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It is tempting to blame the feudal Thakurs for Wednesday's brutal shooting of Phoolan Devi, also known as the 'Bandit Queen' who led a violent crusade against bullies from that land-owning upper caste who use rape as an instrument of oppression in India's villages.

For one thing, the Thakurs of Behmai village in her native northern Uttar Pradesh state, (India's largest) were sworn to kill Phoolan Devi (Flower Goddess), the low-caste woman who had so challenged their feudal authority by ordering the massacre of 22 of their number in 1981.

For another, Phoolan Devi had long shed her 'Bandit Queen' image and became a responsible political leader of the backward castes of Uttar Pradesh. They are numerous enough to decide whether Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will continue to rule Uttar Pradesh.

On Thursday, supporters of Devi's regional Samajwadi Party (SP), tipped to win state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh early next year, vented their fury at her killing by brick batting the New Delhi residence of Rajnath Singh, the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Rajnath Singh, a Thakur by birth, has just announced a plan that has the potential of splitting the backward caste vote. This new policy would giving weight to the more backward within the group when it comes to distributing reserved jobs and benefits under positive-discrimination laws.

Singh said he wanted to ensure that reservation benefits are not cornered by better-off sections among the socially backward castes. But his opponents, mainly Mulayam Singh Yadav who leads the SP, are convinced it is a diabolical plot to fragment the backward caste vote ahead of the elections due before March 2002.

Yadav, who as former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh was responsible for Devi's metamorphosis from lawbreaker to lawmaker, has called for a general strike in the state to protest the brutal murder of his protege.

Six bullets

Devi was cremated on Thursday in the constituency of Mirzapur in the eastern part of the state, where she was born and which she won in the 1999 general elections after decisively defeating the BJP candidate.

According to Yadav, the BJP and Singh are out to shore up their flagging political fortunes through a campaign to eliminate political opponents in the SP. They say Devi was only one of their many victims. ''I could be next,'' said Yadav, who once served as India's defence minister.

Rajnath Singh has denied the allegations and police have yet to trace the three masked gunmen who eyewitness said pumped six bullets into Devi outside her official residence.

Her home is half a kilometre from Parliament House, where she had attended the pre-lunch session of the Lok Sabha (lawmaking lower house) on Wednesday.

Devi's career as the leader of a gang of bandits in the badlands of central India, which began after she was gang-raped by upper caste Thakurs who had killed her lover, was told in the 1994 film 'Bandit Queen' by internationally-known, Indian director Shekhar Kapoor.

One reviewer described the film as a 'never-ending series of rapes and the mindless violence of a one-dimensional Rambolina on a righteous rampage'.

Devi, who Kapoor never met, was herself enraged at her portrayal in the film as a spiteful woman spurred by revenge.

The film recreated her gang-rape by Thakurs in the village of Behmai in Uttar Pradesh, as well as the vengeance she wreaked in 1981 when her gang surrounded the village and mowed down 22 Thakurs.

Firearms training

Devi and her gang earned a reputation as champions of India's downtrodden people, capable of resisting their upper caste oppressors, before finally surrendering to authorities in 1983 on her own terms.

Released on parole after languishing for 11 years in jail without a conviction, Devi used her popular cult image as vigilante liberator to join the Samajwadi Party and first win a seat in Parliament in the general elections of 1996.

As a parliamentarian, Phoolan Devi espoused the cause of India's lower castes, who form the vast majority of the population and whose women continue to figure in newspaper headlines as victims of rape and oppression.

Most importantly, she helped form the 'Eklavya Sena', which encourages Dalit (lower caste) women to take up firearms training to protect themselves from being dishonoured by upper-caste landowners.

She was mainly critical of Kapoor's film as glossing over the issues of gender and caste oppression as well as land deprivation in India's remote rural areas, all of which she had personally endured.

Although incidents of the rape of Dalit (low-caste) women are regularly reported in the Indian press and have been documented by rights groups such as the London-based Amnesty International and the US-based Human Rights Watch, little action has ever been taken.

Sexual exploitation

In 1992, upper-caste landlords in western Rajasthan state gang-raped Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit social worker, for participating in a campaign against child marriage that is prevalent in the state.

But judges in the state high court did not believe eyewitnesses and acquitted the accused rapists, saying upper-caste men could not possibly behave in such a manner.

With the help of the People's Movement Against the Oppression of Women, a voluntary organisation, Bhanwari Devi has appealed the acquittal in the Supreme Court.

The lot of Dalit women in Indian society is one of domestic drudgery rendered harder by landlessness, severe oppression and sexual exploitation by upper-caste men and lack of access to authority, which in any case tends to be overwhelmingly upper-caste.

Though banned by the Indian Constitution, caste continues to be a factor in everyday lndian life and especially in politics because caste groups tend to vote in blocks or 'vote banks'.

In June last year, Devi travelled to New York to attend a special United Nations session on women. She said she was happy with the discussion, but wished there was more real action rather than just words. ''Dalit women continue to be oppressed at will in India,'' she reportedly said.

Indian President K R Narayanan summed up best Devi's extraordinary career in a condolence message: ''Having braved the prejudice that an orthodox society heaps on a woman, poor, backward and a social outcast, she rose to become Member of Parliament in her own right and a democratically elected people's representative.''

The above article was first written for the Inter-Press Service (IPS).