India (46 page)

It was not easy to have a conversation with Mukhtar, since every few moments one of his attendants would approach with a mobile phone. “Inshallah, inshallah,” he said to someone down the line. Nor were Yusuf and I the only visitors. An old man in a baseball cap appeared, a follower of the prominent Hindu swami Baba Jai Gurudev, who was building a temple. “Baba Jai Gurudev has no contact with political parties,” the baseball cap told me as he waited for a consultation, “but he sees Mukhtar Ansari as a good man for India.” He was an emissary of the baba, promising support in the election. “In Benares, everyone is connected with Mukhtar Ansari. We think he will have a big victory.” Later, I looked at the baba’s website: “The soul has an eye, an ear and a nostril but all these are closed at present due to past good or bad deeds. Through meditation and mercy of the Master these can be removed.” Perhaps the godman was hedging his bets and offering blessings to several candidates.

Mukhtar portrayed his life as a justified and even inevitable response to the social imbalance and caste feuding in eastern Uttar Pradesh. “That part of our state is poverty-stricken. Generation after generation has to live on subsistence farming. The minorities are subject to the injustice of the Congress party. As an elected representative, I give all the money I make directly to the community in Mau. I arrange marriages, organize education, health clinics and eye clinics, I give out blankets and saris—and not only at election time. If someone calls me a ‘mafia don’ it makes no difference. Can they name one person I have attacked who comes from a weaker section? I have always fought against the powerful, I have taken power from them. I will continue what I am doing until the end of my days.” Was he afraid? “Death only comes once.”

A mobile phone was brought and held close to his ear by a helper. “Baba, inshallah,” he said. Mukhtar had to run his election campaign from prison, although out on the streets of Benares, activists were campaigning for him in the thousands. His future depended on a victory: if he were elected, there was a good chance the legal cases against him would go quiet. Could
he beat Murli Manohar Joshi? “They have been using blatantly communal images against me. In one of their pictures I was depicted as Aurangzeb at Kashi Vishwanath temple, blood dripping from a sword, lightning coming from the sky, standing with my foot on the statues. M. M. Joshi is a fascist, a very low, petty, filthy human being, an enemy of the state, and an enemy of love and fraternal feeling, and I am gratified to be fighting against him. He came to Benares to play Hindu politics. No Indian patriot can seek to divide us on the basis of religion. If he says that, he’s a traitor. I am ready for those people to slaughter swine and throw them in a mosque, or slaughter cows and put them in a temple. I have warned them about it from my prison cell. But the election commission said I can’t have publicity, I can’t use a phone for my campaign. I am waiting for the court to release me. I’ve been in jail for forty-three months. So I read books, especially historical and revolutionary books. I will buy 2,000 copies of your book if it’s any good, and distribute it to my people. My family fought in the freedom movement, and it’s the same for me. I like Mahatma Gandhi, but if non-violence is not working, I say: ‘Laton ke bhoot baton se nahin maante’ ”—“If a devil isn’t listening to you, you have to give him a kick.”

Three surprise visitors appeared: Mukhtar’s wife, in a turquoise and silver salwar kameez with a black coat and pair of big sunglasses and dark lipstick, and their sons, aged eleven and sixteen. The elder boy wore an Armani belt, and the younger was chubby and cute. The family all sat up on the bed, close and affectionate with each other. The boys were studying at St. Francis’ College in Lucknow. “They’re going into the army,” said Mukhtar. He meant the Indian army, not his private force. I asked Abbas, the elder, why he was joining up. “I want to fight the terrorists,” he said in English. “I am going to attack on Pakistan and fight the criminals and all.” Mukhtar looked proud. “It’s in their blood,” he said. The younger boy, Omar, piped up in English too. “I am going to RULE on Pakistan.” We laughed and began talking about the Taliban. Mukhtar was of the view that they were being paid by a foreign power—probably the Americans—to blacken the name of Islam. “Nowhere in our religion does it say to kill innocents, and that is what they do.” Mrs. Ansari was silent, in a traditional way; it was like a social gathering of men, although we were in a prison barracks.

“When I get out,” said Mukhtar, “I want to travel. I’ve been on the Haj and to Thailand, and I want to go to Mecca again, and to hunt lions in South Africa—where I’ve heard it’s legal. I’ll buy hunting accessories and see the
black-maned lion in Namibia. My ambition is to visit the U.S.A., and see what progress America has made, and what we in UP can take from there to practise in our own part of the world.”
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We left them, sitting up on the bed, a close family. As the wrestler had said: “With the violence there has always been love.” Back at the house, Yusuf’s mother said to me: “If you want to go to Lucknow, you might get a lift with Cyrus. He’s been visiting the arms factory in Kanpur and is going back this evening.” I pictured a journey through the badlands of Uttar Pradesh with a trunk full of weapons. But she explained that Cyrus, a Parsi with damaged legs, had been visiting a medical factory which made prosthetic arms, so as to get his calipers tightened. “Godspeed,” said Yusuf as we drove away. Cyrus and I reached Lucknow, Mayawati’s fiefdom, by nightfall.

Mukhtar Ansari did not win the race in Benares: he was beaten by a narrow margin by Murli Manohar Joshi. Not long afterwards, claiming she had information he was still involved in criminal activity, Mayawati expelled him from the BSP. A while later he was transferred from Kanpur to the political section of Tihar jail in Delhi. Had he won the election, there was little doubt Mukhtar would have been sitting in the Indian Parliament as one of Mayawati’s honourable MPs, rather than in a prison cell.

Ambedkar’s revolution—or the revolution done in Dr. Ambedkar’s name—is about assertion. Its details are less important than its message: India’s Dalits can and will take power for themselves. Now in her fifties with her hair cut short, honoured with giant garlands of banknotes at her public appearances, Mayawati is the message, the symbol. “Chamari hoon, kunwari hoon, tumhari hoon,” she likes to say at the start of her speeches. “I’m a Chamar, I’m not married, I’m yours!” And the audience, who know that no woman of her caste has been in such a powerful position, scream their applause. With her rough Hindi and her contemptuous view of political conventions, she represents everything the old ruling class despises and fears. When a senior Congress leader, herself the daughter of a former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, said Mayawati deserved to be raped, the response was explosive. The unexpressed implication was that since Mayawati was a Dalit, she could be raped with impunity, and shown her place as others had been before her. The Congress leader quickly apologized, saying she had spoken in anger, but not before she had been put in prison and had her house set on fire.
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Ambedkar, analysing the plight of untouchables in his writing, was conscious always of the antiquity of his dispossession. Conventions dating back to the era before the birth of Christ specified that the rejected castes should not be allowed to accumulate possessions, gain education or bear arms. “There is no code of laws more infamous regarding social rights than the Laws of Manu,” he wrote. “The lower classes of Hindus have been completely disabled for direct action on account of this wretched system of [caste].”
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Yet Ambedkar was affected by the colonial thinking of the time, the belief that all controls were unvarying. The authority for Manu’s “laws” was William Jones, an eighteenth-century British judge who had translated from Sanskrit what he called “the Indian system of duties, religious and civil”—with an explicitly political ambition. Jones hoped his book would help in the preparation of “a Code which may supply the many natural defects in the old jurisprudence of this country [in] a commercial age.”

He was saying, essentially, that Europeans did not know what was going on in Indian society and needed a myriad of alien behaviours to be explained and contained. Since their ability to exert physical control was limited, the British rulers planned “to leave the natives of these Indian provinces in possession of their own Laws,” and he hoped that, in future, “the administration of justice and government in India, will be conformable, as far as the natives are affected by them, to the manners and opinions of the natives themselves; an object which cannot possibly be attained, until those manners and opinions can be fully and accurately known.”
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Jones regarded the laws of Manu as a basis for future conduct: “The style of it has a certain austere majesty that sounds like the language of legislation and exhorts a respectful awe; the sentiments of independence on all beings but God, and the harsh admonitions even to kings are truly noble.”
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The laws or teachings of Manu, the Manusmriti, are hard to interpret from a distance of over two millennia. The text is a guide to life and to how a just king should rule. Jones was taken by their regulatory aspect, which seemed to decode a complex society: “Rice pudding boiled with tila, frumenty, rice-milk, and baked bread, which have not been first offered to some deity, flesh meat also … must all be carefully shunned.”
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Many of the rules on pollution and food were (and are) still followed in India, but much of the text appears specific to an antique world. So at a ceremony for the dead you should exclude a man who has shed his semen in violation of a vow, a man who allows his wife’s lover to live in his house, the sexually irregular (including “a man who allows his mouth to be used as a vagina”) and anyone with mangled fingernails or discoloured teeth. If you know the
law, you “should not offer even a little water to a twice-born man who acts like a cat.” If a goldsmith behaves dishonestly, “the king should have him cut to pieces with razors.” If a “ ‘Fierce Untouchable’ man” has sex with a tribal woman, “the evil ‘Puppy-cooker’ is born, who makes his livelihood from the vice of [digging up and selling] roots and is always despised by good people.”
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The impression here is of a ritualized society. Aside from the strict regulations on the behaviour of women, the section with the strongest resonance in Ambedkar’s lifetime concerned the fate of outcastes, who had to live outside the village, wear the clothes of the dead and eat food from a broken dish.

In Lucknow today, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the city’s physical space was being reworked to remake history. Great hoardings were advertising the “achievements nonpareil” of Mayawati’s government in building roads and bridges, but these were posters any chief minister might display. When she came to power, Mayawati had started by building statues of Dr. Ambedkar, and proceeded with the creation of a huge public park and stone buildings in his name. This was merely a preparation for a more serious ambition—creating an enduring monument in Lucknow on a hundred-acre site, with sixty epic red sandstone statues of elephants (her party symbol) and representations of Dr. Ambedkar and the Buddha. Legal attempts to prevent the project had been unsuccessful, and Mayawati was open about what she was seeking to do: “Remember, what I have spent on memorials and statues was only one percent of the state’s annual budget, but what I have built is going to be there for posterity. I firmly believe that those who are unable to create history are always pushed into oblivion,” she told a rally of her followers. Her delivery was perfunctory, but the audience did not seem to mind. “I will not allow a Dalit to bow his head before anybody,” she said.
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At the site, a burning expanse of stone, it was hard to take in the extent of what was now nearly complete. It was impressive and grotesque, elephant after stone elephant stretching off into the distance, veiled statues swathed in royal blue cloth, the whole area raised up from the surrounding roads. To reach the level of Mayawati’s wide monument, you had to climb steps. The site was too big to walk easily from one side to the other. All the tree cover had been chopped down, making it even hotter than the rest of Lucknow on a May morning. It was pharaonic in its assertion—and this was Mayawati’s intention, to be remembered by history, like the first Ming emperor or Shah Jahan. She did not want to be forgotten by history like Ozymandias, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” Mayawati’s
innumerable detractors, who saw her as just another politician, if more corrupt and tasteless than the others, were underestimating the scale of her social mission.

Their heads swathed against the sun, reams of workmen were chipping and dressing stone. One of them lifted a hidden manhole and pulled out a long hose to spray the blocks. I asked them why they were making this enormous park.

“It’s being built for social reform.”

“It’s to say, you are independent in India, you can do what you like.”

“It’s for my community. My family could never have thought about coming to a place like this.”

I was talking to a group of men, not all of them Dalits. One of the most admiring was Dinesh Tiwari, a Brahmin from Rae Bareli. One of Mayawati’s tactics had been to persuade Brahmins—who in Uttar Pradesh were often poor and had been politically excluded following the rise of the Other Backward Classes—that she could be their protector against the intermediate castes. In 2005 she held a huge ceremony in Lucknow where men with vermilion caste marks and shaved heads, bar a braid of hair at the back, paraded in rows and touched her feet in homage. “Behenji, bachao!” they said as they stooped—“Respected sister, save us!”
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It was, again, a scene that would have been unimaginable only decades before, the Brahmins bending down before the former outcaste for protection.

The workers took me on a spontaneous tour. We looked up at two giant bronze statues looming above us, which stood on individual red sandstone plinths. One was of Kanshi Ram, the other of Mayawati, appearing stolid and holding an expensive-looking long-handled handbag almost at ankle level. On the opposite side of the road, facing or matching them, stood correspondingly massive statues of Dr. Ambedkar and his first wife, Ramabai (who came from the Mahar caste like her husband, unlike the second Mrs. Ambedkar, who was a Brahmin). She looked demure, wifely, her head covered, quite unlike Mayawati with her strong, masculine stance. Curving stone canopies shielded both pairs of figures.