Life inside 'free-nation' camp - Rs 25-lakh food bill, Rs 11-lakh tents

Burnt vehicles and soap bars in the park on Sunday

Piyush Srivastava, TT, June 5: The monthly food bill came to Rs 25 lakh at Mathura's Jawahar Bagh, which cult leader Ram Briksh Yadav and 3,000 followers had forcibly occupied for two years and declared a "free nation", police said today. 

Tents worth Rs 11 lakh were pitched on the 60-acre public park alongside 1,500 illegally built single-room wooden quarters, a 2,000sqft community kitchen, an in-house school, 40 makeshift toilets and a storeroom stacked with thousands of soap bars. 

A fleet of 12 luxury cars including a Land Rover bore testimony to the comfortable lifestyle the cult leader and his lieutenants enjoyed. All the cars were damaged and half-burnt, and most bore Madhya Pradesh registration numbers, police sources said.

Ram Briksh and 25 of his followers - men, women and children - died along with two police officers in a gunfight on Thursday evening when the cops freed the park on high court orders.

Officers in Lucknow said the food costs and tent prices were mentioned in a register their Mathura counterparts had found in a two-room building at the park. They suggested the huge expenses at what was virtually a makeshift township were made possible by a regular flow of small and large donations from the cult's followers.

The police claim to have found copies of receipts for sums ranging between Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 scattered across the park. Most of the donations apparently came from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.

They have also found a truck that probably ferried vegetables from the market, 30 motorcycles, 50 huge batteries, 24 air coolers, 60 electric fans and 100 sewing machines, most of them damaged, apart from 200-odd unexploded commercial LPG cylinders.

Police sources said the encroachers had torched a part of the park to prevent the cops from entering on Thursday, but the fire had spread causing several LPG cylinders to explode. Some of the dead were badly charred.

On one side of Jawahar Bagh was a huge satsang kshetra (preaching area) under a tent, on the other the wooden tenements, arrayed in four rows. A huge wheat grinder lay at the rear of the park near a bamboo-and-mud granary stocked with wheat.

A roofless concrete structure was apparently a school for the children of the followers, teaching them from Classes I to VIII, going by the labelling on the walls.

A local journalist said Ram Briksh also ran a dairy. It appears the cows had been untied when the battle started. About 10 cows were seen grazing at the park today. Several walls bore the slogan: "Azad Hind Sarkar Zindabad (Long Live the Azad Hind Government)".

The cult's armed wing, named "Azad Hind Fauj" after Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's army, carried out regular weapons training at the park. They locked up anyone who entered, forcing them to sign on a printed document declaring they were "nationals of Jawahar Bagh" and followers of the Azad Hind Fauj.

Ram Briksh's organisation, the Swadhin Bharat Vidhik Satyagrah, pressed for petrol and diesel at Rs 2 per litre and the replacement of the Indian rupee with the Azad Hind Fauj's currency.

Village snub

Officers said that Ram Briksh's distant relatives in his village of Raipur-Baghpur in Ghazipur district had refused to accept his body for the last rites. The whereabouts of his wife, daughter and elder son, who lived with him on the park, are unclear.

The police today brought Hari Nath Singh, a Ram Briksh aide, from jail to the mortuary to identify the 18 bodies still lying unclaimed.

The state government today announced a reward of Rs 5,000 for information on three of Ram Briksh's alleged lieutenants: Chandan Bose, Rakesh Babu Gupta and Virendra Yadav.

While Bose, alleged commander of the Azad Hind Fauj, is said to belong to Siliguri, the other two are from Uttar Pradesh. The police believe the trio escaped during the battle. According to the register, a two-day trip to Delhi Bose had made last month cost Rs 10,000 in all.

A total of 204 men and 20 women have been arrested. An officer said that 96 women had earlier been let off after a brief period of detention because they had children with them.

The park was today opened to reporters but the police denied entry to Union minister of state for food processing, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, citing a threat to law and order.

She blamed the state government for the "rise of a criminal like Ram Briksh" and left after an argument between BJP members and the police.