by Barkha Dutt
Kejriwal swiftly occupied a place in the national imagination that the so-called third front—the non-BJP, non-Congress regional parties—should have but couldn’t pull off. Though individually, state satraps remained firmly entrenched in their fiefdoms—Naveen Patnaik in Orissa, Mamata Banerjee in Bengal, Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh—and were treated with deference even by the Modi government which needed their legislative support in the Rajya Sabha where it was short of a majority—none of them were seen as a ‘third pole’ in the country’s dominant bipolar model built around the BJP and Congress.
Now, a space had been made in the collective imagination of voters for a third personality—someone other than Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi. Initially both a maverick and a sort of political guerrilla, Kejriwal was like an insurgent in permanent revolutionary mode. From the inception of Kejriwal’s India Against Corruption movement, to his shoot and scoot press conferences—where he attacked some of India’s most powerful people—he understood that Indian politics is increasingly mediated by the mass media. On social networking forums the troopers belonged (and still do, for most part) to only one of two armies: either that of the BJP or AAP. The effectiveness of this approach was reflected in how much air time Kejriwal managed to get in the 2014 elections, even though he was only the leader of a regional party whose sphere of influence did not extend beyond Delhi. He was also good at learning from his mistakes. His decision to apologize to the voters of Delhi after impetuously walking out of government the first time they elected his party, was a first for Indian politics. The voters forgave him and voted him back to power with an overwhelming majority.
His nascent political journey has not been devoid of accidents and serious missteps. His party has already had severe public meltdowns with some of its most prominent members, psephologist Yogendra Yadav and senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, being ousted. Yadav once told me that his enforced exit was akin to a ‘Stalinist purge’; Bhushan called Kejriwal a dictator. His initial patronage of unsavoury characters like Somnath Bharti, accused by his wife of domestic violence, remained another blot. While controversy never left his side, nor did the media attention.
Kejriwal 2.0 was a much mellowed politician who even smiled every now and then and seemed to have ironed out many of his rougher edges. He had also finally abandoned all delusions of grandeur and hunkered down to focus on Delhi instead of chasing a premature national ambition. What made him interesting to a political observer was that he combined some of the traits of both the Congress and the BJP. Unlike many leaders of the Congress, he was culturally rooted in a more traditional Indian ethos—‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ were slogans you heard at AAP rallies and not those of the Congress. But unlike the BJP, which claimed the same rootedness, he did not carry the baggage of Hindutva politics.
Either way, like Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, he represented the shift that had taken place in Indian politics, where the personality of the leader—and how voters responded to the individual—had become more important than either the party or even an ideology. The Americanization of Indian politics was complete.
Seven
* * *
A SOCIETY IN FLUX
I
ON 26 DECEMBER 2004, the sea literally rose to swallow the coastal town of Nagapattinam; a tsunami had hit the southeastern coast of India following a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean.
It was the season when the rich and famous typically moved to Goa or Koh Samui to bring in the New Year. For many of these people, the tsunami was of interest only to the extent that their tropical holiday destinations to escape north India’s winter suddenly didn’t seem so safe anymore. What a bore, they thought, and once the worst was over they simply packed their Louis Vuitton bags and went on holiday to some other place.
When I began my journey to the scene of the catastrophe I was sure that I would find that the devastation was enormous but I was not prepared for what I would discover. The unceasing rain on the morning after the tsunami struck was nature’s final act of cruelty; the strong currents of water were sucking in the few material belongings—a wall clock, a slipper, even money—of the helpless survivors who were looking on. Many of the people I spoke to in the ravaged fishing town said they were determined to leave, even though they had nowhere to go.
One man motioned to us to follow him towards the fishing boats that lay in a heap, blocking the entrance to the nearby village of Akaraipatti. There was only a narrow channel to crawl through under the boats. One by one, we went down on all fours, and squeezed our way through the tiny passage to the other side. No district official had bothered to go past the boats.
I felt a wave of nausea when I stood up and shook the water out of my nose and eyes. We were looking at a beach that had become a mass grave of children overnight; so many that we couldn’t bear to look or count. The women and children of the village had been sleeping out in the open when the raging waves rose to devour the shore. When the water rushed back into the ocean, it had taken many of the tiniest and most vulnerable with it; those it left behind had been battered to death. Now the mothers who had been spared, stood silent and forlorn in the rain as the fishermen placed milk and powder on the lips of their dead children in a final farewell ritual.
When they counted the bodies across the coastal districts of the southern states, especially Tamil Nadu, they discovered that more than 2,000 children had died. Hundreds of others had been orphaned. At the local children’s shelter, older siblings worried about how they would look after their brothers and sisters, a five-year-old boy held on to a teenager he didn’t know for comfort; both had lost their parents. There was a little girl who had been born blind; her parents had saved Rs 12,000 over several years for an eye operation that doctors believed could partially restore her vision. That money, too, had been swept away by the water.
When I filed my stories on the ‘Children of the Tsunami’ I had thought there was no special eloquence needed to convey such visceral sadness and loss. Children dead in their thousands in one of the worst natural disasters the country had experienced—this was a story that told itself. But that night, after the telecast, I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Do we really have to watch this depressing stuff on television right now?’—as if life’s grim reality was an optional item on a movie menu in a hotel room and you could pick out only the cheery stuff to view. In several of my reports I actually began editorializing more than ever before, appealing directly to those vacationing in happier, sunnier spots to pause and at least think about these children. The callousness of the well-heeled was eye-opening. To be reminded that for a section of Indian society the deaths of the children of poor fisherfolk mattered not at all was both disconcerting and disturbing.
Had fifty children from middle class or rich families died in metropolitan India, people would have spoken of nothing else for weeks. Sadly, all that the death of these children seemed to evoke in the hearts and minds of the wealthy was a desire to switch to another TV channel or change their beach destination. But my disappointment with the reactions of people I knew wasn’t the only thing that struck me. Beyond the calamitous scenes I witnessed, what leapt out at me was that even amid the death and devastation, there was the pernicious presence of one of India’s oldest fault lines—that of caste discrimination.
For the past forty-eight hours a group of about a hundred men had been working tirelessly, wading barefoot through the water on the beach, removing rocks, stones, planks and other debris obstructing their passage, trying to drag out the bodies, many of which had already started decomposing. An overwhelmed local administration was terrified that the putrefying corpses would pollute the water and cause an epidemic on a scale that would multiply the rising number of fatalities. It was already too late. And yet, no one among the local rescue teams had been prepared to do this job.
Sanitary workers had to be brought in from Madurai to clear the dead bodies that no one else was wil
ling to touch. These were workers belonging to the ‘untouchable’ Arunthathiyar community of Tamil Nadu, considered the lowest of the low because of their traditional occupation—working in cremation grounds and government mortuaries, and clearing villages of dead animals. Although they were not directly tied, geographically or emotionally, to the tragedy of the tsunami, it was left to them to scrub the stains of death from the beach. They worked with their bare hands and torn gloves, pulling out body after body—I counted thirty in just one hour—and heaving them on to a truck to be taken to makeshift funeral pyres on the beach. The inescapable irony was that most of the dead were fisherfolk belonging to the ‘higher castes’. In life, they would have recoiled from any social contact with the same men who were now pulling them out from under the wreckage to ensure they at least got a dignified, final farewell. But kindness to the dead was no guarantee of appreciation for the living.
Even as the sanitary workers braved quicksand and medical maladies, news was coming in of discrimination in the relief and rehabilitation camps that lay further inland—Dalits were being told they would get food only after it was first distributed among the fishermen’s families. In school buildings that were doubling up as night shelters, there were families who refused to share physical space with Dalits who were then shunted to accommodation in plastic tents. Many Dalit families were left with no option but to live out in the open. Fishermen had borne the brunt of the tragedy because they were the immediate victims of the rising waves. But Dalits had also suffered, losing their livelihood, cattle and, crucially, access to drinking water. Yet they were being forced to the back of food and water lines and in some cases were not even being allowed to use the temporary toilets that had been built by international agencies. Unable to cope with the scale of devastation and the work that needed to be done, some aid workers found it simpler to provide separate relief facilities for the Dalit community than to fight, at that moment, the engrained biases of caste. It was sobering to think that the enormous power of the earthquake and the tsunami it had generated had managed to kill 230,000 people in fourteen countries but had still been unable to break down the wall that separated India’s Dalits from their countrymen.
As I followed the sanitary workers around, a hospital mask tied loosely over my face, I was struck by how diligent and uncomplaining they were about their work. Most of them worked without special protective gear or tools and, in some cases, without shoes. It was backbreaking work. They would clear away the larger pieces of debris, then extract the body from the rubble and lift it onto a mat on the beach from where it would be transported to the pyres. Locals stood around, watching from a safe distance as the corpses of their friends and neighbours were retrieved, their faces wrapped in swatches of cloth in an effort to block the smell of rotting human flesh. As the flames enveloped body after body, I began to feel nauseous; the antiseptic lime powder, the sea breeze, none of it could mitigate the overpowering odour of death. Within a few hours, I was unable to stand there any longer. I ran to where the other onlookers were standing and threw up. But the sanitary workers carried on, impassive, committed and focused on delivering the last rites for people who would not have allowed them to pray in the same temple as them, had they been alive. They did all this for the paltry sum of Rs 75 a day.
Two days later I fell sick and had to leave Nagapattinam for Chennai where I was admitted to the Apollo Hospital for a medical examination. It turned out that I had picked up a severe bacterial infection from my brief exposure to the disintegrating human bodies. I thought of the men on beach and the abysmal daily wages they were paid—if they fell ill where would they go? But there was no one in Chennai I could have that conversation with. Just 300 kilometres away, the city seemed entirely untouched by the violent crash of water on the state’s shores. After the initial shock had passed, Chennai went on with its annual Carnatic music festival. The New Indian Express interviewed a young student hanging out at a mall who explained his apparent disconnect to the lives lost by arguing, without embarrassment, that ‘it’s good if India’s population is reduced’.
The self-absorbed upper classes, the forgotten poor, the oppressed Dalits, the resigned scavengers—the vignettes I carried back from the tsunami painted a portrait of a deeply unequal country.
All this was meant to change after 1991. Forced into liberalizing the economy, India’s financial managers, across parties, made a dramatic ideological shift in opening up once protected markets to global forces. They now believed that growth and the trickle-down effect of capital would run a bulldozer over other social inequities. Capitalism would subsume caste; free enterprises would give birth to dreams liberated from a socialist past.
At Nagapattinam, I discovered that in the collision of caste and class, the country that was booming outwardly was in fact in grave danger of imploding.
II
In the summer of 1901, a ten-year-old-boy and his brother (and their sister’s son) were looking forward to a train ride from the tranquil hill town of Satara in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra to Koregaon, another town in the district, where their father, a retired army officer, had taken a part-time job. New clothes had been stitched for the journey—caps embossed with coloured stones, dhotis with silk borders and new shirts. The children had never been on a train before and they were excited. They each had two annas to spend and as they got on board with their lemonades, they couldn’t have been happier.
But when the boys got off at the Masur railway station they discovered that their father had not sent anyone to meet them. Later, it would emerge that their father’s domestic help had forgotten to pass on the message of their arrival. Whatever the reason for the absence of an escort, the children now had to figure out how to reach their destination. Noticing their plight, the station master began making enquiries. The ten-year-old blurted out that they were Mahars, a community considered ‘untouchable’ because of the ‘lowly’ jobs traditionally assigned to them, including cleaning village streets and skinning and clearing animal carcasses. By recruiting them as soldiers the British Army had offered some freedom to the Mahars from, what was in effect, bonded labour—but the army background of the boys’ father did nothing to change what happened next. On discovering their caste, the station master shrank back in revulsion and withdrew into his office.
Thirty minutes later the boys were still stranded on the platform. The sun was beginning to set. The worried children decided to hire a bullock cart to ferry them to their father. They even offered to pay double the fare. But the station master had spread the word that the boys were ‘untouchables’ and no one was willing to have any contact with them. Finally, a solution was negotiated. The boys would have to steer the bullock cart themselves and, in return for the payment, the cartman would walk alongside at a ‘safe’ distance.
That ten-year-old boy was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He would grow up to be a scholar, a lawyer, a Dalit icon and the architect of free India’s Constitution. He would describe this incident in his life as the first time he had ever questioned why he had to accept abuse in the name of caste. Until then he, like millions of others, had quietly endured the social code which could neither be resisted nor challenged. At school, he was not allowed to touch the tap and help himself to water. ‘Unless [the tap] was opened by a touchable person, it was not possible for me to quench my thirst,’ he wrote. In class he had to sit on a separate gunny bag, one that the school’s cleaner refused to wash. So he would bring it to school and take it back home with him every day. His elder sister was the one who would cut their hair—no barber was willing to provide his services to ‘untouchables’. All this he accepted as a ‘matter of course’. But on that day—when their joyous train ride to meet their father culminated in humiliation—he felt a rage rise within him like never before.
Exactly thirty-five years later he would write his seminal speech calling for the ‘annihilation of caste’, an address that would remain undelivered because it was too radical for the organizers.
In 1936, the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal (Caste Destruction Society) that emerged as an offshoot of the Arya Samaj reformist movement, convened a meeting in Lahore and invited B. R. Ambedkar to address the forum. He sent them an advance copy of his speech. Ambedkar argued that the tyranny of caste and the Chaturvarnya—the four basic classes or varnas in Hindu society: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants or farmers) and Shudras (labourers)—had been sanctioned by the Dharmashastras, ancient texts that outline the codes relating to Hindu social and civil law; and hence, the only way to escape caste was to leave the Hindu fold. The organizers asked for some of the remarks to be expunged, in particular the reference to the Vedas. Ambedkar shot back, ‘I will not alter a comma.’
Ambedkar’s revolt against the tyranny of caste would bring him into confrontation with another of the country’s founding fathers—Mahatma Gandhi. Even though both were true revolutionaries who had taken on the upholders of orthodox and divisive traditions, they approached the challenge of caste in different ways. Gandhi opposed any form of caste discrimination but did not see the resolution outside the framework of Hinduism. In fact, he believed, at least initially, that the varna-defined hereditary occupations helped integrate Hinduism as long as there was perfect social equality between all groups. Later, he called for a single varna to enable the ‘root and branch destruction of the idea of superiority and inferiority’.