The Darkest Hour

{ONE}

IT WAS COMMON for Jayanta Kumar Das to find bundles of documents on his doorstep in Puri, Odisha. Having spent two decades in the Indian Air Force, Das retired as a sergeant, in 2001, aged 39. He started brokering land deals, which exposed him to a lot of corruption. When the Right to Information Act was passed, in 2005, Das felt enabled. At the turn of the decade he was scratching away at what came to be called the Odisha chit-fund scam. His name began appearing in the press as the scandal surfaced. “So people know me,” Das told me recently. “And because they know that I work honestly, they send me information.” Sometimes his dog chewed documents up before he could open the door to find them.

One bulk of papers arrived by post on 11 August 2016, from the city of Cuttack. These contained the interim report in an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation, carried out on orders of the Orissa High Court, which named public servants who had been indicted for acquiring government land by fraudulent means.

On page 30, under the specifics of lease case number 588/79, Das spotted the name “Deepak Mishra.” He managed to locate a three-decade-old order by the additional district magistrate of Cuttack in State vs Sri Deepak Mishra—lease revision case number 238 of the year 1984. With the stated intention of raising a fodder farm, the defendant had applied to procure about three acres of government land in Cuttack, under a scheme designed to uplift the economically disadvantaged. To prove his eligibility, he swore, in an affidavit, that he came from a Brahmin family that owned no land. This was a lie, and the defendant’s lease on the land was cancelled. The additional district magistrate was “satisfied that the lessee had obtained lease by misrepresentation and fraud.”