by Vikram Seth
In practical terms too, Mahesh Kapoor was at his wits’ end. He no longer had two jeeps but only one broken-down vehicle provided by the Congress office. His son was no longer with him to provide him with help and support and introductions. His wife, who could have helped him, who could have talked to the shy women of the constituency, was dead. He had hoped at one stage that Jawaharlal Nehru might make time on his whirlwind tour of Purva Pradesh to visit Salimpur, but so certain had his election appeared that he had not pressed his case. And now it seemed that only a visit from Nehru could save him. He telegrammed Delhi and Brahmpur and asked that Nehru’s great progress be diverted his way for just a few hours; but he knew that half the Congress candidates in the province were making similar pleas, and that his chances of persuasion were utterly remote.
Veena and Kedarnath came out to help for a few days. Veena felt that her father needed her more than Maan, whom at best she could visit for a few minutes every other day. Her arrival had some effect in the towns, especially in Salimpur. Her homely but lively face, her warm-hearted manner, and the dignity of her sorrow—for her mother, for her brother, for her beleaguered father—affected the hearts of many women. When she spoke, they even attended public meetings. Because of the expansion of the franchise, they now formed half the electorate.
The Congress village-level workers campaigned as hard as they could, but many of them had begun to feel that the tide had turned irreversibly against them, and they were not able to disguise how disheartened they were. They could not even be certain of the scheduled caste vote because the socialists were trumpeting their electoral alliance with Dr Ambedkar’s party.
Rasheed had returned to his village to campaign for the socialists. He was disturbed and excitable and he even looked unstable. Every second day he rushed off to Salimpur. But whether he was an asset or a liability to Ramlal Sinha’s campaign was difficult to ascertain. He was Muslim, and religious, and that helped; but he had been disowned by almost everyone in his own village of Debaria—from Baba down to Netaji—and he had no particular standing anywhere. The elders of Sagal in particular mocked his pretensions. One joke that was doing the rounds was that ‘Abd-ur-Rasheed’ or ‘The Slave of The Director’ thought he had lost the head of his name when he had merely lost his own. Sagal had gone solidly into the Independent camp of Waris Khan.
In Debaria the picture was more complicated. This was partly because there were many more Hindus there: a small knot of brahmins and banias and a large group of jatavs and other scheduled castes. Every party—the Congress, the KMPP, the socialists, the communists, and the Hindu parties—could hope to garner votes here. Among the Muslims, matters were complicated by Netaji’s sporadic presence. He exhorted people to vote for the Congress candidate for Parliament, leaving open the question of the race for the Legislative Assembly; but there was bound to be some spillover in the resulting vote. A villager who placed his parliamentary ballot paper in a green box that carried the symbol of yoked oxen would be very likely to place his other ballot paper in a brown box carrying the same symbol.
When Mahesh Kapoor, after long and dusty hours of campaigning, arrived in Debaria with Kedarnath one evening, Baba met him and greeted him hospitably, but told him plainly that the situation had greatly changed.
‘And what about you?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Have you changed? Do you believe that a father should be punished for an offence of his son’s?’
Baba said: ‘I have never believed that. But I do believe that a father is responsible for the manner in which his son behaves.’
Mahesh Kapoor forbore from remarking that Netaji had not proved a great credit to Baba. The point was irrelevant, and he had no energy to argue. It was perhaps at that moment that he felt most acutely that he had lost the fight.
When he got back to Salimpur late at night, he told his son-in-law that he wished to be alone. The electricity in the room was weak, the bulbs low and flickering. He ate by himself and thought about his life, attempting to dissociate his family life from his public life, and to concentrate on the latter. Now more than ever he felt that he should have dropped out of politics in 1947. The sense of determination he had had when fighting the British had dissipated in the uncertainties and feeblenesses of Independence.
After dinner he looked through his post. He picked up a large envelope containing details of local electoral rolls. Then he picked up another local letter, and was startled to see King George VI’s face on the stamp.
For a minute he stared at it, completely disoriented, as if he had seen an omen. Very carefully he placed the envelope down upon the postcard below: a postcard displaying a portrait of Gandhi. He felt as if he had unconsciously trumped his own best card. He stared once again at the stamp.
There was a simple explanation, but it did not occur to him. The Posts and Telegraph Department, under pressure of the great demands of election mail, and concerned about possible shortages, had issued instructions that old stocks of the King George series be put on sale at post offices. That was all. King George VI, from his sick-bed in London, had not visited Mahesh Kapoor in the watches of the night to predict that he would see him again at Philippi.
17.34
The next morning Mahesh Kapoor arose before dawn, and took a walk through the unwoken town. The sky was still starry. A couple of birds had just begun to sing. A few dogs barked. Over the faint voice of the muezzin’s call to prayer, a cock crowed. Then again everything was silent except for the occasional birdsong.
‘Rise, traveller, the sky is light.
Why do you sleep? It is not night.’
He hummed the tune to himself and felt a renewal, if not of hope, at least of determination.
He looked at the watch that Rafi Sahib had given him, thought of the date, and smiled.
Later that morning, he was about to set out on the election round, when the Sub-Divisional Officer of Salimpur came up to him in a great hurry.
‘Sir, the Prime Minister will be coming here tomorrow afternoon. I was instructed by telephone to inform you. He will be speaking at Baitar and at Salimpur.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Mahesh Kapoor impatiently. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ He looked amazed, as if his improvement of mood had of itself brought about an improvement of fortune.
‘Yes, indeed, Sir. I am sure.’ The SDO looked both excited and extremely anxious. ‘I have made no arrangements at all. None at all.’
Within an hour the extraordinary news was all over town, and by midday had percolated into the villages.
Jawaharlal Nehru, amazingly young-looking for his sixty-two years, dressed in an achkan which was already taking on the colour of the dust of the constituency roads, met Mahesh Kapoor and the Congress parliamentary candidate in the Circuit House at Baitar. Mahesh Kapoor could still hardly believe it.
‘Kapoor Sahib,’ said Nehru, ‘they told me I shouldn’t come here because it was a lost battle. That made me even more determined to come. Take these things away,’ he said irritably to a man standing near him, as he bent his neck and freed himself of seven marigold garlands. ‘Then they told me some nonsense about some trouble your son had got himself into. I asked if it had anything to do with you—and it clearly hadn’t. People put too much emphasis on the wrong things in this country.’
‘I cannot thank you enough, Panditji,’ said Mahesh Kapoor with grateful dignity; he was very moved.
‘Thank? There is nothing to thank me for. By the way, I am very sorry about Mrs Kapoor. I remember meeting her in Allahabad—but that must have been—what?—five years ago.’
‘Eleven.’
‘Eleven! What is the matter? Why are they taking so much time to set things up? I’ll be late in Salimpur.’ He popped a pastille into his mouth. ‘Oh, I meant to tell you. I am asking Sharma to come and join my Cabinet. He can’t keep refusing me. I know he likes being Chief Minister, but I need a strong team in Delhi too. That is why it is so important that you win here and help to handle things in Purva Pradesh.’
> ‘Panditji,’ said Mahesh Kapoor with surprise and pleasure, ‘I will do my best.’
‘And of course we cannot have reactionary forces winning sensitive seats,’ said Nehru, pointing in the general direction of the Fort. ‘Where is Bhushan—is that his name? Can’t they organize anything?’ he continued impatiently. He stepped on to the verandah and shouted for the man from the District Congress Committee who was in charge of logistics. ‘How can we expect to run a country if we can’t get together a microphone and a platform and a few policemen?’ When he heard that the irksome and interminable security arrangements were finally secure, he ran down the steps of the Circuit House two at a time and jumped into the car.
The cavalcade was stopped every hundred yards or so by adoring crowds. When they reached the grounds where he was due to talk, he ran up the steps of the flower-strewn podium before doing namaste to the vast throng gathered below. The people—townsfolk and villagers alike—had been waiting for him with growing anticipation for more than two hours. When they sensed his arrival, even before they saw him, an electric shiver ran through the huge, excited audience, and they shouted:
‘Jawaharlal Nehru Zindabad!’
‘Jai Hind!’
‘Congress Zindabad!’
‘Maharaj Jawaharlal ki jai!’
This last was too much for Nehru.
‘Sit down, sit down, don’t shout!’ he shouted.
The crowd laughed delightedly and kept cheering. Nehru got annoyed, jumped down from the podium before anyone could stop him, and started physically pushing people down. ‘Hurry up, sit down, we don’t have all the time in the world.’
‘He gave me a push—a hard push!’ said one man proudly to his friends. He was to boast about it ever afterwards.
When he returned to the podium, a Congress bigwig started introducing and seconding someone else on the platform.
‘Enough, enough, enough of all this, start the meeting,’ said Nehru.
Then someone started talking about Jawaharlal Nehru himself, how flattered, honoured, privileged, blessed they were to have him with them, how he was the Soul of Congress, the Pride of India, the jawahar and lal of the people, their jewel and their darling.
All this got Nehru very angry indeed. ‘Come on, don’t you have anything better to do?’ he said under his breath. He turned to Mahesh Kapoor. ‘The more they talk about me, the less use I am to you—or to the Congress—or to the people. Tell them to be quiet.’
Mahesh Kapoor hushed up the speaker, who looked hurt; and Nehru immediately launched into a forty-five-minute speech in Hindi.
He held the crowd spellbound. Whether they understood him or not was hard to say, because he rambled on in an impressionistic manner from idea to idea, and his Hindi was not much good, but they listened to him and stared at him with rapt attention and awe.
His speech went something like this:
‘Mr Chairman, etc.,—brothers and sisters—we are gathered here at a troubled time, but it is also a time of hope. We do not have Gandhiji with us, so it is even more important that you have confidence in the nation and in yourselves.
The world is also going through a hard time. We have the Korean crisis and the crisis in the Persian Gulf. You have probably heard about the attempt of the British to bully the Egyptians. This will lead to trouble sooner or later. This is bad, and we cannot have it. The world must learn to live in peace.
Here at home also, we must live in peace. As tolerant people we must be tolerant. We lost our freedom many years ago because we were disunited. We must not let it happen again. Disaster will strike the country if religious bigots and communalists of all descriptions get their way.
We must reform our way of thinking. That is the main thing. The Hindu Code Bill is an important measure which must be passed. The Zamindari Bills of the various states must be implemented. We must look at the world with new eyes.
India is an ancient land of great traditions, but the need of the hour is to wed these traditions to science. It is not enough to win elections, we must win the battle of production. We must have science and more science, production and more production. Every hand has to be on the plough and every shoulder to the wheel. We must harness the forces of our mighty rivers with the help of great dams. These monuments to science and modern thinking will give us water for irrigation and also for electricity. We must have drinking water in the villages and food and shelter and medicine and literacy all around. We must make progress or else we will be left behind. . . .’
Sometimes Nehru was in a reminiscent mood, sometimes he waxed poetic, sometimes he got carried away and scolded the crowd. He was, as they had sensed in their earlier slogans, rather an imperious democrat. But they applauded him, almost regardless of what he said. They cheered when he talked about the size of the Bhakra dam, they cheered when he said that the Americans must not oppress Korea—whatever Korea was. And they cheered most of all when he requested their support, which he did almost as an afterthought. In the eyes of his people, Nehru—the prince and hero of Independence, the heir of Mahatma Gandhi—could do no wrong.
Only in the last ten minutes or so of any speech did he spend time asking for their votes—for the Congress, the party which had brought freedom to the country and which, for all its faults, was the only party that could keep India together; for the Congress parliamentary candidate ‘who is a decent man’ (Nehru had forgotten his name); and for his old comrade and companion Mahesh Kapoor, who had undertaken such a heavy task for the whole state by framing the crucial zamindari laws. He reminded the audience of certain anachronisms in an age of republicanism who were attempting to misuse feudal loyalties for their own personal ends. Some of them were even standing for election as Independents. One of them, who owned a huge estate, was even using the humble bicycle as his symbol. (This local reference went down well.) But there were many such, and the lesson was a general one. He asked the audience not to swallow the present professions of idealism and humility of such notables, but to contrast these with their ugly past record, a record of oppression of the people and of faithful service to their British overlords who had protected their domains, their rents and their misdeeds. The Congress would have no truck with such feudalists and reactionaries, and it needed the support of the masses to fight them.
When the crowd, carried away with enthusiasm, shouted ‘Congress Zindabad!’ or, worse still, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru Zindabad!’ Nehru ticked them off sharply and told them to shout ‘Jai Hind!’ instead.
And thus his meetings ended, and on he went to the next one, always late, always impatient, a man whose greatness of heart won the hearts of others, and whose meandering pleas for mutual tolerance kept a volatile country, not merely in those early and most dangerous years but throughout his own lifetime, safe at least from the systemic clutch of religious fanaticism.
17.35
The few hours that Jawaharlal Nehru spent in the district had an enormous effect on all the electoral campaigns there, and on none more so than Mahesh Kapoor’s. It gave him new hope and it gave the Congress workers new heart. The people too became perceptibly more friendly. If Nehru, who was indeed perceived by the ordinary people as the Soul of Congress and the Pride of India, had put his stamp of approval on his ‘old comrade and companion’, who were they to doubt his credentials? Had the elections been held the next day instead of two weeks later, Mahesh Kapoor would probably have flown home with a large majority on the hem of Nehru’s dusty achkan.
Nehru had also partially drawn the communal sting. For among Muslims throughout the country he was perceived as their true champion and protector. This was the man who at the time of Partition had jumped down from a police jeep in Delhi and rushed unarmed into the midst of fighting mobs in order to save lives, no matter whether the lives were Hindu or Muslim. This was the man whose very dress spoke of nawabi culture, however much he fulminated against Nawabs. Nehru had been to the shrine of the great sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, and had been honoured with the gift o
f a gown; he had been to Amarnath, where the Hindu priests had honoured him with puja. The President of India, Rajendra Prasad, would have gone to the latter but not to the former. It gave the frightened minorities heart that the Prime Minister saw no essential difference between the two.
Even Maulana Azad, the most notable leader among the Muslims after Independence, was a moon compared to Nehru’s sun; his brightness was largely that of reflection. For it was in Nehru—though he was not a man who was in love with it, and though he did not make the most effectual use of it—that popularity—and national power—was vested.
There were even some—both Hindus and Muslims—who said half-jokingly that he would have made a better leader of the Muslims than Jinnah. Jinnah had no sympathy for them—it was his will that had held them in his sway and led them towards Pakistan. But here was a man who was positively bubbling with sympathy, and who, unembittered by the partition of his country, continued, unlike others, to treat them—as he treated people of all religions or none—with affection and respect. They would have felt a great deal less secure and more fearful if someone else had been ruling in Delhi.
But, as the saying goes, Delhi is far away. And Brahmpur too for that matter—and even the district headquarters of Rudhia. As the days passed, once again local loyalties, local quarrels, local issues, and the local configurations of caste and religion began to reassert themselves. Gossip about Mahesh Kapoor’s son and the Nawabzada, about Saeeda Bai and the Nawab Sahib, continued to be exchanged at the small barber’s shop in Salimpur—more a pavement stall than a shop—in the vegetable market, over an evening hookah in a village courtyard, and wherever people met and talked.
Many upper-caste Hindus decided that Maan had lost his caste by associating with—and, worse still, falling in love with—that Muslim whore. And with Maan’s loss of caste his father had lost his claim on their vote. On the other hand, with the passage of time, many of the poorer Muslims—and most of them were poor—rethought the question of where their interests lay. Though they had a traditional loyalty to the Nawab Sahib, they began to fear what would happen if they elected his man Waris to the Legislative Assembly. What if not only he but other feudal Independents were elected? What if the Congress did not get a clear majority? Would the Zamindari Act—or at least its implementation—not then be at hazard, even if it passed the barrier of the Supreme Court? The danger of permanent tenantry under the cruel control of the munshi and his enforcers held few attractions compared to the possibility of independent ownership, however encumbered, of their own land.