Raghuraj Pratap Singh, more commonly known as Raja Bhaiya (born October 31, 1967) is an Indian politician. He belongs to Bhadri family Oudh of Kunda, Uttar Pradesh. He was an Independent Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA), having been elected fifth time in a row from Kunda in the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly election, 2012.
Raghuraj completed his primary education from Mahaprabhu Bal Vidayalaya Narayni Asram Shivkuti, Allahabad, high school from Bharat Scout H.S. School in the year 1985, intermediate from Colonel Ganj Inter College Allahabad in the year 1987, and law graduation at Lucknow University. He contested and won the state elections from the Kunda seat in 1993, as an Independent. He was officially 26 years old, but was possibly underage at the time.
In the Indian general election, 1999, he put up Akshay Pratap Singh against the incumbent Ratna Singh (als from a related family). It is in this election that Raghuraj started using strongarm and criminal intimidation tactics. In the years 1997, 1999 and 2000, he was made minister in the BJP governments of Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta and Rajnath Singh respectively. For the 2004 elections, he changed his stand and began supporting Samajvadi Party which made him minister in the 2004 Mulayam Singh Yadav government and the 2012 Akhilesh Yadav government. In March 2013, he had to resign from the Akhilesh Yadav cabinet after he was booked for the murder of Deputy Superintendent of Police Zia-ul-Haque.
Eventually the POTA act was repealed in 2004, and although the court again refused to release Raghuraj, he subsequently became a powerful man in the government, and was accused by police officer R.S. Pandey (who led the raid on his house) of having launched a vendetta against him. Eventually R.S. Pandey was killed in a road accident, which is currently being investigated by the CBI.
In 2005, he became the minister for Food and Civil Supplies, and despite his pending criminal cases, he came to be assigned the highest level of security (Z-category) provided by the state, though the threats against him were not specified.
His cousin and political follower Akshay Pratap Singh alias Gopalji won the 2004 elections to the 14th Lok Sabha from Pratapgarh. Much of his campaign against Congress leader, Ratna Singh (from a related branch of the family), was planned from the jail premises where Raja Bhaiya was incarcerated.
After the 2007 elections, when Mayawati swept to power with a majority, Raghuraj again came under the police radar.
He became a cabinet minister in the newly elected SP government led by Mulayam Singh Yadav's son Akhilesh Yadav. He was assigned the Food and Civil Supplies ministry as well as prison department.
On 3 March 2013, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Zia Ul Haq was killed during clashes between villagers and police in Uttar Pradesh minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya's constituency, Kunda.Following a complaint by the slain officer's wife, Parveen Azad, Pratapgarh police have registered a case against Raja Bhaiyya for his alleged involvement in the "conspiracy" which resulted in the gang war and subsequent murder of the police officer. In the FIR, Parveen has said her husband was killed by the henchmen of Raja Bhaiyya. She has named Gulshan Yadav, chairman of Kunda Nagar Panchayat, Harion Srivastava, a representative of Raja Bhaiyya and Guddu Singh, Raja Bhaiyya's driver as prime accused. She has also named two other villagers - Kamta Prasad Pal and Rajesh Kumar Pal. The police have registered a murder case against other accused who were named in the FIR.
If one goes by the criminal cases filed against him over the years, Raghuraj Pratap Singh, as the 46-year-old politician was named at birth, took to the life of an outlaw barely a year after he was old enough to vote. When he became a minister in the state government in March 2012 for the fifth time in 15 years, UP Police had 45 criminal cases against him. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is also probing him in two cases.
The latest charges emanate from the 2 March mob lynching and shooting of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Ziaul- Haq after he reached a village to investigate the killings, allegedly by Raja Bhaiya’s shooters, of the village chief and his brother.
The nickname Raja Bhaiya draws on his lineage as an upper-caste Rajput from a family of landlords that once owned vast stretches of land for generations. He is also known as Raja (king) of Kunda, the name of his hometown of about 35,000 people. It is widely known that he still controls enormous tracts of agricultural land as well as many illegal trading activities such as those relating to sand mining from the riverside. Those who are especially in his thrall also call him “noor-e-nazar” (the light of the eyes). Of course, he is also feared as the “Kunda ka gunda” (the don of Kunda).
“Kunda has been a hotbed of all kinds of anti-social activities and crime since Raja Bhaiya first became a legislator from there 20 years ago,” says Rajkumar Ratna Singh, the Lok Sabha MP from Pratapgarh, which includes Kunda. “Both the BJP and the Samajwadi Party are guilty of effectively protecting this criminal by making him a minister.”
Singh, who is from the Congress party, claims the slain police officer had been on Raja Bhaiya’s hit list as he had put an end to illegal sand mining allegedly carried out by Raja Bhaiya’s men near the Ganga river. The DSP, she says, was trying to enforce a Supreme Court ruling that most others had been frightened to implement. “Local policemen act like Raja Bhaiya’s servants,” says Singh. Zia-ul-Haq had dared to raid the mining site and seized trucks full of the illegal consignment that are still parked at the local police station. “That is why the policemen with him abandoned him and ran away. It was pre-planned murder.”
Few are shocked at the turn of events involving Raja Bhaiya. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who heads the Samajwadi Party that rules Uttar Pradesh, had made worsening crime under the previous government’s rule a key issue in his campaign for the 2012 Assembly election. But old-timers weren’t surprised when Raja Bhaiya wormed his way into the government of Yadav’s son, Akhilesh, who became chief minister after the Samajwadi Party won the election. The Yadavs need Raja Bhaiya to mollycoddle the Rajputs, who are numerically and politically significant in the state.
The last time Mulayam was chief minister, from August 2003 to May 2007, he had made Raja Bhaiya the food minister. That tenure resulted in the CBI filing a case over alleged embezzlement of hundreds of crores of rupees in a scheme to supply subsidised food to the poor. Filed in December 2007 after Mulayam’s bitter rival, Mayawati, became the chief minister, that case is still continuing. In her previous tenure during 2002-03, Mayawati had launched an all-out war against Raja Bhaiya and sent him to prison. Last year, Akhilesh had wanted to keep Raja Bhaiya out but his father overruled him. Raja Bhaiya’s tenure as prison minister was marked by violence by jail inmates, such as by a gangster named Brijesh Singh who had been brought from Gujarat. Last month, Akhilesh divested Raja Bhaiya of the prison portfolio.
Schooled in Allahabad, Raja Bhaiya almost didn’t graduate as his father believed that education made cowards of men. But his mother’s insistence saw him attend Lucknow University. But Raja Bhaiya was clearly no coward: by the time he turned 19, he had several criminal cases filed against him already. He debuted in politics in 1993, getting elected as an independent legislator at the age of 26 with the support of the BJP. Ironically, Mulayam had then opposed Raja Bhaiya as he was accused of masterminding anti-Muslim violence in a village of Kunda during 1991-92. Mulayam even disrupted proceedings in the UP Assembly for a week demanding police action against the newly elected legislator.
Raja Bhaiya, who has never joined a political party, has been the bugbear of every politician in the state at some time or the other. In 1996, BJP’s Kalyan Singh campaigned against him in the Assembly election only to be forced to make the strongman a Cabinet minister in 1997 when the BJP leader became chief minister. Two successive BJP chief ministers, including the current party president, Rajnath Singh, had retained Raja Bhaiya as their minister
HIS TROUBLES with Mayawati began when she formed a government in May 2002 with the BJP’s support. She resisted a push by the BJP, which had supported Raja Bhaiya in the election, to make him a minister. In much of rural Uttar Pradesh, the caste Rajputs are the worst tormentors of the lowest-caste Dalits, who are Mayawati’s core votebank. Raja Bhaiya mobilised Rajput MLAs of the BJP who opposed the coalition with Mayawati and spearheaded a dissident movement against her government. He was arrested in November 2002 after he allegedly threatened a BJP legislator.
Thus was Mayawati’s war against him launched. In two months, police would raid Raja Bhaiya’s palatial ancestral home in Kunda and recover, among other firearms, two AK-47 rifles. His father, Udai Pratap Singh, and a cousin, too, were arrested and booked under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) for allegedly conspiring to kill Mayawati. Over the next weeks, the police carried out more arrests in a bid to destroy what it said was Raja Bhaiya’s network of terror that, among others, ensured he lorded over public works and irrigation contracts running into crores of rupees. Famously, Mayawati also acquired a huge private lake on Raja Bhaiya’s estate that was home to crocodiles and named it Ambedkar Bird Sanctuary. This was a symbolic blow by a Dalit against a Thakur that made her a hero among the Dalits and him a symbol of injured Rajput pride.
When police attacked Rajput youths protesting the arrests, Mulayam launched a political campaign vowing to free them if he came to power. When he did become chief minister replacing Mayawati in August 2003, he promptly released Raja Bhaiya from jail and made him a minister. On her part, Mayawati decided to court the Brahmins, the upper-caste rivals to the Rajputs. Her lieutenant, Satish Mishra, addressed hundreds of Brahmin rallies and conventions across the state over three years. This brought her political gains in the 2007 election as the Brahmins and the Dalits helped her win an absolute majority in the Assembly. But she lost power again in 2012, beginning a revival in the fortunes of Raja Bhaiya as the Samajwadi Party won power.
Opposition leaders, however, believe that this time Raja Bhaiya may have tied Chief Minister Akhilesh, too, in knots. Raja Bhaiya has claimed that one of the key accused in the 2 March killings, Rohit Singh, had actually accompanied him to a meeting with Akhilesh. “Raja Bhaiya has created potential trouble for Akhilesh Yadav,” says Congress leader Pramod Tewari who is a legislator from near Kunda. Rohit Singh has more than a dozen cases of crime, including murder and criminal conspiracy, against him.
Since the 2 March killings, Raja Bhaiya has said he did not need to get the police officer murdered as he could have easily got him transferred out of Kunda with his influence as a minister. But sources in the police debunk that claim. Anil Kumar Rai, who has been transferred out as the Superintendent of Police in Pratapgarh, had stood up to Raja Bhaiya on postings and transfers, a senior police officer in the state told TEHELKA on the condition of anonymity. “Also, as the inquiry officer into last year’s communal violence in Kunda, Zia-ul-Haq had clinching evidence about Raja Bhaiya’s involvement in it,” the officer said. The slain police officer was shortly to submit his report to the government that would have reportedly pointed a finger at Raja Bhaiya.
Life
Raghuraj was born to Raja Uday Pratap Singh in 1967. His grandfather shri Raja Bajrang Bahadur Singh was the founder vice chancellor of Pant Nagar Agriculture University and later the second governor of Himachal Pradesh state. Raghuraj was the first in his family to enter politics; his father is largely a recluse. Raghuraj's grand father had adopted his father Uday Pratap Singh. Raja Bhajarang Bahadur singh, the grandfather of Raghuraj were three brothers: Bhadreshwar Pratap Singh, Trilochan Pratap Singh and Bajarang Bahadur Singh.Raghuraj completed his primary education from Mahaprabhu Bal Vidayalaya Narayni Asram Shivkuti, Allahabad, high school from Bharat Scout H.S. School in the year 1985, intermediate from Colonel Ganj Inter College Allahabad in the year 1987, and law graduation at Lucknow University. He contested and won the state elections from the Kunda seat in 1993, as an Independent. He was officially 26 years old, but was possibly underage at the time.
In the Indian general election, 1999, he put up Akshay Pratap Singh against the incumbent Ratna Singh (als from a related family). It is in this election that Raghuraj started using strongarm and criminal intimidation tactics. In the years 1997, 1999 and 2000, he was made minister in the BJP governments of Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta and Rajnath Singh respectively. For the 2004 elections, he changed his stand and began supporting Samajvadi Party which made him minister in the 2004 Mulayam Singh Yadav government and the 2012 Akhilesh Yadav government. In March 2013, he had to resign from the Akhilesh Yadav cabinet after he was booked for the murder of Deputy Superintendent of Police Zia-ul-Haque.
Jailed on terrorism charges
In 2002, on an FIR filed by a dissident Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Puran Singh Bundela of alleged kidnapping and threatening with dire consequences, got Raghuraj arrested on the orders of then Chief Minister Mayawati at the early hours about 3:00 a.m. of 2 November 2002. Later Mayawati-led government in Uttar Pradesh declared him a terrorist, and he was sent to jail under Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), along with his father Uday Pratap Singh and cousin Akshay Pratap Singh. Subsequently, Akshay managed to get bail, but Raghuraj's pleas were rejected many timesFrom jail to cabinet minister
Within 25 minutes of the Mulayam Singh Yadav's government coming to power in 2003, all POTA charges against him were dropped. However, the Supreme Court debarred the state government from dismissing POTA chargesEventually the POTA act was repealed in 2004, and although the court again refused to release Raghuraj, he subsequently became a powerful man in the government, and was accused by police officer R.S. Pandey (who led the raid on his house) of having launched a vendetta against him. Eventually R.S. Pandey was killed in a road accident, which is currently being investigated by the CBI.
In 2005, he became the minister for Food and Civil Supplies, and despite his pending criminal cases, he came to be assigned the highest level of security (Z-category) provided by the state, though the threats against him were not specified.
2007 Elections
In the,Uttar Pradesh state elections, 2007, he was overwhelmingly elected from Kunda with a margin of nearly half the votes cast over Shiv Prakash Mishra of the Bahujan Samaj Party. He had stood as an Independent, supported by the Samajwadi Party. He also wields considerable influence over five assembly constituencies in the Pratapgarh region, as well as some in neighbouring Bihar. In election rallies in this region where he is present, the actual candidate may never speak or even be mentioned in his speech; "they are all shadows. Raja Bhaiya, alone, is the substance.".His cousin and political follower Akshay Pratap Singh alias Gopalji won the 2004 elections to the 14th Lok Sabha from Pratapgarh. Much of his campaign against Congress leader, Ratna Singh (from a related branch of the family), was planned from the jail premises where Raja Bhaiya was incarcerated.
After the 2007 elections, when Mayawati swept to power with a majority, Raghuraj again came under the police radar.
He became a cabinet minister in the newly elected SP government led by Mulayam Singh Yadav's son Akhilesh Yadav. He was assigned the Food and Civil Supplies ministry as well as prison department.
On 3 March 2013, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Zia Ul Haq was killed during clashes between villagers and police in Uttar Pradesh minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiyya's constituency, Kunda.Following a complaint by the slain officer's wife, Parveen Azad, Pratapgarh police have registered a case against Raja Bhaiyya for his alleged involvement in the "conspiracy" which resulted in the gang war and subsequent murder of the police officer. In the FIR, Parveen has said her husband was killed by the henchmen of Raja Bhaiyya. She has named Gulshan Yadav, chairman of Kunda Nagar Panchayat, Harion Srivastava, a representative of Raja Bhaiyya and Guddu Singh, Raja Bhaiyya's driver as prime accused. She has also named two other villagers - Kamta Prasad Pal and Rajesh Kumar Pal. The police have registered a murder case against other accused who were named in the FIR.
FEW PEOPLE are able to maintain a life in politics coterminous with a life in crime. Raja Bhaiya, a strongman in Uttar Pradesh, has done exactly that for two decades. But comeuppance is the staple of the men of the mafia who straddle politics. Raja Bhaiya had his this week when an uproar over the killing of a policeman and two others near his hometown forced him to quit as a minister in the state’s one-year-old government.
If one goes by the criminal cases filed against him over the years, Raghuraj Pratap Singh, as the 46-year-old politician was named at birth, took to the life of an outlaw barely a year after he was old enough to vote. When he became a minister in the state government in March 2012 for the fifth time in 15 years, UP Police had 45 criminal cases against him. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is also probing him in two cases.
The latest charges emanate from the 2 March mob lynching and shooting of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Ziaul- Haq after he reached a village to investigate the killings, allegedly by Raja Bhaiya’s shooters, of the village chief and his brother.
The nickname Raja Bhaiya draws on his lineage as an upper-caste Rajput from a family of landlords that once owned vast stretches of land for generations. He is also known as Raja (king) of Kunda, the name of his hometown of about 35,000 people. It is widely known that he still controls enormous tracts of agricultural land as well as many illegal trading activities such as those relating to sand mining from the riverside. Those who are especially in his thrall also call him “noor-e-nazar” (the light of the eyes). Of course, he is also feared as the “Kunda ka gunda” (the don of Kunda).
“Kunda has been a hotbed of all kinds of anti-social activities and crime since Raja Bhaiya first became a legislator from there 20 years ago,” says Rajkumar Ratna Singh, the Lok Sabha MP from Pratapgarh, which includes Kunda. “Both the BJP and the Samajwadi Party are guilty of effectively protecting this criminal by making him a minister.”
Singh, who is from the Congress party, claims the slain police officer had been on Raja Bhaiya’s hit list as he had put an end to illegal sand mining allegedly carried out by Raja Bhaiya’s men near the Ganga river. The DSP, she says, was trying to enforce a Supreme Court ruling that most others had been frightened to implement. “Local policemen act like Raja Bhaiya’s servants,” says Singh. Zia-ul-Haq had dared to raid the mining site and seized trucks full of the illegal consignment that are still parked at the local police station. “That is why the policemen with him abandoned him and ran away. It was pre-planned murder.”
Few are shocked at the turn of events involving Raja Bhaiya. Mulayam Singh Yadav, who heads the Samajwadi Party that rules Uttar Pradesh, had made worsening crime under the previous government’s rule a key issue in his campaign for the 2012 Assembly election. But old-timers weren’t surprised when Raja Bhaiya wormed his way into the government of Yadav’s son, Akhilesh, who became chief minister after the Samajwadi Party won the election. The Yadavs need Raja Bhaiya to mollycoddle the Rajputs, who are numerically and politically significant in the state.
The last time Mulayam was chief minister, from August 2003 to May 2007, he had made Raja Bhaiya the food minister. That tenure resulted in the CBI filing a case over alleged embezzlement of hundreds of crores of rupees in a scheme to supply subsidised food to the poor. Filed in December 2007 after Mulayam’s bitter rival, Mayawati, became the chief minister, that case is still continuing. In her previous tenure during 2002-03, Mayawati had launched an all-out war against Raja Bhaiya and sent him to prison. Last year, Akhilesh had wanted to keep Raja Bhaiya out but his father overruled him. Raja Bhaiya’s tenure as prison minister was marked by violence by jail inmates, such as by a gangster named Brijesh Singh who had been brought from Gujarat. Last month, Akhilesh divested Raja Bhaiya of the prison portfolio.
Schooled in Allahabad, Raja Bhaiya almost didn’t graduate as his father believed that education made cowards of men. But his mother’s insistence saw him attend Lucknow University. But Raja Bhaiya was clearly no coward: by the time he turned 19, he had several criminal cases filed against him already. He debuted in politics in 1993, getting elected as an independent legislator at the age of 26 with the support of the BJP. Ironically, Mulayam had then opposed Raja Bhaiya as he was accused of masterminding anti-Muslim violence in a village of Kunda during 1991-92. Mulayam even disrupted proceedings in the UP Assembly for a week demanding police action against the newly elected legislator.
Raja Bhaiya, who has never joined a political party, has been the bugbear of every politician in the state at some time or the other. In 1996, BJP’s Kalyan Singh campaigned against him in the Assembly election only to be forced to make the strongman a Cabinet minister in 1997 when the BJP leader became chief minister. Two successive BJP chief ministers, including the current party president, Rajnath Singh, had retained Raja Bhaiya as their minister
HIS TROUBLES with Mayawati began when she formed a government in May 2002 with the BJP’s support. She resisted a push by the BJP, which had supported Raja Bhaiya in the election, to make him a minister. In much of rural Uttar Pradesh, the caste Rajputs are the worst tormentors of the lowest-caste Dalits, who are Mayawati’s core votebank. Raja Bhaiya mobilised Rajput MLAs of the BJP who opposed the coalition with Mayawati and spearheaded a dissident movement against her government. He was arrested in November 2002 after he allegedly threatened a BJP legislator.
Thus was Mayawati’s war against him launched. In two months, police would raid Raja Bhaiya’s palatial ancestral home in Kunda and recover, among other firearms, two AK-47 rifles. His father, Udai Pratap Singh, and a cousin, too, were arrested and booked under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) for allegedly conspiring to kill Mayawati. Over the next weeks, the police carried out more arrests in a bid to destroy what it said was Raja Bhaiya’s network of terror that, among others, ensured he lorded over public works and irrigation contracts running into crores of rupees. Famously, Mayawati also acquired a huge private lake on Raja Bhaiya’s estate that was home to crocodiles and named it Ambedkar Bird Sanctuary. This was a symbolic blow by a Dalit against a Thakur that made her a hero among the Dalits and him a symbol of injured Rajput pride.
When police attacked Rajput youths protesting the arrests, Mulayam launched a political campaign vowing to free them if he came to power. When he did become chief minister replacing Mayawati in August 2003, he promptly released Raja Bhaiya from jail and made him a minister. On her part, Mayawati decided to court the Brahmins, the upper-caste rivals to the Rajputs. Her lieutenant, Satish Mishra, addressed hundreds of Brahmin rallies and conventions across the state over three years. This brought her political gains in the 2007 election as the Brahmins and the Dalits helped her win an absolute majority in the Assembly. But she lost power again in 2012, beginning a revival in the fortunes of Raja Bhaiya as the Samajwadi Party won power.
Opposition leaders, however, believe that this time Raja Bhaiya may have tied Chief Minister Akhilesh, too, in knots. Raja Bhaiya has claimed that one of the key accused in the 2 March killings, Rohit Singh, had actually accompanied him to a meeting with Akhilesh. “Raja Bhaiya has created potential trouble for Akhilesh Yadav,” says Congress leader Pramod Tewari who is a legislator from near Kunda. Rohit Singh has more than a dozen cases of crime, including murder and criminal conspiracy, against him.
Since the 2 March killings, Raja Bhaiya has said he did not need to get the police officer murdered as he could have easily got him transferred out of Kunda with his influence as a minister. But sources in the police debunk that claim. Anil Kumar Rai, who has been transferred out as the Superintendent of Police in Pratapgarh, had stood up to Raja Bhaiya on postings and transfers, a senior police officer in the state told TEHELKA on the condition of anonymity. “Also, as the inquiry officer into last year’s communal violence in Kunda, Zia-ul-Haq had clinching evidence about Raja Bhaiya’s involvement in it,” the officer said. The slain police officer was shortly to submit his report to the government that would have reportedly pointed a finger at Raja Bhaiya.
9 comments:
Jai Rajputana....
Prakash Chauhan Rajput great the aur rahenge :)
very One knew that it was a simple case of Villagers' spontaneous outburst against the insipid police action; authorities & the Press just played along the aft convenient, sensational minority theme. To the hearts' content of the 'RajaBhaiya's haters.
Now what?
Would the CBI & UP Police do something for the false allegations; solely with the purpose of swindling jobs. They should all be now charge sheeted for false FIRs & ulterior motives.
Why the Police dint put their foot down, then; they certainly knew better, instead of causing so much bad blood, anguish & pain to Kr Raghuraj!!
VeerPratapS C
Alaska, US
is raja bhaiya really a chauhan
Raja bhaiya ek bar cm ban jaye uttar pradesh ke .
Jai raja bhaiya ki
Bilkul bnege
Jai Rajputana!!
Kya raja bhaiya Chauhan Rajput hai
Kya raja bhaiya Chauhan Rajput hai
Ashutosh Singh Baghel
Raghuraj Pratap Singh Raja Bhaiya!
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