THE tale of how Brahmeshwar Singh ‘mukhiya’, chief of the Ranveer Sena and notorious as the Butcher of Bathani and Bathe, has escaped scot free all these years is a shameful one, implicating two Chief Ministers.

In the wake of Bathani Tola, the police removed the names of Brahmeshwar and his three lieutenants Bhola Singh, Sadhu Rai, and Bhoda Bhatt from the FIR, and in spite of protests being conveyed to the SP, his name was never added to the FIR. In the Bathe FIR too, Brahmeshwar is conspicuously absent. This decision to omit the Ranveer Sena’s top man from the FIRs in the worst-ever massacres perpetrated by this banned outfit, could only have come from the top man in the Government. Even today, Brahmeshwar Singh continues to be a ‘non-FIR accused’ in these cases.

And of course, the Nitish Government took the greatest care to protect Brahmeshwar.

When the Ara court convicted 23 in the Bathani Tola case in May 2010, Brahmeshwar was pronounced an ‘absconder.’ Strangely, though, this ‘absconder’ whom the police failed to find, had already been arrested in 2002, and was inside Ara jail! A Special Public Prosecutor told The Hindu, “It is hard to fathom as to what is preventing the police and the government in bringing to book this criminal, who has been lodged in Ara jail since 2002. This clearly shows that both the police and the government are not interested in ensuring that justice is meted out.”

Soon after the Ara sessions court verdict in the Bathani Tola case, the Additional District and Sessions Court of Patna sentenced 16 Ranveer Sena men to death and 10 to life imprisonment in the Laxmanpur Bathe massacre case. But both verdicts failed to indict Brahmeshwar Singh – and the fate of the Bathani conviction has shown the way for what lies ahead for the Bathe verdict as well.

Responding to the Bathe verdict, Barmeshwar Singh had given the JD(U)-BJP regime his accolade: had a government like Nitish’s been there to guarantee “law and order”, he said, there would have been no need to form the Ranveer Sena.

And in July 2011, Brahmeshwar ‘Mukhiya’ became a free man, since the Bihar Govt didn’t oppose his bail plea!