Aaj Ki Baat July 9 episode
The end was as dramatic as the surrender. Dreaded UP gangster Vikas Dubey was taken into custody by Madhya Pradesh police outside the famous Mahakaal temple in Ujjain in a dramatic manner on Thursday morning. He was later handed over to UP Special Task Force who were bringing him in a convoy of vehicles to Kanpur.
On early Friday morning, the vehicle in which Dubey was sitting with policemen overturned on the roadside near Barra on the outskirts of Kanpur city. According to police, the gangster snatched a policeman’s weapon and tried to flee. He was surrounded by other STF personnel.
According to police, he was asked to surrender, and in the encounter that ensued, Vikas was shot at and injured. Vikas and four other injured policemen were rushed to LLR hospital in Kanpur, where the gangster was declared brought dead.
With this, the curtains have now fallen on the sordid drama that began with the bloodbath of eight policemen in Vikas Dubey’s Bikra village on July 2 night. The gangster, while escaping the police dragnet, went across five states and covered 1,500 kilometres before he surrendered in Ujjain after worshipping Lord Mahakaal.
The gangster took an early morning bath in Shipra river, bought a VIP pass at the temple gate, attended morning ‘aarti’ and then came out to declare to the world that he was “Vikas Dubey, Kanpurwallah”, with temple security guards holding him tightly. Female devotees who were at the temple revealed how Vikas and his two companions were taking video of the ‘aarti’ inside the shrine, even though taking a cellphone inside the temple is prohibited.
Witnesses also said, Vikas, after buying a VIP ticket, sought backdoor entrance, but on being denied, he joined the queue of devotees to enter the shrine. He also took a selfie video outside the temple, and shared his phone number to a policeman, after he was taken into custody.
Clearly, Vikas Dubey was running out of time, as his lieutenants were either being killed in encounters or nabbed by UP police.
In custody, he revealed how he planned the bloodbath of policemen on July 2 night in his village near Kanpur. Vikas revealed, he had got information about the police raid a day before, and he was prepared with his lieutenants. He revealed how one of his men cut off the leg of Circle Officer Mishra with an axe, how he wanted to set fire to the bodies of slain policemen with 50 litres of kerosene, but could not do so because police reinforcement had arrived.
I am amazed when people described his arrest in Ujjain on Thursday as “arranged surrender”, and now, after his death, the same people are describing this as a “murder and fake encounter”. I will appeal to such people to give a thought to the families of those eight policemen who were killed in cold blood by Vikas Dubey’s henchmen.
Vikas Dubey had planned his surrender in public because he was afraid of being killed in the encounter. He thought he has saved his skin by handing himself over to MP police. He had also planned to run his extortion ring from jail like other criminals in UP. But fate willed otherwise.
It is time we realize that a criminal has no caste, no religion. A criminal always tries to misuse the loopholes in the administrative and judicial systems for his own ends. Vikas Dubey had his moles inside the UP police force. With his death, ends a sordid chapter in the annals of crime in Uttar Pradesh.
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India’s Number One and the most followed Super Prime Time News Show ‘Aaj Ki Baat – Rajat Sharma Ke Saath was launched just before the 2014 General Elections. Since its inception, the show is redefining India’s super-prime time and is numerically far ahead of its contemporaries.
