JOIN USFrom Allahabad to Prayagraj
Prayagraj (Allahabad) has been in the news since the murder of Umesh Pal right outside his house in late February. Umesh Pal was the sole witness in the 2005 Raju Pal (BSP MLA) murder case. There were arrests, bulldozers, and police encounters of the accused in Umesh Pal’s murder. The latest sensational murders took place on April 15, when gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed (Samajwadi Party) and his brother Ashraf were killed on live TV, as the police just watched.
I was in Allahabad from 2003-2006 as a branch head of my bank and had exceptional experiences. There were three mafia dons -- ‘Bahubalis’ -- at the time. Atiq was the reigning don. Karwariya brothers, the ‘Brahmin face’ of the mafia, had their own areas of control, and Nand Gopal Gupta ‘Nandi’, of the Vaishya caste, was widely seen as the upcoming don. Nandi is a minister in the Yogi government; some members of the Karwariya family are also with the BJP.
One of the things Allahabad is known for is Anand Bhavan, the home of Motilal Nehru and Jawaharlal Nehru, which became a centre of the freedom struggle. Many meetings of the Congress were conducted in a ground-floor room of this palatial building. The number of books Jawaharlal had collected in the almirahs evoked awe. Gandhi used to stay in one of the first-floor rooms whenever he was in Allahabad. Jawaharlal’s room had a big photo of him standing on his head, doing the Shirshasana.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s will is prominently displayed on the book counter. One is moved by it: “When I die, I should like my body to be cremated. If I die in a foreign country, my body should be cremated there, and my ashes sent to Allahabad. A handful of my ashes be thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad to be carried to the great ocean that washes India’s shore. The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want these to be carried high up in the air in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.”
I devoted some mornings to clear the plastic and other pooja material at the Sangam (confluence) of Ganga, Jamuna and the mythical Saraswati. My friend Ram Narayan Singh, then DIG of Allahabad, was running a cleaning drive and asked me to volunteer for it. A Mahant of the Hanuman temple complained to then CM Mulayam Singh Yadav that this was interference in religious work. The DIG was shunted to Varanasi.
Allahabad is also known for Chandra Shekhar (Tiwari) Azad and Alfred Park, where he sacrificed his life in 1931. He was a wanted man in the Kakori Conspiracy case. Trapped by the police at Alfred Park, he resisted them till he had bullets in his revolver. When he had only one bullet left, he shot himself. He was 24.
Allahabad had several publishing houses, prominent among them being Lok Bharti Publication, owned by Dinesh Grover. He was 72 when I met him in 2003 but had the agility and mental alertness of a young man. He knew exactly which books there were in his office-cum-godown-cum-showroom and seemed to know every one of the thousands of titles and even the artist who had designed the cover of each book.
What were the common people of Allahabad like? I was once interviewing a lady who had applied for a Pradhan Mantri Rozgar Yojana loan, along with our loan officer and a clerk. Suddenly, in the midst of a question about the project report, she lowered her voice and requested us not to sanction the loan, saying that her husband would misuse the loan. The man, who was keeping a watch on the proceedings from outside the cabin, was in the business of making ‘blue films’, she said!
We rejected the loan. Two days later, an old man entered my cabin and told me that his daughter, whose loan application we had rejected, was being mercilessly beaten by her husband.
In another instance, a woman was trying to save her brother, whose business had failed and the loan had turned bad. Our loan officer had gone to the borrower's house and warned that he could go to prison. His sister came to the branch and requested the officer not to pursue recovery. She offered herself, to be used in any manner he saw fit, in return. The officer was speechless. He reported it to me. We decided to recommend writing off the loan.
Such were the people that I encountered in Allahabad. In Prayagraj today, there are encounters of a different kind.