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

by Pankaj Mishra

  The Congress, weighed down with self-serving coteries and lobbyists and dulled by its years in power, had been late to wake up to the fact that it could no longer meet the conflicting needs of Brahmins and Dalits, rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim. It tried to appease everyone and sought renewal through the few surviving members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

  Some measure of the Congress’s confusion was revealed by an election meeting at the university student union. It was to be addressed by Rita Bahuguna, the Congress’s candidate from Allahabad. She had been elected mayor of Allahabad three years ago, but this wasn’t going to help her defeat Mr. Joshi, the BJP MP. She was blamed for the deteriorating civic condition in the city, but she was, in effect, powerless since the municipal corporation spent most of the little money it had on staff salaries. The hall was packed, a mixed crowd of students and teachers perspiring under slow fans. Mrs. Baluguna was late, and a series of student leaders appeared on the platform, assured the audience of her imminent arrival, and then proceeded to harangue those waiting. Their oratorical style was fierce; broad speakers squatting under tall portraits of freedom fighters boomed and clanged as the students clasped the microphone close to their faces and shouted into it at the very tops of their voices. The passion in these leaders, who looked so much like other students, thin-limbed, dressed in ill-fitting shirts and pants and plastic sandals, was oddly disturbing. One by one they came and after expressing their frenzy retired sheepishly to the side of the platform, where they sat half listening to other speeches, their sweat-glistening faces blank.

  They spoke of many things: the BJP’s failure in Kashmir, the arrogance of Mr. Joshi, the sitting MP from Allahabad, whose commando bodyguards had physically evicted from Mr. Joshi’s house the father of a man who had been drowned in a boat accident. But they never strayed far from their chief target: the police and university administration that had “conspired” to force students out of their hostel.

  The speeches stopped as more leaders arrived: not students, but middle-aged men, large paunches showing under loose white kurta pajamas, many-ringed fingers clutching mobile phones. These were the local Congress’s senior people. Small garlands of stringy sunflowers and roses mysteriously appeared in the hands of the student leaders as they lined up to greet the newcomers.

  A tall, long-faced man with gold-rimmed glasses hung around his neck received the most garlands, all of which he immediately took off and handed to his pretty young daughter. He didn’t look like a politician, and in fact he was a former admiral of the Indian Navy; his arrival in the city had been reported in the morning papers. He had been recently sacked by the BJP government for not very clear reasons, and he had subsequently taken to touring the country on behalf of the Congress, denouncing the government, particularly the defense minister, who was responsible for sacking him.

  Cut off from the easeful life of high office and navy clubs, the man appeared to be struggling to know his new audiences. Hailed by the preceding speaker as a national hero, he started off his speech with an exhortation to the students to emulate Stanford University.

  This provoked no titters, just puzzlement; few students in that hall would have even heard of Stanford. His daughter looked anxious, but he improved as he went on, his sentences composed of as many English words as Hindi, as he spoke about the fascist tactics of the Hindu nationalists, their attempt in particular to “saffronize” (saffron, the Hindu color) the armed forces. Then, while discussing parallels in Nazi history, he asked the students if they had read the chapter entitled “Triumph and Consolidation” in William L. Shirer’s history of the Third Reich. The students, now massed around the doors, looked on mystified.

  Rita Bahuguna finally arrived. Fresh garlands appeared—perhaps the same ones, I couldn’t tell—as the town leaders queued up before Mrs. Bahuguna. In the new hierarchy that sprang up, the student leaders had to vacate their places, and even the admiral was ignored for a while.

  Mrs. Bahuguna, sitting in her blue sari among burly white-clad men on the platform, was small and frail. A few rose petals clung to her hair when she rose to give a strangely brusque speech. She didn’t need to establish her “credentials” (she used the English word) before students, she said. She was their teacher after all (even though she was the elected mayor of Allahabad, Mrs. Bahuguna still taught medieval Indian history at the university). She said she knew all about her problems, none of which had been solved by Mr. Joshi, also a former teacher, of physics, at the university. She ended by denouncing the police raid on the hostel and promised to ensure, if elected, a safe environment for students inside the university.

  The crowd had grown suddenly quiet. The police action had been popular with the students. Vinod, a young man sitting next to me, had smiled wryly when the student leaders spoke, in loud, sentimental tones, of the poverty of parents who sent their children to the university in the hope they would pass the Civil Service exams and help them in their old age. Vinod himself was one of the countless students from poor families at the university preparing for the Civil Service exams, and fortunate enough to live in a bare, tiny hostel room, much like the one I had once lived in, where thick books on general knowledge and Indian economy stood in a tall pile on the solitary table, next to a rusty hot plate on which he made tea and warmed omelets brought from a stall outside the hostel gates. But he approved of the police operation, and so did, he said, most of the students, who couldn’t find cheap accommodation anywhere outside the hostels. He said that Mrs. Bahuguna had been wrongly advised by the city leaders, several of whom were close to the criminals residing at Hindu Hostel. It was another instance of the Congress’s protecting only its own interests and being out of touch with general feeling; it was now going to cost them votes among the students.

  Vinod felt that Mrs. Bahuguna, who was the daughter of an influential Brahmin politician in the city, should have known better. She had come late to politics herself, several years after the death of her father, but she hadn’t played her moves too badly until that point (although she lost the first parliamentary election she contested, from a neighboring constituency; she had opposed the Congress on that instance, mocking it for choosing Sonia Gandhi, a foreign woman, as its president. A few weeks before the present elections, she had managed to get Sonia Gandhi’s backing for the contest in Allahabad).

  The Congress leaders in Delhi had chosen Mrs. Bahuguna for her father’s name, a Brahmin name that it expected would put a dent in the Brahmin support for the BJP, while attracting Muslims, among whom her father had been popular. She already had some support among the small group, not more than 2 percent, of the electorate, liberal, educated people in the city—teachers, lawyers, journalists—who, though not always political, felt comfortable with her, saw her as a bulwark against the Hindu nationalists. The student union hall she spoke from was full of teachers from the university, many of them women in stylish saris. The next morning at her house, there were more women, door-to-door campaigners wearing fresh lipstick and smelling of deodorant. Some were part of a study group called Chetna (consciousness) and also ran a private organization called Sahyog (Assistance), which supervised shelters for bonded child laborers and battered women.

  There was much that was admirable about these women. It was they who seemed to affirm a sense of a shared society otherwise absent in small cities like Allahabad. But generating middle-class support within the city wasn’t going to be enough to elect Mrs. Bahnguna. I accompanied her to the villages south of the Yamuna River, where she had to work hard to win the Dalit and Muslim votes for the Congress. Driving out of Allahabad, the city rapidly receding after the bridge over the swollen and muddy Yamuna- she seemed a bit out of her element. She held the end of her sari over her nose to block the diesel fumes from passing trucks and tractors, as she talked to me of the conferences she had attended in European and American cities as mayor of Allahabad.

  At the small roadside settlements of half-built brick houses and shops we passed, men holding Congress flags
ran up to her. These were local party workers, who were to “deliver” their villages’ uncommitted voters, mostly illiterate, to the Congress. Important men, many of them old enough to have known her father, they would have been paid the small price for this support employment for their sons or brothers, the expediting of housing and agricultural loans after the election.

  A heavily built man with a Hindu, stereotypically sagelike white beard and long hair sat behind Mrs. Bahuguna in her large new Jeep. Dal Bahadur, the Congress candidate from Allahabad in the previous election, prompted her as soon as he saw the party workers. He knew all their names; he knew the caste they belonged to and introduced them to Mrs. Bahuguna with gruff familiarity. She exhorted them to work harder for her victory, her bookish Hindi strikingly different from the dialect Dal Bahadur spoke. She turned back, slightly flushed, and then, as the Jeep moved on, she returned to chatting with me. “I had a good time in New York,” she told me at the gas station where we had stopped to refuel, and then suddenly started to wave at someone behind me. I turned to find a couple of slightly amused petrol station attendants. “Will you remember me on election day?” she shouted at them. There was a fluency to her speech and an ability to change register that she couldn’t have acquired during her long career as an academic. It matched the sudden silences in the Jeep, and it seemed as if coming late to politics, she had been surprised by the inherited politician’s skills rising to the surface, as if she had only recently tapped into some new elastic part of herself.

  But her family background had also burdened her with a sense of entitlement. This was what made her so abrupt with the students; this was what that afternoon made her work her way through a series of poor low-caste villages, offering little more than her father’s faded good works and the talismanic name of the Nehrus and Gandhis.

  At one of the roadside settlements, a small crowd was waiting under a string of paper Congress flags hung between two mango trees. Mrs. Bahuguna mounted a wooden cot that served as a platform and gave a speech that was barely audible. She spoke of Sonia Gandhi’s bereavement and the sacrifices of the Nehru-Gandhi family. The crowd watched her, not hearing much, but still agog. Many of them had walked a long way through the surrounding fields to see her. They were like the people Sonia Gandhi and the then prime minister Vajpayee would address in Allahabad a few days later. The celebrity speakers were hardly visible to a majority of the audience, and the speeches were all lost in the bewildering echoes from loudspeakers, but it was the seeing that seemed important, the contact with the powerful and privileged.

  I saw a numbers of light-eyed boys with sharp features in the crowd; it turned out that they belonged to a Muslim community of horse riders from Rajasthan that had migrated to this part of India two generations ago. This community of three thousand lived in the mud huts lining the road; most were unemployed and survived by skinning cows killed in road accidents. Nearly all were illiterate. An old Hindu man from the adjacent tea shack, himself only slightly better off, was sympathetic to their plight. He told me, “Yeh bilkul zero hain. These people are completely zero.” Some of the boys came over as he talked and stared at me, frank appraisal on their raw young faces. They nodded with unexpected vehemence when the man said that it was a school, above all, they wanted their member of Parliament to provide.

  A few miles ahead—open fields of wheat and rice on both sides, an occasional hut in the distance—a freshly painted signboard announced a girls’ school. I saw a small shack with just one long room, dark, the mud walls without windows, the only light coming from between the stacked bundles of straw on the roof. The roof would have leaked during the finest drizzle, and the ground around the jute mat where the children would have sat was damp. There were simple sums scrawled on the blackboard on one of the walls.

  A couple of young men appeared as I stood there. They were the two teachers; they cycled in from nearby villages every morning and then cycled on to a local college, where they studied for postgraduate degrees and also “prepared” for the Civil Service. They were paid a monthly salary of four hundred rupees by the school’s owner, a local contractor for gravel, for whom the school was only one business among many.

  At the talk of teachers’ salaries, Mrs. Bahuguna’s secretary, a plump, friendly young man with glasses, who had followed me into the room, perked up. He had been traveling in my car after the Jeep had filled up with local Congress leaders, and a little while before he had been explaining to me why Mrs. Bahuguna would win. There was no question about the areas we were traveling through; her father had done so much work here, they all remembered him. Teachers all across the state (and there were sixty thousand in Allahabad constituency alone), he said, were going to vote against the BJP and for the Congress. They had been on a strike protesting their low salaries, but the BJP-run government had done nothing. And now a senior leader of the teachers’ association had been murdered in Lucknow. (I had seen the newspaper reports that morning. A week later there was a report of a police “encounter” in which the alleged killer of the leader had been shot dead, “police encounter” being the all-Indian words for summary execution. A journalist from The Times of India arrived to see the bullet-riddled body lying next to a police inspector who was still on the wireless to his headquarters, shouting excitedly, for the official record, about bullets flying everywhere. There were allegations from the teachers’ association that the police had murdered the so-called killer of their leader in order to quickly close the case before the complicity of the BJP government could surface.)

  By the afternoon dark clouds had gathered in the big sky as we drove along a muddy river, more cars now following Mrs. Bahuguna’s Jeep on the narrow road. For the next many miles, it rained, a fierce, blinding rain, from which cyclists and bullock cart drivers sheltered in wet, cowering groups under massive mango trees or under the leaking corrugated iron roofs of tea shacks and paan stalls. The windows began to fog up; the cars, jolted from side to side by large potholes, proceeded warily. Barefoot children in rags, their wet hair plastered to their skulls, ran after the bouncing rocking cars and pounced upon the propaganda leaflets thrown from their windows.

  There was no welcoming party at the next riverside village, and no one seemed to know much about the place, except Dal Bahadur, the sagelike man, who now disappeared, leaving the rest of the party standing on a rain-soaked knoll.

  I followed him on the muddy lane squelchy with rainwater and sheep and cow droppings. In front yards messy with straw and dung, women sifting wheat stopped to stare at me, their pink and purple saris bright against the pale mud-yellow of the houses. Naked children with distended bellies shrank to the one side as I passed them. An old man slumped on a string cot gestured at me from inside his hut, and when I went in, he wanted to know if I was from the government.

  It was cool and fragrant inside the hut, the smell of cow dung almost turned into something heady and intoxicating by the rain. Two boys in their early teens came in: both thin, with sticklike legs, their large eyes glowering in the dark room. Their father was a rice farmer and fisherman, like most people in the village. Rice and fish was what they ate, the food cooked on the chulha fire in a little alcove before the room, cakes of cow dung stacked to one side of it. They had never been to school, and they had no other clothes than what they wore, clothes their father had bought from the nearby bazaar two years ago. The oversized polyester pants and shirts torn at the armpits and around the collar were adequate for ten months of the year, and when winter arrived, they tied straw to the insides of the shirts.

  It took the boys some time for them to get used to my presence, and even then they spoke with difficulty; they did not understand the simplest words, the sparse vocabulary reflecting the bareness of the room that, apart from the string cot, had no furniture or personal possessions, words and things both absent and making for a kind of all-enveloping vacancy.

  Back where the cars had stopped, Dal Bahadur had emerged with a few old women timidly trailing behind him. They s
tood speechless, their wizened, toothless faces half hidden by sari veils pulled down to nose level, as Mrs. Bahuguna asked them about their “problems.” Still, they said nothing, and so Mrs. Bahuguna began to describe Sonia Gandhi’s presidency of the Congress and how women were best placed to understand other women’s problems. They looked on, puzzlement appearing in eyes that held great anxiety and patience. And now an embarrassed Dal Bahadur prompted them, in his gruff voice, “Don’t you know who this is? Don’t you remember how her father once distributed lai chana?”

  Lai chana! The puffed rice and chick peas that were the poor man’s snack, stuffed in rusty tin containers in the gloomy one-room shops in shanty markets we had passed. It was hard not to feel the pathos of the situation. Decades after it had been made, the old women were being asked to remember a meaningless offering from a long-dead politician, in a village which near-total destitution had taken beyond the simple deprivation of the rural poor elsewhere, beyond lack of water, electricity, primary schools, and hospitals to the earliest, most elemental form of human community, where the outside world intruded only in the form of election-time visitors and the propaganda leaflets the ragged children had pounced upon.

  The more you examine the reclaiming of India by Indians, the more uneven the whole process looks. It is never very clear who is reclaiming what. Mr. Patel, the candidate of the Bahujan Samaj Party, had presented himself as a Dalit to me. I had been nervous about going to his house and possibly facing expulsion. I had been relieved to find him a friendly figure, eager for attention from the press. It now turned out that he wasn’t a Dalit at all. He was a Kurmi, which—so important these differences—made him a member of a technically “Backward” caste, much better placed, socially and financially, than the Dalits.