Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  I had met the man she mentioned. His name was Atiq Ahmed. He was a Muslim politician who had just resigned from the Samajwadi Party over its failure to back Sonia Gandhi in her attempts to form a coalition government after the BJP government’s collapse, and he lived in the warren of narrow lanes, with overhanging two- or three-story houses and small shops, which made up the old quarter across the tracks from Civil Lines. It had rained heavily on the evening I went with a friend to see him. A stench from uncollected mounds of garbage hung in the humid air; the unlit road was all large water-filled craters, treacherous and almost impossible to negotiate in the dark. Mr. Ahmed had famously shot his greatest rival in one of the more public squares in the old city. By living where he did, he had made it difficult for his own would-be murderer to reach his house. The walled compound was patrolled by armed men and ferocious-looking Dobermans, and packed with gleaming new Toyotas and Hondas and Tata Sumo jeeps. Tall, stocky men walked around the veranda of the house, speaking into mobile phones; a row of sofas with frayed blue-satin upholstery lined the wall, several rooms beyond which probably were—though hard to imagine in this rough masculine atmosphere—the living quarters for women.

  Mr. Ahmed’s thick curling moustache, his burly frame and brisk waddle suggested a brute panache. But he dressed simply in a white kurta pajama, a long scarf wound around his head, Bedouin-style, and he received us in a small bare room, where a singlet hung limply from the lone hook on the yellow walls and a wrinkled sheet with a faded redroses print covered the bed in one corner, under a glossy calendar picture of Mecca at night.

  Ostentation in general wasn’t Mr. Ahmed’s style. His power seemed to partly lie in remaining, or at least appearing to be, a man of the people, someone who had begun his career by stealing tar from road construction sites, had become a contractor for the railways, successfully contested the elections to the state legislature, and then, after a series of strategic murders of potential rivals, had emerged as the unchallenged authority in a part of the old quarter populated largely by poor Muslims, thin, gaunt, angular-featured men in prayer caps who stood idle before lightless shops and gazed warily at the passing cars.

  For local politicians in need of Muslim votes, Mr. Ahmed was the person to talk to, and the phone rang constantly, with callers from Benares, Mirzapur, Pratapgarh, and Fatehpur entreating him to visit these neighboring constituencies and work his special persuasive magic on the Muslim voters, who formed up to 20 percent of the electorate of the region. Mr. Ahmed usually pleaded busyness, uncancelable engagements. He was gruffly matter-of-fact; while I was with him, he received many telephone calls informing him that an associate of his had been shot, and after ascertaining that the man was still alive and arranging for him to be taken to a “nursing home,” Mr. Ahmed became increasingly brusque in his replies. Putting the phone down, he would assume a friendly demeanor, and with the graciousness that is the politician’s acquired skill, he would urge us to take more pistachios from the bowl on the table before us.

  In between phone rings, he talked, seriously and engagingly; he spoke like the man who had moved on, after the petty crimes and murders, to a higher idea of himself. He worried about the Brahmin vote bank in Allahabad. He feared that most of it would go to BJP’s Brahmin candidate, the incumbent Mr. Joshi, even though the Congress had also put up a Brahmin candidate. He thought the Brahmins weren’t ready to accept Sonia Gandhi’s leadership. He worried, too, about the “fascist” tactics of the BJP. The Hindu nationalists had no respect for democracy, he said. They had staffed the district administration with their upper-caste sympathizers—this was something ) I heard often—and were going to rig the elections in their favor.

  It wasn’t just his expressed concern for democracy that made judgment on Mr. Ahmed difficult. In his area, almost a ghetto with its boxed houses and cramped lanes and restricted lives, among a minority made insecure and fearful by the rise of the Hindu nationalists, Mr. Ahmed with his wealth and political power offered certain guarantees to otherwise unprotected peoples. His power, though often asserted in violent and arbitrary ways, kept at bay the violence and arbitrariness of other men in other ghettos: the Raja Bhaiyyas, the Hindu nationalists, the corrupt policemen,.

  Now he was extending his suzerainty to the city across the tracks, and he made the inhabitants of Civil Lines nervous. The judge’s wife spoke to me of the general turning away from the city, a retreat that appeared more extensive than that of the British after the shock of the mutiny in 1857, but without the power and security of the latter. “People living here in Civil Lines,” she said, “long stopped taking any kind of interest or pleasure in their city; they want to have as little to do with it as possible. They send their children out of the city for studies; sometimes they too move out.”

  4. The Reclaiming of India

  The middle class, which had depended for a long time on its close affiliations with the executive and legislative branches of the administration and on its class loyalties, now weakened at a time when every man was for himself, the middle class in small towns and cities sees itself as besieged. In this you could detect the beginning of the end of an India that thought itself safe in the cocoon of colonial privilege, an India that with all its inherited advantages had failed to create a democratic and egalitarian society and was instead forced to accommodate people like Mr. Ahmed.

  It could all seem fated from the time, soon after independence, when the new bourgeois self-confidence that had once contributed to the making of modern India decayed into a desire for colonial forms of self-assertion and authority: the high-placed job with the government, the big bungalow, the graveled driveway, the servants in the kitchen, the uniformed sentinel at the gate. Many more Indians seek to enter that world. The reclaiming of India by Indians, the logical result of independence from colonial rule, often appears to have only just begun.

  This process is inevitably hardest and longest for people whom the caste system and poverty had previously kept in darkness. Ram Dular Singh Patel, the candidate in Allahabad of the Bahujan Samaj Party, which claimed to represent the interests of the Dalits (the all-inclusive term for all formerly untouchable and oppressed castes), thought politics could short-circuit the process. Dalits form roughly 20 percent of India’s population. By using their vote effectively, they could be a force for instability, and instability was good, Mr. Patel said, looking searchingly at me, since “it confuses and bewilders Brahmanical forces and hastens their breakup.”

  The leaders of Mr. Patel’s party had been known to begin their press conferences by asking all Brahmin journalists to leave. It was a kind of reverse humiliation, a small retribution for centuries of oppression, and my initial nervousness about contacting Mr. Patel had grown after lie failed to return my calls. I had then gone to his house early one morning with the hope that he would be more receptive to a visitor at home. He lived in Allahapur, a residential area built on sloping ground near the Ganges, where the broad, straight streets of Civil Lines suddenly shrink and turn into a maze of narrow, often unpaved lanes with potholes and open gutters and piles of filth. When I was there last, the houses were no more than two or three square or rectangular boxes of brick and cement stacked on top of or next to each other. They formed unbroken walls on both sides of the lane, their façades moldy and grimy after three months of monsoon rains; some of these were boardinghouses and lodges where many students from the region around Allahabad live. The lanes were choked with cows and pigs, which seemed unusually big in that constricted space, and street vendors selling vegetables and fruits and fried snacks in open stalls, but a steady stream of rickshaws, scooters, and motorcycles still managed to wend past them. Before a hand pump, a man furiously soaped his swarthy torso, as two men waited behind him, brushing their teeth. A tangle of electric cables hung loosely and dangerously from electric poles at every corner, illegal power connections you could acquire by bribing the local electricity staff.

  Mr. Patel’s house, a white two-storied building, was se
parated from the main lane by a stretch of bare ground that heavy rains had scored into a miniature mountain valley of gullies and mounds. My shoes left a trail of mud as I walked up a staircase at the back of the house to one of these rooms, where bleary-eyed young men in undervests and pajamas sat cross-legged under fast-spinning fans. There was no furniture apart from a wooden cot and an old sofa with its straw stuffing exposed; some rumpled and frayed sari-like sheets on the rough floor indicated the place where the men slept. The walls were bare except for a poster with the words “God loves you” and a garish oil painting in garish colors of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Gandhi’s rival and the original leader of the Dalits.

  The men in the room, dark and thin and subdued-looking, shot quick glances at my clothes and shoes, and it occurred to me that I was the only fully dressed person there. One of the men introduced himself, ordered tea, and then informed Mr. Patel, dressing for the day in an inner room, of my arrival. The man’s name was Sandip. A thick beard covered his round, rather jovial face. His undervest had tiny holes in it, but the upright way in which he sat suggested authority. He told me, speaking with the practiced fluency of a public speaker, that the other young men, most of them Dalits, were student volunteers for Mr. Patel’s campaign. Some of them were from villages outside Allahabad ; others lived nearby, in the dingy boardinghouses I had just passed.

  They stared at me as Sandip spoke, still sitting where I had surprised them, and I wondered if, after the first burst of caste loyalty and enthusiams that had taken them to Mr. Patel’s home, they had found themselves at a loose end, unsure of what they were supposed to do.

  Mr. Patel soon appeared. He was tall and lean, with thick hair and pencil-thin mustache, and a mole in the middle of his forehead that looked incongruously like the caste mark of the devout Brahmin; in his crisp white kurta and dhoti he stood out in the bare room full of shabbily dressed students, who, passive until this point, immediately clustered around him. He was at first surprised, and then pleased, to see me; it turned out that there hadn’t been any press coverage so far of his campaign. But he didn’t have much time; he was on his way to address meetings in the rural areas south of the Yamuna River. The leaders of his party were soon arriving in Allahabad to lend support to his campaign, and they were arriving in a helicopter. Mr. Patel himself planned to travel in the helicopter with them, the resonant fact for him; he kept repeating it, to the extent that it seemed that the helicopter had become, like the expulsion of Brahmins from press conferences, another small way of experiencing a long-denied power.

  The students looked impressed, and after his first moment of surprise, Mr. Patel spoke to me slightly mockingly, dismissing my questions in his slow, deliberate voice, inviting smiles from the students, who watched his face intently.

  The real issue in this election, Mr. Patel said, wasn’t one that anyone outside his party had taken up. It was this: How can Dalits live in India with dignity and self-respect and receive equal opportunities in education and employment? Fifty years after independence most Dalits were victims of the worst kind of exploitation: They were worked into the ground and underpaid; in villages they were not allowed to draw water from the communal well; they were killed at random, and their wives and daughters raped. There was only one way of stopping all that: by welding the Dalits into a solid political unit. Mr. Patel clenched and unclenched his fist to illustrate his point. It was an unsettling gesture after the softness of his voice. The combined strength of the Dalits, Mr. Patel continued, would then hold the balance of power against “Brahmanical forces,” who after all were just 20 percent of the population as opposed to 20 percent Dalits, 30 percent other Backward castes, and 15 percent Muslims and other minorities.

  And then after this swift reckoning Mr. Patel left, quickly pattering down the stairs, a small retinue of party men with flags and banners running to keep pace with him. The students dispersed and became idle again. Sandip, who had been standing next to Mr. Patel, suddenly laughed embarrassedly and said that he himself was a “student leader,” the first Dalit to have won an election to his college’s student union, which the upper castes had previously monopolized. His ambition now—and here Sandip’s voice suddenly became full of passion—was to help elect Mr. Patel as the first Dalit member of Parliament from Allahabad, where duplicitous Brahmins from various political parties had managed to fool the Dalit masses with false promises for over fifty years.

  Later that afternoon, I was at a tea shack in Civil Lines when a Tata Sumo jeep flying the BJP flag—saffron-colored, with a lotus in the middle—stopped before it. Two students emerged, identically plump in tight jeans and T-shirts with mobile phones strapped to their trouser belts. The jeep was new, with plastic covers still draped across the seats. It was probably a temporary gift, along with the mobile phones, from the party. It emerged that the students had been going from door to door in the middle-class parts of the city, campaigning for Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, the BJP’s Brahmin candidate for Allahabad. Despite this, the two saw themselves not as active politicians but as members of the Sangh Parivar, the family of both extreme and moderate Hindu nationalist groups, which, since they do not take part in electoral politics, are free to make unpopular gestures of Hindu assertion, such as the recent attacks on Christians across India that the BJP’s sister outfit, the Bajrang Dal, organized.

  They were trying, they said, to present the issues before the people, such as whether India was to be ruled once again by a foreigner, an “agent of the Vatican” (the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi); whether India was to defeat attempts by Islamic fundamentalists to destroy it; whether India was to regain its past glory as a strong, self-sufficient Hindu nation.

  They looked confused when I asked them how the BJP proposed to achieve the last-mentioned aim. One of them began to say something about India’s nuclear tests and then stopped. When I asked them about the Dalits and Mr. Patel, they were scornful. They said that the politics of hate and animosity Mr. Patel and his party practiced would weaken Hinduism and India. The Dalits were welcome to join the mainstream of Hindu society, but their current demands for more reservations in government jobs was going to lead to civil war. As it was—and here they became agitated—India faced all kinds of challenges from abroad. Did I know that Osama bin Laden had issued a call for jihad against India? The pope already had a dangerous agent in India, Sonia Gandhi. And now America had declared war through its missionaries, who were bribing innocent Hindus to convert to Christianity. Had I heard about the beating up of the missionaries last winter in Allahabad? They knew the man responsible for it. It was the right thing to do; it had sent a clear message to America: that Hindu India would fiercely rebuff any attempts to undermine it.

  Raised from ordinariness by the elections, and given a slightly glamorous identity by the jeep and mobile phones, the students hadn’t really bothered to think through their rhetoric. They found it easier to work with a sense of the enemy: bin Laden, Sonia, the pope. I hadn’t asked, but I knew they were Brahmins; their political affiliations and opinions were enough of a hint. Most of the educated upper castes were with the BJP; the rest of the parties fought over the Backward caste and Dalit and Muslim votes in the intensely competitive politics based on group identity that had emerged in India after the politically torpid years under the Congress.

  Just fifteen years ago I couldn’t have encountered people like Sandip or the BJP’s supporters; the Dalit students wouldn’t have been clustering reverently around Mr. Patel. The Congress then had a brute majority in the Parliament. For much of the time since independence, it had managed to keep the lid on most of the bewildering social and political contradictions of India; it had appeared to address all the dif ferent claims made by rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, Brahmin and Dalit, North Indian and South Indian.

  This elastic appeal was the party’s legacy, along with its nationwide organization, and its association with the great names of Gandhi and Nehru. It had been sustained as much by the glamour of its dynasty as it had b
y the ineptitude of opposition parties or by the monopoly it came to have over the institutions of the colonial state, the system of rewards and punishments it created within the civil bureaucracy and the newly opened state-controlled industries. The Congress’s unchallenged dominance had made for a simple political and intellectual life in the country. Academics and journalists looked for shelter in the great network of state patronage created by the Congress. Small talk and gossip crowded out political discussion in the newspapers. It was rare for the politicians and journalists who used to cluster at the old coffeehouse in Allahabad to do more than speculate about who was in or out of favor with the big bosses of the Congress.

  In the end the Congress had been undermined by its own inner complexity. The peace it maintained between antagonistic groups began to crumble, and this was as much due to an ossified leadership as to the fact that individuals as well as special interest caste and regional groupings had become more conscious of what was owed to them, the self-awareness that the stability of colonial and then Congress rule—a sterile stability with no end but itself—had managed to suppress for the most part. Provincial party bosses challenged the leadership and were, in turn, themselves challenged by newly emergent activists from below. India had now reverted to being a nation with many minorities, each with its own grievances.