TELLING IT AS IT IS: A still from Kya Yahi Sach Hai; (left) Y. P. Singh

A huge poster of Kya Yahi Sach Hai greets you when you enter the living room of the Worli flat in Mumbai. The cop on the poster is ready to take on the world. But his creator — former Mumbai policeman Yogesh Pratap Singh, better known as Y.P. Singh — looks tired. The film has just been released to mixed reactions. And Singh, who fought corruption till he was forced to step down from the police force, is unhappy that the story of a man who dared hasn’t caught on.

“I am disappointed with the initial response to the film. I am told the younger generation didn’t like it much,” he says about his directorial debut released in end-December featuring fearless and uncompromising cop Raghu Kumar. The film, based on Singh’s 2003 book Carnage by Angels, has been praised for its storyline, but panned for poor cinematography and technical glitches.

Singh, 51, is Maharashtra’s favourite scam buster and whistleblower who brought down a chief minister. His investigations into the Adarsh Society scam revealed political involvement in the illegal high-rise building on army land in Mumbai. Again, it was Singh who alleged that Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule and her husband were allotted shares at undervalued rates in Lavasa, a private city near Pune — something they have denied. When he was with the Central Bureau of Investigation, he exposed corporate violations, oil field scams and so on.

Forced to resign from the police a year after he wrote his book — he says he was harassed and sidelined — these days he is a successful lawyer. His wife, Abha Singh, who also makes an appearance in his film, is a director at the Indian Postal Services. And after years in the police — including six in the armed police department — he is a treasure trove of stories.

When the Mumbai boy (his father was from Uttar Pradesh) joined the force in 1985 as a sub-divisional officer, he was told that a senior IPS officer and his wife were visiting, and it was “customary” for newly joined junior IPS officers to hand over jewellery worth Rs 1 lakh as a gift to the senior’s wife. Singh, then 26, was appalled. “I went off in a huff,” he says. Later he learnt that two petrol pumps in the vicinity sponsored the gift Singh had refused to fund. In return, they were allowed to continue with their business of selling adulterated petrol.

“Initially I thought I was too young (to take on the system) and that discretion was the better part of valour,” he says. But soon, it was difficult for him to ignore corruption in the police. Singh claims that senior posts are bought for large amounts of money. And paying for a post naturally means that the corrupt policeman makes money in other ways.

“There is simply no mechanism to stop this flourishing trade in postings and transfers,” he says. Postings in the crime branch and the territorial branches of the police force are coveted because they deal in organised crime, drugs, prostitution and other institutional crimes — which can mean big bucks for a corrupt cop.

In an age when civil society — led by Anna Hazare — is seen to be fighting corruption, Singh stresses that there are some corrupt people in every department — from income tax to customs. “But the policeman being corrupt is more dangerous because of the repercussions it can have on society,” he says.

According to Singh, there are three types of criminals. The first consists of those who steal because of poverty. The second involves corrupt government officers who rob the system of revenues. The third set, he believes, is the most “heinous”. And that, he says, is when the bureaucracy comes together to “finish off” the life of an honest civil servant.

Singh knows what he is talking about. Seven years after leaving the force, he is still to get his Provident Fund, gratuity and other dues. After he left the IPS, he says the family was so badly off that his son could not afford a vada pav in school.

But now that he is a successful lawyer, things have been looking up. These days, he earns Rs 10 lakh a case handling corporate matters, land, developmental and environmental issues. He hasn’t stopped taking on the high and mighty, though. He filed a PIL against Shah Rukh Khan in 2008 on an alleged illegal extension of his bungalow in Bandra.

He believes his activism came in the way of his film’s release too. Movie halls were reluctant to screen his film. Halls asked him to pay an advance fee for full house occupancy — he finally ended up paying for 80 per cent occupancy in advance. At one point of time, Singh was almost ostracised by his former colleagues. “It was very painful. It hits you badly. You are deserted by society, by your colleagues and your life is very lonely. But like Chamberlain being given a hug by Hitler before the war in 1938, all my police friends are now in touch with me.”

The scars of the battle he fought show on his face, but Singh hasn’t lost his humour. A camera crew is leaving his room, and Singh is reminded of a television discussion he’d watched a few days earlier. “The anchor was going on and on about ‘Kya karegi Kareena?’ (What’s Kareena going to do),” he says, imitating the anchor’s voice. “A country progresses by the minds of its people. In America prime time news television would never deal with such trivial matters,” he says.

So would he like to settle down in a country like the US given the bitter experiences he has had in India? “No, I would rather reform hell than revel in heaven,” he says.