India
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“The Mussulman community doesn’t accept that terrorism is cancerous, that it has cancerous properties and if it is not shed it is going to ruin the whole body.” He felt strongly about this, and about other things too. “The Mussulman community is a threat. Although they may be weaker economically, they have toughness of mind and nurse a grudge for partition. They have a lack of education because Congress was content to keep them illiterate.” It seemed as if he envied his own mental idea of Muslims for their toughness. Manoj said he knew what they were up to, although he never had any contact with them himself. “They work only as hair-cutters, or they make goggles [spectacles] and don’t know about the rest of the world. We have to look at the root cause, which is their tendency to link each and every act to the Quran. I want to say to them, ‘Don’t depend on this book. Hindus have 33 crore [330 million] deities and it is a way of life, it is a culture, and it is always evolving.’ The nation must tighten. For 800 years, invaders were coming and they took away a sizeable chunk of our country [through the creation of Pakistan]. With the exception of emperor Akbar, they all broke down our religious centres, in Kashi [Benares], in Ayodhya, in Mathura.” These were places in Uttar Pradesh with a religious resonance. “The Babri Masjid was a sign of our slavery. India may have achieved its independence in 1947, but the Hindu gods are still not free.”39
It was quite a tirade, and I could not help feeling that Manoj, and other BJP types like him here, were similar to men I had talked to in Pakistan who imagined a purer nation. Their version of Hinduism was a direct match for politicized Islam. It was a similarly reductive way of viewing humans and the world, and it was as if their exclusivist, reductive, relentlessly male prejudice—which failed to acknowledge the loyalty most Muslims had to the Indian dream—was justified only by the threat of Islamist extremism.
I asked Manoj whether he was worried the leaders of the BJP were mainly old men. His hero was the 29-year-old Varun Gandhi, the son of Maneka and Sanjay who as a baby had been expelled from Indira Gandhi’s house after his father’s death. I had met Varun a few years before he joined politics, and he had struck me then as being an amalgam of his parents: lively, charismatic and somehow weird in his intensity, a young man who was likely to go somewhere, though possibly not to a good place.
At the age of twenty he had published a book of poems, The Otherness of Self:
Of the end
Seems to be
Littoral noise
Wash down the eucharist with water
A euthanising silence
strychnine
Key to Eugenics
Truth is the key to life and indignation.40
An aspiring MP for the BJP, and shortly to become a party secretary, Varun Gandhi had been jailed during the election campaign when he was secretly recorded saying he swore on the Gita that he would cut off the hand of anyone who raised a finger against Hindus.41 After his release, he spoke about other subjects which he thought would hit a chord. Like Murli Manohar Joshi, he was keen on the cow: “If somebody attacks my mother, would I not stand in front of her to protect her? Cow-slaughter is not only a social crime it is also a criminal act,” he told a rally.42
For someone like Manoj, he was exactly the sort of new leader the BJP needed.
“Varun Gandhi is a responsible youth. He has an emotional connect with the youth and he is the right torchbearer for Hindutva.” Our interpreter, Arunav, interrupted. “Don’t say ‘Hindutva’—say patriotism.” Manoj shrugged him off. “Varun Gandhi has been able to identify the threats that are posing a challenge to India. I met him at his rally yesterday. Maybe it is Sanjay Gandhi who will be put in the shade.”43
4
FAMILY POLITICS
WHAT REALLY HAPPENS in an Indian general election? How does it work? When the people of India got started in 1952, no one else had tried anything quite so big. The new election commission had to make 2 million steel ballot boxes, and developed an idea begun in the 1920s of having a symbol for each party—an elephant, an open hand—to make things easier for illiterate voters, and decided to paint a streak of indelible ink down the finger of those who had voted.1 Before that, they had constructed a list of voters—but what of the electors in the former princely states who did not want to give their names out of reverence for the ruler and fear of democracy, or the women in Punjab who had no names to give except daughter of ________ or wife of ________, or the people in Bengal who did not want to say certain family names out loud to a stranger?
Somehow, it happened, and since then the elections have kept on coming, fifteen so far since 1947. Amazingly, no one has yet managed to fix an Indian general election. Certainly all sorts of bribery take place—one of Sonia Gandhi’s intimates told me you could buy journalists like prostitutes—but the machinery or intimidation needed to capture an election at an all-India level has not been found. There are too many voters, too many points of view, too many conflicting allegiances. The practice of electoral violence such as booth capturing has declined significantly since the 1990s. The “model code of conduct” outlined by the election commission is enforced with increasing vigour, with rival parties being quick to complain of any breach: candidates break the law if they use an image of a deity on an election leaflet, their dummy ballot units (to show voters how to work the electronic voting machines) must be of a specified size and colour, political adverts cannot be printed “on back side of the bus ticket of Govt. owned buses,” no more than five people are allowed to visit the returning officer at the same time and the display of party flags on moving vehicles is strictly regulated.2
After watching several Indian general elections, I had come to think they were self-regulating, like Gaia theory, designed for the public to fleece aspiring politicians as payback for the previous years when the transaction had gone in the opposite direction. For a small family business, urban elections could be like Diwali, the festival of lights: sweet sellers would produce special packages, caterers would charge double, loudspeaker rickshaws would be hired for ten hours and disappear after only two to a rival parade, printers would raise their prices, the sellers of flags, banners and bamboo poles would make profits, PR agencies would charge high fees to send out illiterate press releases, religious leaders would be paid to deliver the votes of the faithful (a car or truck was often the price) and the votes would not come in at the agreed level. A candidate in West Bengal said to me: “You can pay money for a certain district, but you are never sure if the neta [local leader] will deliver the votes. I would say that for election rallies, about two thirds of the money you pay to mobilize people gets wasted. They promise 10,000 farm workers will turn out, and you get 3,000.” But he had lost his campaign; a more experienced candidate, always delegating the unsavoury work to a deniable third party, would butter the necessary parts of the constituency.
Money that had been stored up for years in cash would be paid out to officials and supporters. “When you see those IAS [Indian Administrative Service] officers’ wives going shopping in the new mall,” an oleaginous fixer told me, “there’s usually someone like me in the car behind to pick up the bill.” Semi-professional facilitators would pop up at election time, especially in constituencies which a member of a business family was contesting. In such situations, it was not hard for a fixer to say they needed to give a Montblanc pen here, a bottle of Blue Label there. A senior election facilitator from Mumbai told me a “big” candidate would have trouble spending less than $2–3m to win a constituency in the 2009 election (officially, each candidate was allowed to spend $55,000). One report calculated that if you had assets over Rs100m, your chances of winning an election to the Maharashtra state assembly were forty-eight times greater than if you had Rs1m ($23,000) or less. Just six of the state’s 288 legislators were worth less than Rs500,000. The same report stated that celebrities were hired by campaigns in 2009 to give an endorsement, and newspapers moved back into profit by selling column inches brazenly to ride out the economic downturn: one candidate fro
m Maharashtra had spent nearly $250,000 on local media alone during his successful campaign.3
This was one of the reasons why parties which were growing rapidly liked to pick “resourceful” candidates, who could spend their own fortunes trying to get elected. After an impressive showing in the 2007 Uttar Pradesh state elections, the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Mayawati, wanted to extend her writ across north India to Haryana, Delhi and Uttarakhand. It was an ambitious plan, but she had never lacked ambition. Usually wearing gold and turned out in a pink or lemon salwar kameez, Mayawati was a squat woman born in 1956 and raised in a poor part of Delhi, one of nine children. When she was little, she travelled to her grandparents’ home for a holiday, and the other passengers asked her parents where they were headed. They named the district. Acha, which village? They named the village. Ah, which part of the village, which mohalla? Chamar mohalla. And the passengers shrank away and stopped talking. Mayawati did not know why. Her mother explained that since they came from a caste of hereditary leather workers—Chamars—they were considered low and unclean. “From a very early age,” she wrote in Hindi in her ghosted 3,300-page memoir, A Travelogue of My Struggle-Ridden Life and of Bahujan Samaj, “I learnt to hate the caste system with all my might.”4 Under her guidance, Dalits would claim their rights as Indian citizens.
Mayawati’s response to the caste system has been extreme assertion, copying the methods of earlier rulers. After she took over the state of Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s, she built around 15,000 statues of her hero, Dr. Ambedkar, at the government’s expense; for, without his ideas, she might never have gained the throne. To understand the extreme democracy of Uttar Pradesh, you ideally need a qualification in both statistics and chaos theory, and Mayawati knew how to play a game of numbers. The old elite hated her. “She should be given a broom,” said one man, meaning she was a sweeper who should get back in her place. “How can she just take taxes from these poor people to build palaces and monuments?” asked a retired Rajput princess, whose ancestors had done much the same for generations. A rich lady in Delhi said, “Mayawati doesn’t work, she just wakes up and dismisses some IAS officers. I’ve heard at midday she puts wax on, does manicure-pedicure, has massage and at six—like all the middle classes—she watches Hindi soaps.” Stories circulated of her unexplained wealth, which included properties in some of the most expensive streets in Delhi. Despite having had no occupation but being a schoolteacher and a politician, Mayawati’s declared assets when she ran for office in 2010 totalled 87 crores or more than $18.5m.5
Around half of the BSP’s votes came from the Dalit community, and she wanted to widen the party’s appeal and gain more MPs. If Congress and the BJP drew level at the 2009 general election, her hope was she could step in as kingmaker, and possibly become India’s prime minister herself. She was picking her candidates from a variety of communities (for the seven Delhi seats, she had chosen three Muslims, two Brahmins, one Dalit and one Gujjar). The richer ones were probably running for office as an investment: if they gained power, they would have greater opportunities. And some were very rich indeed. Deepak Bhardwaj, who was standing for Parliament for west Delhi in 2009, was officially worth $134m—he described himself as “philanthropist, patriot, educationist, builder” and was to be seen driving around on a mini-tractor topped with a blue stuffed elephant, the party symbol. Haji Mohammed Mustaqeem was the candidate for Chandni Chowk in the heart of old Delhi. He was a meat exporter and a Muslim—the kind of person Murli Manohar Joshi of the BJP did not favour—and had declared personal assets of $4.5m.6
I went to see Haji Mustaqeem. His election office was in a run-down building extending over four floors, in a Muslim part of the old city of Delhi opposite Filmistan Cinema. The Bahujan Samaj operation was unlike that of other parties. In Lucknow, I had noticed the same thing: it was run by the firm edict of its leader, rather than in the usual haphazard way. Big posters of Mayawati, Ambedkar and the party’s founder, Kanshi Ram, were on show by the entrance. The workers there were looking poor and edgy as they prepared to go campaigning, but they had a disciplined attitude which seemed to say, we might change things, our way.
Haji Mustaqeem had a canny face, with the sides of his head squashed in as if by forceps, and brown patches lay under his eyes. He was forty-seven years old. Guarded by BSP minders, he was sitting on a bed and looked as if he was not used to speaking to foreigners. “I have entered politics to help the poor and the downtrodden,” he said in Urdu. One of his secretaries from the meat packing company was translating for me. “I am a good businessman. Congress and the BJP do nothing for these poor people.” A minder who was visiting from Uttar Pradesh—UP—cut in: “He is very successful in business, he comes from a very reputed family and has no criminal record.” I sensed that the party officials and Haji Mustaqeem did not make an easy fit. It seemed as if he was used to issuing commands, not taking them. He began again.
“The chief minister of UP, Miss Mayawati, said to me, ‘You have earned a lot, now go out and serve your community.’ My father was pro-Congress for fifty years, but in fifty years they have done nothing for Muslims in India. My father was a butcher before me. We don’t have jobs in the defence services, in the bureaucracy, in the police. We are talking about people who have been neglected since years. The educational prospects are not good. The BJP is a communal party—so for me they are zero. My family used to be 100 percent Congress supporters. I have worked very hard, doing food export.” This was true: under “education” on his election affidavit, Haji Mustaqeem had written only “Primary schooling from Rahima Madarsa.” His was the sort of success story that was rarely mentioned in India or beyond: not being a software tycoon, he slipped under the net. Judging by his surroundings and appearance, he had little interest in displaying his wealth.
What sort of meat did he export? He looked surprised to be asked. “Lamb, goat and buffalo—fresh and frozen—to the Gulf, to Malaysia, to Egypt and South Africa. We are completely mechanized and automated, using equipment from Germany. We have one factory in Ghaziabad district in UP, one in Haryana and a government slaughter house on lease in Goa. We export 400 to 500 crores of meat per annum.” That was about $100m a year, an impressive business. Was he bothered about some Hindus not wanting to vote for him? Earlier in the campaign there had been a story, quite possibly invented, about buffalo carcasses tipping off one of his lorries in front of a Hanuman mandir. The question did not interest him. He did not see the world in this way. The Haji was a businessman, not a politician. “My vote bank is in the walled city area. I have not approached any local leader to deliver my votes.” Did he think the Bahujan Samaj Party could break into a constituency like this? “When we started, at the local election, our vote went up from zero to 16 percent—so we can win.”7
As it turned out, Haji Mustaqeem did little campaigning, just tramped through the narrow lanes of the old city with an entourage who wore blue scarves, choosing days when he knew other butchers would be off work, counting on the votes of the Muslim sub-caste to which he belonged, the Qureshis. His essential purpose in this election was to put down a marker for himself and the party. He waved as he walked and rarely spoke or smiled. Haji Mustaqeem was the local man who had done exceptionally well. Elections were part of his journey.
Chandni Chowk was the number one constituency in India, the first on the electoral lists. In the 2009 general election, its size increased: delimitation gave it four times as many voters, with the proportion of Muslims reducing from one third to one fifth. In the 1990s the seat had been held by the BJP, but in 2004 it was won for Congress by Kapil Sibal, a Harvard Law School graduate who had joined politics after a successful career as a lawyer.8 Now, with the redrawn boundaries, no one was quite sure where the result might be heading.
The main street of Chandni Chowk had once been a principal avenue of the Mughal empire, home to traders, poets, pilgrims and courtesans, and after the anti-British rebellion of 1857 the corpses of rebellious nawabs and rajas were displ
ayed along the length of it. Now, it was a confusion of utensil shops, old havelis, flower sellers and street stalls trading currency notes. Every faith was catered for: a mosque, a Baptist church, a Sikh gurdwara, a Shiv temple and a Jain temple, beside a hospital for sick birds. A branch of McDonald’s stood nearby, the steps thronged not with fans of the Maharaja Mac but with lean, squatting men in red turbans. Some had cotton buds stuck in the band of their turban, and each had a grubby towel draped over his shoulder. Others wielded sticks and wires, and were at work on their customers, crouching on their haunches, poking and twiddling, tutting and squinting: kaan saaf karne wallahs, the ear-cleaners of old Delhi. I asked one of them why he had chosen this spot to ply his trade. Drawing on a bidi, a leaf cigarette, he pointed out that McDonald’s had chosen the location: these steps were where the ear-cleaners had assembled for generations, in sight of the Red Fort, and they had no intention of going elsewhere.
I went to visit another candidate, Dr. Sita Ram Sharma, whose office was nearby. He was seventy-seven, and his party, the Rashtrawadi Sena, was concerned with the salvation of traditional values. Although the election campaign in Chandni Chowk was a three-way race between the BJP, Congress and the BSP, in democratic style no fewer than forty-one candidates were contesting, for the excitement and to get their point of view across. Some were said to be standing as dummy candidates on behalf of larger parties, to enable more election agents to get into polling stations. One of the independent candidates seemed to be staking a third of his fortune: named Beer Singh, he had declared assets of $600, and was likely to lose his deposit of Rs10,000 ($220). Another candidate with an outside chance, a gentleman’s tailor called Prem Narain, told a reporter he had no manifesto and when pressed as to why he was running answered sadly: “Hum bhi kuchh kar sakte hain”—“I too can do something.”9