How much is your life worth if you’re the daughter or son of a migrant worker? Most of the time, nothing. But closer to election time, it escalates by the day. In Nithari, it started at Rs2 lakhs. Within a couple of days, it was up to Rs5 lakhs. On Friday, the value rose to include a plot of residential land. And now, there’s the carrot of a permanent government job. UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has been reacting to the Nithari horror with all the callousness of a politician in election mode. Notes for votes. Buy your way into power. As if money or a plot of land makes up for the grotesque nightmare that’s been unfolding for the parents of a previously unknown village on the edges of upscale NOIDA.

We’ll never know how many other Nitharis there are across the badlands of UP. Going by official police figures, the state presents a glowing picture of peace and tranquility. In the last two years, dacoity has fallen by 70 percent, kidnapping by 60 percent. As one commentator mocked, UP hasn’t been this safe since 1953! Naturally. If the police refuse to register FIRs, as they did when the parents of 38 missing children from Nithari complained, the UP crime graph can only fall. The skeletons tumbling out at Nithari seem to substantiate what Mulayam Singh’s political opponents have been saying for the past two years, that there’s an unwritten directive from Lucknow to keep crime figures low by not registering cases.

***

There may be more to the police apathy in the Nithari horror story than a clumsy effort to manipulate statistics. Rumours are swirling of a multi-crore organ racket involving influential people. What it needs is an unbiased probe, if such a thing is at all possible in UP’s highly politicised climate, to get at the truth of the rumours. But panic is mounting in the Mulayam Singh camp after newspaper reports linked controversial businessman Ashok Chaturvedi’s name to the main accused, Moninder Singh. The reports suggested that it was Chaturvedi who pressured the police to release Moninder Singh when he was picked up last year in connection with the disappearance of his maid, Payal. If one starts connecting the dots, Chaturvedi is the owner of Flex Industries in which Mulayam Singh’s Man Friday Amar Singh was a director till the company was raided in an income tax evasion and bribery case some years ago. Interestingly, the reports linking Chaturvedi to Moninder Singh have not been denied so far.

It’s curious that the police refused to consider the organ racket angle right from the beginning. And they continue to ignore it despite subsequent revelations. For instance, Moninder Singh’s neighbour in NOIDA is a doctor who was arrested some years ago for suspected involvement in organ trade. The police found nothing and released him. Now comes the news that Moninder Singh’s business associate in Chandigarh was also picked up by the police two years ago on similar charges. Mere coincidence? Or is there something more?

Any doctor at a respected hospital will explain the difficulties of running an organ racket. But who knows what happens at the hundreds of small clinics and nursing homes operating in the back lanes of NOIDA and surrounding areas? Who monitors the medical standards and ethics at such places? Or the desperation of a poor patient whose life is a whim of fate anyway? Mulayam Singh hasn’t dared visit Nithari because of superstition about a jinx on every sitting chief minister who goes to NOIDA. The jinx may get him anyway.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net