NEW DELHI, 26 July — Masked gunmen killed India’s “Bandit Queen”, Phoolan Devi, outside her home yesterday, ending a turbulent life that began in poverty and rape, turned into a quest for revenge and wound up in parliament.
Devi, 37, was shot by three gunmen who pumped five bullets into her when she got out of her car and was about to enter her house in the high-security heart of the Indian capital, Joint Commissioner of Police Suresh Roy said. Roy said Devi, who had three bullets in the head and two in the body, was rushed to a hospital where she was declared dead. Her businessman husband and relatives wept over her body in the emergency room.
He said the attackers escaped in a car which was found abandoned in a nearby street. They then made their escape in a three-wheel autorickshaw. Police recovered a pistol and some bullets from the abandoned car, Roy said, adding that the motive for the attack was unclear.
Devi, one of India’s best-known women, was adored by thousands of lower-caste Hindus in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, whose interests she represented in the country’s parliament.
The short and stocky Devi was portrayed in the 1994 film “Bandit Queen” as a rape victim from a low-caste community of boatmen whose career of crime began as a quest for revenge against her attackers. Devi rose to notoriety in 1981 when 22 upper-caste men were massacred in the Uttar Pradesh village of Behmai. She denied leading the killers but surrendered to police in the central state of Madhya Pradesh in 1983.
When she was released on parole in 1994 other charges against her in Uttar Pradesh were dropped, and she joined the regional Samajwadi Party, which represents low castes. Devi became a member of the lower house of parliament in 1996.
President K.R. Narayanan said he heard of Devi’s death with utter shock and condemned the “cowardly and gruesome act”.
The murder sparked angry protests yesterday in Devi’s parliamentary constituency in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Thousands of supporters of Devi’s Samajwadi Party took to the streets of Mirzapur town.
