embarrassed her by being rowdy in her constituency, Jaiswal added.

Singh, whose knee nervously bounced up and down during an interview, says he first met Devi when she was in New Delhi’s Tihar jail, in late 1993. He was drawn to the Bandit Quen, Singh says, because they were both born into the fisherman’s low caste, known as Mallah.

“We had some kind of connection in our previous lives,” Singh said.

He said he called Devi his shakti, or the source of his strength. The Hindi word is often associated with Durga, a goddess with several arms who rides atop a lion and fights evil in the world.

Singh couldn’t remember the date of their marriage, or even the exact month. It was either July or August 1994, he said.

The petition for divorce that he and Devi both signed Feb. 15, 1999, says they were married June 20, 1994. It adds, in lifeless legalese, “that after marriage serious differences arose between parties and they could not adjust with each other.”

“On account of this, parties are living separately from each other since July 22, 1996,” the divorce petition adds. Although the joint request for a breakup gave “no chance of reconciliation,” the case was dismissed Aug. 30, 1999, because Singh failed three times to show up in court, Devi’s lawyer said.

“In all families, you have small, small fights,” Singh said through an interpreter. “We also fought. We also went for a divorce. But we sat down and we compromised.”

During a lifetime of abuse and struggle, Phoolan Devi learned how to put up with pain, so it was a familiar voice of resignation her sister heard when she called to deliver some bad news one day in June.

Singh had taken his wife’s pet green parrot, Bittu, outside on his shoulder, and the bird flew away. Munni Devi said she is certain he did it on purpose because his wife had rescued the bird when it was a little chick, with white feathers. She had found it lying in the yard of her official residence being pecked by black crows and nursed it back to health.

“Phoolan loved the parrot very much and looked after it very well,” her sister said. “Umed Singh just let it go. When I told her, all she asked me was, ‘Did it leave OK?’ She just wanted to see it fly away.”

*

Sidhartha Barua in The Times’ New Delhi Bureau contributed to this report.