Who is afraid of Chanchal Singh?

Thirty-nine years after he was booked on the charge of preventing an officer from doing his duty in Sawansa, under Badlapur police station in Jaunpur district, Chanchal Singh, the former students’ union president of Banaras Hindu University was picked up by Uttar Pradesh Police and jailed on November 8. He was granted bail the next day as the magistrate found no merit in the case.

“I was not surprised when the police arrested me on November 8 in an almost four-decade old case because an officer had alerted me two days ago that the BJP government would try to harass and terrorise me. The case was so weak that additional chief judicial magistrate Amar Singh questioned the working of the police when he granted me bail next day,” said Chanchal, who runs a weekly episode- “Aakhiri Payedaan Se (From the Last Step)” on YouTube and has been a harsh critic of right wing politics on social media.

“I never received any arrest warrant, nor did I know that the case was reopened until an officer informed me on November 6 that effort was on to arrest me because I was questioning the policies of the BJP government on social media,” said Chanchal, reminding us that he was arrested in a case which was registered in 1978, when Bharatiya Jana Sangh (associated to Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh) was part of Janata Party government.

Dushyant Singh, Chanchal’s counsel, informed the court that his client turned old without knowing about his arrest warrant and fresh proceedings in the case. He was granted bail on furnishing two bonds of ₹30,000 each.

This latest arrest came a month after he said that Narendra Modi should be “ashamed of himself for allowing baton-charge on women students of the university” and about a month before his memoir would hit the stands. He had reminded Modi that he was in Varanasi on September 22, when the police had brutally lathi-charged and injured a dozen women students on the BHU campus.

“Let me be specific that besides my statement against Modi and my upcoming memoir, I am extremely active on social media against the PM. I know his functioning and am prepared to be harassed. I am born to criticise bad politicians and will die doing so,” asserted the writer-artist who runs a school for poor children in his village. An artist who has designed more than 5,000 cover pages of Rajkamal Prakashan — a popular publishing house of Hindi books — Chanchal leads the life of a villager in Badlapur. But his memoir is unlikely to be a simple narrative. His 68 winters are full of events, which are likely to annoy leaders, he claims.

“My life is predominantly green and saffron. Green because I am an agriculturist by birth and a socialist by training and commitment. And saffron because I have spent major time of my life with some liberal RSS men and know their inside stuff,” said Singh.

“Kalyan Singh, Governor of Rajasthan and former BJP chief minister of UP, was lodged at Varanasi Central Jail with me at that time. He used to cry all day because of his imprisonment and I would console him,” claims Chanchal. “There are many such stories about politicians in my memoir, which they wouldn’t like to be retold.” Chanchal had joined the socialist movement in 1967 and was put in jail in 1975 during emergency. He was elected BHU students union president in 1978. The same year Chanchal represented India in World Youth Festival in Havana, the capital of Cuba.

He also worked as a journalist in an English newspaper for a year, before contesting the 1984 Parliamentary election on a Janata Party ticket from Machhali Shahar and losing. Later he joined the Congress, contested Assembly election as a Congress candidate from Garhwara seat in 2002 and faced defeat again.

Chanchal said people ask him the difference between the Congress, which imposed Emergency, and the BJP which disliked someone raising questions. “I tell them that asking a question was never a crime in the Congress rule. I also tell them about my meeting with Indira Gandhi soon before leaving for Havana in 1978. A friend of mine took me to Indira and told her that I didn’t like her because she had put me in jail. Indira appeared very happy and told me that I should forget about doing politics if I feared going to jail”, reminded the man who boasts of his 28th journey to jail this month.

“The politicians like Modi and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath do not understand that if I’m alive, I cannot be a fence sitter. Being in the Congress is no crime and criticising certain kind of politics is the essence of my life. They are welcome to harass me,” drawled Chanchal.