by Uday Prakash
It was in the Star Computer Centre that Mohandas met Harshvarddhan Soni. He’d come there to have some photocopies made for his legal practice, and to have some letters typed. By then, Mohandas was a fast typist and made few mistakes. He told his whole story to Harshvarddhan right then and there.
Toward the latter part of the twentieth century, I’d spent a couple of decades as an active member of a particular ideological political party; Harshvarddhan Soni had been in the same party. His life had also been full of the same struggles and sorrows, victories and defeats. The son of a woman who was a middle school teacher, Harshvarddhan was, from the beginning, independent-minded and quite perceptive. His older brother, Srivarddhan Soni, had come in first in his BA class for engineering; despite the degree, however and after the joblessness got worse and worse, one night, five years ago, he’d tied a rope to the ceiling fan and hanged himself. The tragedy of his brother’s suicide made such a deep impact on Harshvarddhan, son of a shopkeeper and middle school teacher, that even during his studies he began participating in the student wings of political organisations. He married outside of his caste, and was punished for doing so by being expelled from it.
Harshvarddhan Soni then earned an LLB and made his living working alongside his party in the local court on legal matters. When Mohandas told him the story that day at the Star Computer Centre – it wasn’t really a story, but a real account of a living life – he decided to take his case and seek redress in court.
‘How much money do you have at the moment?’ Harshvarddhan asked, looking at Mohandas’s patched-up shirt and washed out jeans. ‘I’ll take your case, and you will receive justice.’
Mohandas’s eyes lit up, and his frail body began trembling. For an instant he didn’t believe that it was possible someone would aid him like this.
‘Right now I have eighty rupees,’ he answered. ‘In a few days I’m supposed to get forty more. And Imran pays me a couple of hundred in wages.’
Harshvarddhan calculated that Mohandas at most could be counted on for five hundred a month, while it took in the vicinity of five thousand in court fees just to have the case heard. The economic policies of one government after the next transformed India’s big cities into little Americas, while putting people who lived in the same country into the poorhouse, but in tiny villages and undeveloped places, and creating countless Ethiopias, Ghanas, and Rwandas. A professor who toed the ideological line of a connected political party made around fifty thousand a month in Delhi-Lucknow, Mumbai-Bhopal, Kolkata-Patna, and a no-name freelancer could expect five hundred to a thousand rupees for a two page piece; but the hardworking, industrious Mohandas, from the wrong side of the tracks from a forgotten village, and those like him, took a whole month to scrape together four hundred.
Harshvarddhan realised that he himself would have to find the funds if Mohandas were to have his day in court. He put in a thousand of his own money, asked friends for another two thousand, and got the rest from the charity fund of the Lions Club – in other words, he was able to get the cash.
Slowly but surely, one way or another, judge (first class) Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, who preferred his bidis to smoking cigarettes, who was thin as a stick, whose bony cheeks jutted out, whose brow was scored with countless wrinkles, agreed to hear the case of Mohandas in his court of law.
Mohandas, s/o Kabadas, caste Vishwakarma, r/o Purbanra, district Anuppur, M.P. versus Vishwanath, s/o Nagendranath, caste Brahmin, r/o Bichiya Tola, currently r/o A/11 Lenin Nagar, Oriental Coal Mines, district Durg, Chhattisgarh.
The moment the court went into session, S.K. Singh, the chief executive of the Oriental Coal Mines, along with welfare officer A.K. Srivastav, along with other senior executives, were summoned before the court to testify and explain how and why it was that the man who had been working for five years as deputy depot supervisor known as Mohandas Vishwakarma was, in fact, Vishwanath (s/o Nagendranath, r/o Bichiya Tola).
Judge Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh ordered the district magistrates of Anuppur and Durg to launch an official enquiry into the matter and instructed them to report their findings to the court within two weeks’ time.
The court order and summons by bidi-smoking judge G.M. Muktibodh created chaos in the Oriental Coal Mines. The local newspapers ran the headline:
WHO IS THE REAL ‘MOHANDAS’?
Anil Yadav and Khalid Rashid – local reporters for NDTV and Aajtak national news channels – sent clips of the story to Delhi and Bhopal, but it didn’t fit into the ‘National Scene’ or ‘Indian Panorama’ segments, and didn’t even made the ‘Regional News’ because the story didn’t include any big politicians or bigwigs from the big cities of Delhi-Bhopal-Lucknow.
(This is a story from the time when Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s ‘Munna Bhai MBBS’ was making a killing at the box office. George Bush and Tony Blair had both been re-elected and were returned to power, and Saddam Hussein, his beard giving him the look of a crazed fakir, face covered with wrinkles, was writing poetry in an American prison, and former Indian Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who instituted the recommendations of the controversial Mandal Commission that set aside job and school slots for the lower-castes, was diagnosed with cancer, his kidneys were failing, he was on dialysis – just like J.P. had been – and was quietly painting oil canvases in a corner of Delhi.
It was the time when the district collector from Patna, Bihar – Gautam Goswami – whose photo was on the cover of Time as a hero when the big floods hit that year, later made off with tens of millions of rupees from the flood fund; and it was the time when the new government constituted a new film censor board, and placed at its helm a nawab from a royal family, former captain of the Indian cricket team, but who was unable to delete a scene in a film where he was caught red-handed hunting the endangered black buck and other animals...
It was the time when for fifteen years running each and every vacant position connected with a Hindi language post was filled with a son, a son-in-law, a daughter, a father-in-law, an arse kisser, or a right-hand man of a search committee member, right out in the open, without shame, without any CBI inquiry or any questions asked in the Rajya Sabha or Lok Sabha.
It was a time when the Human Resources Minister had transformed the public sector into a machine for corruption that churned out thinkers, pedagogues, sociologists, novelists, historians, intellectuals, artists, teachers ... and the political battle to capture the minds and hearts of the youngsters was on, by endlessly re-writing and re-re-writing history texts and schoolbooks.
It was the time when India ranked seventh among the world’s most corrupt countries, sixth among nuclear-armed nations, second in population, while in poverty Bangladesh was at the top.)
Both Harshvarddhan Soni and Mohandas were confident that the court of the judge G.M. Muktibodh would separate milk from water and sort out right from wrong. They were confident for two reasons. The first was based on the fact that the magistrate smoked bidis and drank strong chai from the streets, and there was no sign at all he was looking to have his palms greased. The man was not corrupt.
The second reason was that truth was in Mohandas’s corner: he was the real Mohandas, BA.
‘These lies will come crashing down like a house of cards! Like the light of dawn, all will be revealed! Victory to Malihamai! Please let it be so, Kabirguru!’ Kasturi’s gloomy life was once again sprouting shoots of hope. Though Putlibai’s blindness had grown even more severe since Kabadas’s death, she still sat on an old mat in the corner, like an ancient hawk with clipped wings, her ear forever trained toward the inner rooms of the house.
And so one morning at the crack of dawn, while Mohandas was eating his breakfast of leftover rice and potatoes and getting ready for his appearance in court, the rapturous voice of Putlibai suddenly echoed throughout the house. She chirped like a merrymaking bird,
‘Little one! Devdas! Come quick and take a peek in the living room! I think the myna bird’s made herself a new nest, what do you think? Come quick!’
As he wolfed down his breakfast of stale rice and potatoes that’d have to last him the whole day, his blind old, bird-like mother sang out in a rapturous voice:
Sing the song of satguru
Sing the song of satguru
Sing the song of satguru and set your soul free
The chief executive of the Oriental Coal Mines, S.K. Singh, was not present in court. His lawyer was there to plead on his behalf. The company welfare officer A.K. Srivastav had brought his complete enquiry file with him, and gave it to the judge for his perusal, along with all supporting documents. Harshvarddhan Soni was deflated: of the three witnesses from Bichiya Tola he’d called to testify that the man who had been working at the Oriental Coal Mines for several years as a junior depot manager was their childhood friend Vishwanath, not Mohandas, two of them didn’t show up, and the third, Dinesh Kumar Sahu turned into a hostile witness and testified in front of the packed courtroom that Vishwanath was the real Mohandas. Then he pointed his finger at Harshvarddhan Soni and Mohandas and claimed that the two of them had one month ago come to his house and told him that they’d give him five thousand rupees for telling the court what they told him to say.
Judge Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh set the next hearing for one month’s time; Harshvarddhan and Mohandas were stunned.
They now pinned all their hopes on the report of the district magistrates. If Mohandas was going to get justice, it could only be when the truth came forward.
Harshvarddhan and Mohandas were speechless when, during the following court session, the reports of the district magistrates of Durg and Anuppur were presented. The investigations found that charges regarding the name and identity of Mohandas s/o Kabadas, deputy depot collector at the Oriental Coal Mines, were baseless. According to reliable testimony, circumstantial evidence, and after questioning several members of the grameen and panchayats, it was indisputably proven that Mohandas was Mohandas, and not Vishwanath.
Later they found out that Vishwanath had dropped ten thousand on the patwaris of the two districts, Durg and Anuppur, plus some hard liquor and spicy chicken. None other than Vijay Tiwari had picked up Bisnath in his police vehicle and helped him deliver the bribes to the patwaris. In any case, that was the real meaning of an inquiry headed by the collector, aka district magistrate, aka zilla adhikari: in the fine tradition of the administrative services, the inquiry was pawned off onto the lowly patwari. Whenever a court ordered a collector to make an inquiry, the collector would take note of the order, then send it to his subordinate, the SDM. The SDM would entrust the task to the tehsildar, who would order the sub-tehsildar to take care of it. That’s how it went, from the revenue inspector, aka IR, aka qanungo, until it finally landed in the lap of the patwari, who, finally, was the collector’s eyes and ears.
Bisnath and Vijay Tiwari handed over the stack of hundreds to Kamal Kishore, patwari of Bichiya Tola and Purbanra, plus a bottle of Macdowell’s No. 1 whisky, and butter chicken, and mutton seekh kabab – Kamal Kishore fell at the men’s feet in gratitude.
‘Have I ever let you down before? All this cash – Jesus and Krishna! With all this money I’ll turn a mouse into a moose, a club into a spade, a farm into a freeway!’ the patwari said all dreamy, jumping for joy while stuffing the money into his bag. He downed a triple of the Macdowell’s No. 1 in one shot, and just like that, right then and there, without moving an inch, the problem had been thoroughly investigated; the one-page white paper – a most official report – was readied, and the inquiry conducted by the district collector into the matter of Mohandas versus Vishwanath was completed in under fifteen minutes.
To put it another way, this rust-eaten steel frame of bureaucracy that had been readied for power by the English over subservient India had just transformed Bisnath, s/o Nagendranath, into Mohandas, s/o Kabadas.
Mohandas again broke down. He incanted the name of Kabir non-stop. He sat for hours in front of the little shrine to Malihamai. She only took the thickest, sweetest cream as an offering. And only from goat’s milk at that. High casters didn’t frequent her shrine. The thakurs, baniyas, babhnan, and lalas had their own gods and goddesses. Gosains, rather than brahmins, conducted her puja. It was said that brahmins who had shared food with dalits or adivasis, or who married them were called gosains in their own caste community.
Mohandas went to Khanra village and found Siu Narayan Gosain, and gave him twenty rupees and an uncooked mixture of dhal, rice, turmeric, and gur, with which he performed a puja to Malihamai; he also made an offering of a full half pound of fresh goat’s milk cream to the goddess.
Something else happened in the meantime. One morning at dawn, Kasturi was out in the fields doing her morning toilet with a couple of other women from the village. There was some commotion behind the bushes, as if someone was hiding.
For her own safety, Kasturi had taken to tucking a little scythe into her the waist of her trousers; she knew all too well that even after giving birth to two kids she was still the loveliest woman of the village. As long as she could remember she’d been subjected to the vulture-like stares of the local Brahmin slimeballs.
Kasturi stood up from her squat and removed the scythe from the cloth at her midriff. Holding it in her hand she approached the bush carefully; Ramoli, Sitiya, Chandna and Savitri followed.
‘Hey, now’s who’s that hiding behind the bush? Come on out, I’ll cool you down, you cunt wipe! What are you scared of, arse breath!’ screamed Kasturi. The rest of the women surrounded the bush, each with a lota in hand for washing their potties.
Chatradhari’s son Vijay Tiwari dashed out from behind the bush and ran off. His flabby body looked like a chubby watermelon as he scampered away in his boxers and undershirt.
Kasturi chased him for a bit, knife in hand. Ramoli, Sitiya and Savitri hurled their potty lotas after him. Inspector Vijay Tiwari ran as fast as he could, stumbling and tripping. The women screamed after him:
‘Call the TV station! They’ll get some great clips!’
‘Run away, run away! Big boy inspector is making fudge in his pants!’
Vijay Tiwari was now scared through and through. Who knows what kind of nonsense Mohandas and his lawyer Harshvarddhan Soni might cook up and publish in the papers or get shown on TV?
(All of this was happening at the time when, for the first time in Asian political history, an Indian woman was made member of the communist party politburo, while another woman kicked away the chair of the prime minster’s post.
It was the time when three non-stop giggling women were appointed members of the jury of the most important film festival where Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha or Kamol Gandhar or Shailandra’s Teesri Kasam were never even shown.
It was the time when a female US soldier working at Abu Ghraib prison stripped Iraqi prisoners naked and made them climb on top of one another to form some kind of pyramid, and then draped them with the American flag.
It was the time when power was defining gender.
It was the time when a girl from the north-east of India was kidnapped into a car near Dhaula Kuan in Delhi and raped for two-and-a-half hours nonstop by five men while travelling on every VIP road in Delhi. And it was when in Imphal, after the rape and murder of Manorama, hundreds of Krishna-devotee women stripped naked in front of the army headquarters to protest.
It was the time when two women failed in their struggle against the Sardar Sarovar dam, and so four thousand dalit and adivasi homes and fields and yards were submerged, and in the flood, forest animals and plants and trees and so much more was swept away.
The sad faces of those tired women were shown on TV, nonstop, in tears, defeated.
It was the time when I left Delhi and moved to V
aishali and from my rooftop could see that very same Jhandapur in Ghaziabad where exactly fifteen years earlier the revolutionary artist and performer named Safdar Hashmi was murdered.)
In the court of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, judge (first class), all the witnesses and evidence – and even the two investigative reports of the two district magistrates’ inquiries – corroborated that Bisnath was indeed Mohandas. So, then: this pauper who’s in a bad way and who swears and swears he’s Mohandas – who is he? This court didn’t have any direct judicial authority over this question. It possibly could be another case altogether, if some lawyer submitted a petition on behalf of the plaintiff.
Harshvarddhan Soni couldn’t sleep for three days and three nights. He positively knew that Mohandas was Mohandas – but it wasn’t just that this was difficult to prove, it was becoming impossible. He sent me an email:
‘This is too much. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. Neither can Mohandas. Everybody knows he’s the real Mohandas, but it’s impossible to prove. I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what to do. The two of us are receiving threats: shut up or else. In the meantime I found out that Bisnath has taken on Ras Bihari Rai as his attorney. You know him as well as I do – big shot in the ruling party. His wife’s a member of the city council and is the head of a few government organisations and NGOs. There are half-a-dozen people ready to testify on behalf of Mohandas: Biran Baiga, Gopaldas, Biharidas, Ramoli, Sitiya ... but their appearance will make it seem like they’re witnesses we just bought off ... each one of them looks like a homeless person.
‘What I’m thinking is that I’ll go straight to the judge and have a word with him. He smokes bidis and looks a little, well – off. His name is G.M. Muktibodh. He’s Marathi, but he speaks Hindi like you wouldn’t believe. After court lets out he sits outside drinking chai at Ramdeen’s little tea shack on the side of the road.