India (45 page)

I received an SMS from someone I knew, Yusuf Ansari, while I was in Delhi watching the general election: “Are you averse to visiting gaol? One of the biggest factors of this election in U.P. is in Kanpur gaol.” The factor was Mukhtar, who turned out to be Yusuf’s cousin. It was a surprising family connection: I knew Yusuf worked in policy planning for the Congress party and had attended an English boarding school and the LSE. Sometimes he dressed in a dark achkan and earring, like an old-fashioned north Indian Muslim gentleman, and at other times he could be seen in a preppy red-and-white-striped shirt and waxed green jacket. I took the early-morning express train from New Delhi. The railway station was a crush of cars, yellow-and-green rickshaws, red-jacketed porters with brass ID plates twisted around their upper arm, people and more people. “Car will receive
you with my secretary Mr. Pandey,” Yusuf texted. “Mukhtar has gone for hearing on his bail application so can’t meet.” In the carriage I sat beside a student who tapped away on a laptop through the journey and talked of Mayawati. “Maya’s so rich and clever,” he said, “but she’s got issues.”

When I reached Kanpur, Mr. Pandey and I were conveyed to Yusuf’s parents’ residence by a driver. His family had previously lived in a nearby haveli, and this house had been built in the 1980s. When the family moved to the city in the 1930s to take advantage of new economic opportunities, they had been accompanied by a couple of hundred family retainers, to whom they had a social responsibility, and whose descendants still lived nearby. The house was constructed over several levels. Hunting trophies and animal skins with shot marks in them were on the walls, and framed imperial invitations, such as one inviting an ancestor to King George V’s ceremonial durbar. I looked at Yusuf’s library:
The Akbar Nama of Abu-l-Fazl
, P. G. Wodehouse, a biography of Winston Churchill. This house in Kanpur gave an echo of the nawabi world of earlier times.

In the sitting room, a throng of Congress party officials were discussing vote fractionalization: would Brahmins stick with the BJP or shift to the BSP, who had put up a Brahmin candidate in Kanpur? “This election is going to be decided by women,” said one man, “because they know the price of kerosene and onions.” A sweeper crouched like a spider on the stone floor, circling the room with a large wet cloth. Yusuf had a copper band on his wrist, high-arched eyebrows and an endlessly alert manner—when he was a child, his arm had been badly injured in a hunting accident in Ghazipur. He spent a little time lying prone on a day bed discussing political matters with his secretary, Mr. Pandey, while a family retainer massaged his arms. We could hear an election event out on the street and went down the steps to watch. It was blindingly hot outside. Campaigners were wearing masks featuring the face of their candidate, Shriprakash Jaiswal—the Congress minister who brought his own mineral water and mattress when he went to spend the night with Dalits.

“We’ll go to some ’57 sites,” said Yusuf. What had happened in 1957? But he was speaking of 1857 and the mutiny against the British in the city then called Cawnpore, which had changed Britain’s political position in the subcontinent. Hindus did not like to wear cap badges made of leather or to serve overseas, and neither Hindu nor Muslim soldiers had wished to handle cartridges greased with the fat of unspecified animals, which had to be bitten open before insertion into a rifle barrel. A rise in nationalist or at least anti-European feeling, fanned by rumours that the foreigners were
planning to convert the population to Christianity, caused a chain of military encounters and sieges across the north. In Cawnpore, British soldiers and civilians were massacred as they sought to escape by boat. The revolt ended with Indian defeat, the collapse of the remnants of Mughal rule and savage reprisals by the British.

The events of 1857 left Britain aware of its weakness and vulnerability in India. Nervous of further rebellion, the number of European soldiers was increased and the remnants of the East India Company were replaced by a more regular structure of government, with Victoria becoming queen and later queen empress of India. Her first viceroy, Charles Canning, was worried by the “rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad” in the land, with members of the European community calling for “war to the knife.” He told the queen that some people said they wanted the execution of 40,000–50,000 mutineers and “a broad line of separation, and of declared distrust drawn between us Englishmen and every subject of your Majesty who is not a Christian, and who has a dark skin.” The queen shared Canning’s view that this would be impractical, and plans were made for a proclamation to the people of India. Victoria told her officials in London that the tone of this new charter should be conciliatory, and to:

This was quite a mental leap to be making so soon after blowing countless sepoys from the mouths of cannons, but it was to become the foundation of subsequent British imperial policy in India.

We drove through modern Kanpur, past temples and mosques and leather and textile workshops, and chemical and soap and fertilizer manufacturers. The industrial city was huge. We entered the cantonment and came to the river, the Ganges. Trees grew inside tubes of latticed bricks, to make sure animals did not graze on them. On the opposite bank of the river lay fields of silt created by the monsoon, perfect for growing watermelons. As we walked over to “Musker” or Massacre Ghat in the shimmering heat, Yusuf looked at a building and said, “God, all this is new. Everything’s changing.” A Shiva temple had been put up by the site of Musker Ghat, and with it a large portrait of Mayawati. We left quickly; it was a grim place.

After it grew dark we drove with Yusuf’s father, Idris, to a political rally. “It’s São Paolo out here,” said Yusuf. The headlights illuminated houses without electricity and the shapes of people. “We heard about India being an emerging economy,” said Idris, staring out of the windscreen, “but look at this. These people are just living.” He had a successful leather company, supplying shoe uppers for stitching in Europe and the U.S. He also did pet treats: the leather offcuts were turned into dog chews. We reached a street corner where a stage had been erected and draped in royal blue, the Dalits’ colour. “There’s no administration here,” said Yusuf, “only politics.” The ground was littered with rubbish and potholes. About a thousand people were present at the rally, many of them Muslims, who were being encouraged to shift away from other parties and to back Mayawati. On the stage, politicians were surrounded by banners and flags, and most were dressed in BSP kurta pyjamas. Armed security officers lined the stage, some sporting Bruce Lee T-shirts, and muscular men in blue caps ran through the crowd, pushing and shoving, keeping people in line, rousing cheers for Mayawati. It seemed exceptionally energetic compared with Congress rallies.

Akbar “Dumpy” Ahmad, a former crony of Sanjay Gandhi, was addressing the people, wrestling with the lectern as he shouted, waving his arms in apparent anger, throwing off flower garlands as they were passed up to him, imploring voters to quit Congress (as he had done) and support the BSP. “My father was the first Muslim chief of police in UP,” he declaimed in Urdu, “my grandfather was chief justice of Allahabad high court, and I stood beside Sanjay Gandhi when he launched his youth campaign. And today, Muslims must vote with Mayawati and back the BSP.” Voting for somebody was certainly essential: that day, the Darul Uloom religious school in Deoband had issued a fatwa saying all Muslims must exercise their democratic right: “A vote is as important as a testimony or a witness is in Islam.”
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As Dumpy Ahmad was speaking, someone drove a motorbike through the crowd, knocking people down, not accidentally.

It looked as if a riot might be starting, and we sheltered in the lobby of a nearby hotel. Idris knew the owner. “We call him the wrestler,” he said.

The wrestler, whose shirt was not fresh and whose mouth was stained with paan, began to tell a story that was so convoluted I soon lost track. While he spoke a boy or man with a vacant expression and a number 11 football shirt stood beside him in attendance, listening. It seemed, in essence, that he was a butcher-cum-wrestler-cum-hotel-owner and his family were involved in a blood feud with another family. “It has been going for about forty-five years, and now nearly everybody is dead.” Some killings—from
their side—had been done with a white-handled “Astra” pistol, imported from Spain. It was a particularly good and reliable pistol. “About twenty in all have died,” he continued, chewing, “though with the violence there has always been love.” It was hard to know what he meant, or indeed if the story was true. He turned to Idris, and then back to me and said in English, “And a lot of love also.” What had happened to the family pistol? The wrestler reached into the tight pocket of his trousers, pulled out a handgun and broke it to show it was loaded. He handed it to the attendant, chewed his paan some more and reached into a different pocket. Out came the notorious white-handled Astra pistol. He gave it to me. I looked at the weapon, wondered what to do with it and gave it back to him. The noise outside had quietened, and we left. Did that happen? I asked Idris. “We call him Naim Beta,” he said. “He’s from a family of local wrestlers, but there are not many left now after the blood feud. He’s got several politicians staying at his hotel tonight, and he thinks he needs the gun to guard them.”

We were driving back through the dereliction, past bamboo and timber yards, when Yusuf got a call on his mobile phone. “You were asking about Dumpy,” he said to me. “He’s just at the railway station if you want to meet him.” We diverted, being detained for ten minutes at a level crossing while an interminable goods train rumbled through. Trains in India seemed to be three times longer than trains anywhere else. Our driver stopped right in front of the station—although the area was blocked by a security detail—and Idris told Yusuf and me to go ahead. We ran over the railway bridge and pushed through a scrum of BSP supporters to reach Dumpy’s carriage. He was standing by the open door, enjoying the crowd’s attention, a short, energetic man with a bristly beard and a blue stole around his neck. He caught sight of Yusuf. “Hey, Yusuf, are you still with the Congress?” Dumpy pretended to be disconsolate, playing the situation. He turned to me: “These babalogs have a lot to learn, they think they’re still at Cambridge or Oxford Street. Mayawati is the future for India, and not just in UP, I can promise you. Sonia and Rahul are going nowhere.” The train was about to whistle out of the station. I asked Dumpy about his days with Sanjay. “I was practising as a chartered accountant when Sanjay asked me to join politics. I knew Sanjay. Mrs. Gandhi said I was like her third son. Then when he died, Mrs. Gandhi threw Maneka out on the street and I was the only one who stood by her.” How did Maneka repay him? The train started to move. “She gave me a kick up the ass.” What would Sanjay Gandhi have thought of his son Varun wanting to chop off the hands of those who insulted Hindus? “He would be disgusted,” said Dumpy Ahmad.
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When Yusuf and I had run over the railway bridge to reach the train, an extraordinary thing had happened. Marching along the main platform of Kanpur railway station came two columns of armed police, and in their midst a very tall man in a spotless white kurta pyjama. As the procession advanced, people had turned and bowed and been acknowledged with a grand wave. It was the don of dons, Mukhtar Ansari, returning late in the evening from his bail hearing. Yusuf walked past the sleeping figures, the piles of dusty boxes and the vendors carrying clay pots of water, pushed past the deferential policemen and greeted his cousin in the traditional way, with a cross between a shoulder bump, a bow and a hug. He introduced me, and Mukhtar suggested we come and visit him in the prison tomorrow, but to be sure to bring some oranges. In the topsy-turvy world of Uttar Pradesh, there was nothing so strange about seeing the outlaw striding along the railway platform, looking like a senior politician.

The next day we ate tahri, a dish like biryani, and drove to the jail. “Mukhtar’s obsessed by
National Geographic
and
Animal Planet
on Discovery,” said Yusuf on the way. “He analyses big cats. He’ll lay bets with his entourage about animal fights—say, whether a lion will catch a gazelle. He wants to know why an animal does or doesn’t get away.”

“Yesterday?” asked Mukhtar Ansari, speaking in Urdu. He rubbed his hand over his substantial black moustache, which was twirling up at the tips. “Yesterday … I had a case heard in Chandoli.” We were in a cavernous, limewashed barracks—his barracks. At the gate a seal of purple indelible ink had been stamped on both of my wrists, like the stamp you get when going into a nightclub. It read: “Office of the Gatekeeper, District Jail, Kanpur” in Devanagari script (the word “gatekeeper” had passed into Hindi). Along one wall were tables, where prison stewards were preparing watermelons. Mukhtar was in blue jeans and a flowery red shirt, sitting up on his bed cross-legged. He was hugely tall and big, though not fat, and wore a long, thin scrunchy scarf, of the kind worn by students in France. I noticed we had the same brand of spectacles. When Yusuf told him I had thought he looked like a government minister walking through the railway station, Mukhtar was delighted, and he relaxed.

“I entered politics because I was concerned about justice and the persecution of the oppressed. The Dalits and bonded labourers in eastern UP are treated like scum. I took up arms against this way of living in Joga village back in 1985, although I come from a distinguished family background. I have won six consecutive elections as an independent MLA [state legislator]. The Bhumihars killed some people in 1990 and knocked down a statue
of Dr. Ambedkar. The oppressed went after them and killed about twenty.” Mukhtar had a low and resonant voice. “The war against landlord oppression involves a constant battle to mobilize. I used my reputation. I had 20,000 or 25,000 men, and my army was Muslim, Brahmin, Thakur, Dalit—everyone. We could mobilize at a week’s notice. We had licensed rifles. Our opponents the Ranvir Sena [a notoriously violent upper-caste militia from Bihar] had more weapons.”