India (15 page)

I had another talk with the BJP, in the avatar of Murli Manohar Joshi, who had overseen the election manifesto. His janam patri, or horoscope, was reputed to say he would one day become prime minister of India, but this was looking increasingly unlikely. He was a Pahari from Kumaon in the far north, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Now in his mid-seventies, he
had joined the RSS at the age of ten after watching its devotees parading in the park opposite his house. “I was impressed by the camaraderie and discipline.” Joshi was dressed in a dhoti kurta and a flamboyant white, vermilion and gold stole. He wore four gold rings and a double-stringed pearl bracelet on his right wrist, and his room was done nicely with fresh carnations and lilies. Various deities were in attendance, in stone. We spoke on many subjects, but he only became animated about one thing—the cow.

“In Allahabad when I was younger, there was the Go Sevak Mandal, a movement towards cow protection. India was having a lot of food shortages. In the cultural life, the cow was considered to be as tolerant as mother earth. I looked at the role of the cow and its progeny. In Calcutta and Delhi, the cow was being slaughtered in an inhuman way. Most of these abattoirs were run by Muslims. Facts are facts. We had to challenge this because the export of beef is repugnant to the people of India. When I was a minister, I investigated it. The position of the cow has been most important since the beginning of our history. Cow’s milk—it has been shown scientifically, the milk of the indigenous Indian cow—is nearest to mother’s milk. It gives you immunity. So, the distillate of cow’s urine has important medicinal effects. It makes your body able to absorb drugs, so you can have lower dosages. So Taxol, a drug for treating cancer made from yew-tree bark, can be taken in half-quantities if you have it mixed with distillate of cow’s urine. There is no other society where the position of the cow is so important.”

Why was the cow important? Some early source material suggests beef was eaten in India in ancient times, and that extreme reverence for the cow was a more recent social practice. Dalits and Indian Muslims, and presumably others too, had never stopped killing cows. I wondered if Murli Manohar Joshi was saying this because, as a Brahmin whose community had used cow’s urine to purify themselves after contact with their inferiors, he wanted to return to a fading, archaic version of his own heritage, which increased his community’s status. Did his theories about Taxol offer a link to the purported ways of his forefathers, just as the inscriptions about gargantuan rice yields “proved” the superiority of ancient agricultural technology?

He was still talking. “Every society must preserve its cultural values and traditions. India’s love for the cow is one of these values, for the cow has done so much service to the society, for thousands of years. Some Indians who go abroad oppose and eat the cow, but this is because they are ignorant about their own value system. The cow is for us almost like a family member.”

Other things paled after this part of the conversation. Did Murli Manohar Joshi still want to be prime minister? “I will wait for the design of the divinity.” Did he regret being present at the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya? “Congress did nothing to prevent that, and created a situation where this thing developed. With their consent, religious men were washing the platform for the new temple in Ayodhya with water from the local river. The action only should have happened through an Act of Parliament, or by consensus.” What were his ambitions for the nation? “India should be strong. We are not congenitally anti-Muslim. I personally can’t be anti-Muslim because I listen to Sufi music during my morning yoga.”
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Were Joshi and Chowgule detached from their own supporters or articulating a deeply held view? I tried another tack, speaking to BJP workers and enthusiasts in Lucknow, where Atal Behari Vajpayee, the acceptable “mask” of Hindutva, was the Member of Parliament. More than any other party, it seemed to have few women in public positions, and the women who manifested were consciously conservative in appearance: a tame salwar kameez or sari, sturdy spectacles, a functional handbag, earrings and a single-string necklace. The men who were helping to put the election campaign into effect at the BJP office here were mainly young or middle-aged, and seemed genuinely enthusiastic. I talked to Manoj, a party worker from north-eastern Uttar Pradesh who had ambitions to join the state legislative assembly one day. He sat erect on a bench in a crisp white shirt and trousers while a local activist, Arunav, translated his Bhojpuri into English.

“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.”
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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:

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.
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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.
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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.”
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W
HAT 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.
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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.
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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 from Maharashtra had spent nearly $250,000 on local media alone during his successful campaign.
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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.”
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Under her guidance, Dalits would claim their rights as Indian citizens.