The Unfinished Symphony: Why Victory Against Mafia Raj Hasn’t Translated to Unified Brahmin Support
Long before Mirzapur and Gangs of Wasseypur became cultural phenomena, a real-life thriller played out in eastern UP. In 1987, sociology lecturer Hari Shankar Tiwari sat in a Gorakhpur jail cell, contesting his first election. Outside, his Brahmin supporters painted the town: “Jail se Vidhayak, Sadak se Sarkar” (From jail to legislature, from streets to power). This was the birth of a template that would inspire a thousand crime thrillers.
The late 80s and 90s in Purvanchal had their own law, the AK-47 Constitution. Every market had its mafia tax collector, every police station its price list. Murder rates in Azamgarh exceeded Bihar’s, while Gorakhpur made Chambal look tame. Government jobs cost five lakh rupees in bribes, police stations closed after sunset during “criminal curfew hours,” MLAs travelled with thirty-member armed entourages, and court witnesses had a sixty percent “disappearance rate.” Into this landscape stepped a Brahmin intellectual who understood that in a jungle, you become the apex predator.
The Tiwari Effect
Tiwari’s metamorphosis from professor to political don was methodical, almost scientific. His “Three-Stage Revolution” would rewrite power dynamics in India’s most populous state. Between 1985 and 1990, he perfected playing the victim card, positioning himself as the Brahmin shield against Thakur oppression. His victory from jail with 67,000 votes while facing seventeen criminal cases created a powerful narrative: “Our criminality is our self-defence.” This transformed shame into pride, victims into warriors.
The next phase saw legitimization, Tiwari became minister in Kalyan Singh’s cabinet while out on bail in murder cases. His formula was elegantly simple: Criminal Case plus Electoral Victory equals Political Immunity. By 1995, Tiwari had transcended to institution status, serving in six cabinets across party lines, creating a parallel governance system where his word superseded official orders. This was Crime 2.0, complete with investor meetings disguised as party funds and performance reviews delivered through election results.
When Reality Exceeded Fiction
The Deoria Summit of 1992 saw fifteen gang leaders meet at a temple to divide eastern UP into “operation zones”; corporate territory mapping with hand-drawn charts. The Gorakhpur Gazette Incident of 1994: a newspaper criticized Tiwari, and every copy was mysteriously bought at 6 AM while the editor found a bullet on his desk.
Most surreal was the Azamgarh Paradox of 1996, where crime rates officially dropped seventy percent after criminals joined politics. not because crime decreased, but because FIRs stopped being filed. When Amazon Prime writers researched Mirzapur, they had to tone down reality because test audiences found the truth “unrealistically violent.”
The Modern Mutation: Why Brahmins Still Love Their Captor
Fast-forward to 2024: the BJP claims to have cleaned up UP with 183 encounters, 19,000 arrests, 2,400 crore rupees seized. The mafia dons are dead, jailed, or exiled. Yet forty-two percent of Brahmins still vote for parties that once harboured their tormentors. This isn’t stupidity; it’s the Tiwari Effect in action.
Like a virus altering DNA, Tiwari’s legacy has reprogrammed Brahmin political genetics. They don’t vote for today’s reality; they vote for yesterday’s survival mechanism. The visible mafia threat has been eliminated, but the invisible threat of Thakur dominance still lurks within the BJP’s structure. When a Brahmin family in Azamgarh sees a Thakur BJP candidate, they see centuries of hierarchy and fear that beneath saffron unity lies the old caste arithmetic.
The Arithmetic of Fear and Memory
The power matrix reveals why this fear is learned behaviour from generations of survival. In the BJP Cabinet, Thakurs hold twenty-three percent representation while Brahmins have twelve percent. Among District Police Chiefs, thirty-one percent are Thakurs compared to eight percent Brahmins. Local BJP leadership is perceived as forty-five percent “Thakur-controlled” in eastern UP. Liberation without representation equals new subjugation.
The SP’s emotional hold persists because it represents historical sanctuary, a party that, despite its criminal baggage, provided Brahmins political space when Thakur dominance threatened their existence. This creates schizophrenic voting: the same family votes BJP in Lok Sabha elections for national safety, SP in Vidhan Sabha for local protection, BSP in panchayat elections for community assertion. Trauma bonding supersedes logical self-interest; memory trumps reality.
The Unfinished Revolution
The BJP’s much-needed, clean-up raj has created an unexpected paradox. By eliminating the mafia, they’ve eliminated the very condition that should drive Brahmins into their fold, an active, visible threat requiring immediate protection. The party’s focus on dismantling mafia networks, many with Brahmin connections through leaders like Tiwari, may have alienated a community that sees this as selective justice. When encounters target criminals with Brahmin surnames while Thakur strongmen receive political rehabilitation, the message resonates deeply, creating narratives that no development work can counter.
The BJP’s victories against crime remain politically incomplete: they’ve won the war but lost the peace. They’ve created safety but not trust, order but not belonging, development but not dignity. The ghost of Hari Shankar Tiwari still walks Gorakhpur’s lanes as a psychological ecosystem where crime became career, violence became negotiation, fear became governance, and community became militia.
The Script That Continues to Write Itself
As UP moves toward future elections, the question isn’t whether the state has become safer, statistics suggest it has. The real question haunting BJP strategists is whether they can convince Brahmins that this safety includes them as equal partners, not subordinate beneficiaries. Until the party addresses this through genuine power-sharing, institutional safeguards against Thakur dominance, and sustained outreach acknowledging past grievances while offering concrete future stakes, the Brahmin vote will continue its dance between saffron hope and socialist memory.
The web series writers got their scripts from these streets, where reality was stranger than fiction. The politicians got votes through bullets before ballots. The criminals got their encounters. But the Brahmins? They’re still waiting for freedom, not from the mafia, but from the memory of needing them. They remain trapped in the prison Tiwari built, unable to trust the BJP that freed them, unable to abandon the SP that enslaved them, unable to forget when a sociology professor taught them that survival requires becoming the monster you fear.
The kingmaker died in 2018, but kingdoms of doubt are immortal. In Purvanchal’s dusty lanes, where every dawn carries the echo of gunshots that no longer fire, where every election booth stands as a monument to choices between bad and worse, the Tiwari Effect persists, a reminder that the most powerful chains are those we forge in our own minds. That’s a script even Netflix can’t write, because some stories are too true to be believed, too painful to be forgotten, and too complex to be resolved by mere encounters and statistics.
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