The Writer and the World (10 page)

“We want nuclear bomb for the safety of the country. But this is a
matter of our all-India policy. I don’t talk too much about it to our villagers.” The cow was different. “We feel that cow is a very important animal in our country, being an agricultural country, and as such should not be slaughtered. There is a candidate in Delhi, Mr. Ram Gopal Shal-wala, is fighting only on that. Government should give protection and give good bulls to have a better type of animal. Good arrangements of fodder should also be made, because generally there is famine in this area and thousands of animals die of famine.”

He didn’t think Muslims would object. “Muslims who live in villages and are agriculturalists like to live as Hindus do. It is only the educated fanatics who want to create this gulf of Hindus and Muslims for their own selfish motives.” But later, when we were talking about the way the forty thousand Muslim votes would go, Mr. Sharda said in his direct, unrancorous way, “They will be divided. But generally most of the Muslim votes do not go to Jan Sangh.”

As I was leaving, a barefoot servant in a torn dhoti brought in the up-country edition of
The Motherland
, the new English-language Jan Sangh daily published in Delhi. The Kishangarh story, and the charge of political murder, was still big on the front page.

T
HE MUSLIM
votes wouldn’t go to the Jan Sangh. But Mr. Mukut thought they would go to him personally, for his past services. This was on a day of exaltation when, after an evening of well-received speeches, he seemed to think that by allying himself with his former enemies he had left almost no votes for the other side.

We were driving in one of the campaign jeeps from Ajmer to the military town of Nasirabad, through country that had been stripped almost to desert by eight successive years of drought. Between the driver and myself Mr. Mukut sat or half-reclined, small, frail, easily tossed about, in a dhoti and a black waistcoat, with his fine head thrown back, his sightless eyes closed, his delicate hands occasionally clutching at air. Sometimes, between sentences, his wide, expressive mouth opened and closed wordlessly, and he was then like a man gasping for breath. His gentle manner and fragility imposed gentleness on all who came near him; and I occasionally felt, as I leaned close to catch his exalted words, that I was rushing a garrulous invalid to hospital, and not racing with one of Rajasthan’s master-politicians to a hard day’s campaigning.

A leaflet had appeared in Ajmer calling on Jan Sangh supporters to boycott Mr. Mukut. Mr. Mukut said this was another trick of Mr. Bishweshwar’s party; he had, he said, been astonished by the loyalty of his Jan Sangh workers. Mr. Mukut spoke, not quite as one who had seen the error of his Congress ways, but as someone who was at last able to speak of the errors of the Congress. The Jan Sangh said that the Congress was corrupt. It was true, Mr. Mukut said. “The power corrupted us. Our politicians became Gandhian only in name.” But he himself had been helpless; he had never been a minister. And now he saw no moral or political complication in his alliance with the Jan Sangh. His position was simple: it was as a Gandhian that he was fighting the Indira Congress, which was illegitimate, Communistic and Westernizing.

“Gandhiji’s ideology was quite different from the ideology of Western politicians. The foundation of his political tactics is that means should be as fair as the end.” He didn’t think this could be said of Mrs. Gandhi. He was also concerned about nationalization. “It will ruin the country. All our state-owned enterprises are so badly run.” His support of private enterprise brought him close to the hard anti-Communist line of the Jan Sangh. But Mr. Mukut didn’t appear to be concerned either about efficiency or capitalism. His opposition to nationalization was embedded in an over-riding Gandhian doubt about the machine age. The machine had destroyed the West, as Mr. Mukut had heard; the machine would destroy India. “What I particularly admired about Gandhiji was that he went to Buckingham Palace in 1931 in a dhoti.”

I asked why that was admirable.

“Because he put the picture of poor India before the world.”

“Mr. Nehru said that the danger in a country as poor as India was that poverty might be deified.”

“Did he say that?” Mr. Mukut paused. The idea was new, “Western” and perhaps intellectually unmanageable. “I never heard him say that.” He opened and closed his mouth wordlessly; and again, head thrown back, eyes closed, he was like a gasping invalid.

We passed the new Shiva temple, still with its bamboo scaffolding, that the peasants had built to celebrate the end of the eight-year drought. It stood white in a desolation of young thorn bushes. Once there had been woodland here; but towards the end of the drought, at a time of famine, the trees had been cut down for charcoal. And then we were in the military area: barracks old and new in the stripped land, soldiers with
rifles on their shoulders running in groups of two or three on the asphalt road.

The main street of Nasirabad was brilliant with stalls of fruit and vegetables. Here we stopped. Many reverential hands helped Mr. Mukut out of the jeep and led him, limp-shouldered, limp-armed, between the vegetable-stalls and across the narrow pavement to a dark little office, over the front door of which, on the outside, were dusty framed diplomas from Lucknow University and, on the inside, brightly coloured Hindu religious prints. It was a lawyer’s office, with a whole glass-cased wall of Indian law books covered in brown paper, the frame of the case painted yellow, with each section roughly labelled in red.

Mr. Mukut said to me, “He’s one of my disciples.”

The lawyer, a middle-aged man in a chocolate-purple sports shirt, said very loudly, as though addressing the street, “Everything I am I owe to Mr. Mukut.”

They made Mr. Mukut sit on a basket-chair. They brought him tea and a large, fly-infested
cachoree
, a local fried delicacy.

The lawyer said, “Mr. Mukut made me what I am. He has served many people here without payment. The people of Nasirabad remember these things.”

And Mr. Mukut, leaning back, his slender legs drawn up onto the seat, his hands fumbling for the
cachoree
that had been broken for his convenience into little pieces, opened and closed his mouth, like a man about to sigh.

But the lawyer had pointed out the weakness of Mr. Mukut’s campaign. Some of the people in the office were linked to Mr. Mukut by interest. The others were Jan Sangh and they for the most part were small shopkeepers. Even the forbidding, kohl-eyed young man in a cream-coloured suit and pointed black shoes, even he, who was a teacher, came from a shopkeeping family. The Jan Sangh was an urban party; it had no organization in the villages. The only party with a village organization was the Congress. It was that village organization that had to be captured; and Mr. Mukut’s only weapon was his influence. Mr. Bishweshwar’s strength was that he belonged to the ruling party; a ruling party had its ways of exerting pressure.

“I will tell you how they won the last State Assembly by-election,” the lawyer said. “At that time this area was affected by famine. Rural people were jobless. The government machinery opened famine works in a
number of places. And these famine-relief workers were given one slogan: ‘If you vote for the other side, famine-relief work will be closed down.’” And now the ruling party was again up to their old tricks, this time with the untouchables or Harijans, whom they were bribing in all sorts of ways and especially with loans from the nationalized banks.

A prominent Christian in Ajmer had complained to me that as a result of all the political attention the Harijans were getting out of hand. They were being “brought up” too fast, before they had a proper “footing”; there had been strikes. “I am even afraid to speak harshly to some of them now,” the Christian said. I thought that the lawyer might be trying to say something like this in an indirect, un-Christian way. So I asked him, “They’re behaving badly then, these scheduled castes?”

“Badly?” The lawyer didn’t understand my question. He was a Hindu; he didn’t have the Christian social sense; he couldn’t share the Christian’s resentment. Caste was not class. No one, however successful, denied his caste, however low, or sought to move out of it; no one tried to “pass”; no one’s caste-security was threatened by any other caste. So the lawyer floundered. “No,” he said at last, “they are not
behaving
badly. It’s just that they’re being fooled.”

But what did Mr. Mukut have to offer? How was he going to balance this powerful appeal of the other side? Was he campaigning, for instance, for cow-protection? Mr. Mukut was astonished that I should ask. Everyone in Ajmer knew his record. During his time in parliament he hadn’t only campaigned for a ban on cow-slaughter and the punishment of cow-killers; he had also campaigned for free grazing for cows anywhere.

“We are too Western-oriented,” Mr. Mukut said. He was sitting up now, small and neat and cross-legged in his basket-chair. “Go to the villages. Everybody in the village now wants to wear jacket and tie. Look at our own
ayurveda
medicine. It was only after a long fight that we managed to get it accepted, these remedies that are much cheaper than any modern drugs. And then there are the pipelines.”

I said, “Pipelines, Mr. Mukut?”

“Even in the villages. The pipelines in the villages is going too far. It’s all right in the cities. But in villages the healthy water from the well is good enough. But they are taking piped water now to many villages. For our womenfolk this going to the well and drawing water was one of the ways in which their health was maintained. They now have got no substitute exercise for the women. Similarly, we have our own indigenous
chakki
[a quern] for grinding grain on the floor. Now they have substituted these mills run by electric power or oil-fired machines. So now the whole village sends its grain to these mills, with the result that the women are missing this exercise as well. Previously even in cities this grinding with
chakki
was done by small families. But now everything is being Westernized. It is morally bad because it tells upon the health and habits of our womenfolk. And unless some alternative employment is found for them it naturally makes them sluggish.”

In a famine area! From an election candidate! But Mr. Mukut could go into the villages to ask for votes because he was a Gandhian who knew that his own merit was high. He had achieved merit through service and sacrifice. Service for its own sake, sacrifice for its own sake. “Since Mr. Kaul and I left the Congress,” Mr. Mukut said, “there is no one there with a record of service. Mr. Kaul was in jail; I was in jail.” Democracy, the practice of the law, the concern with rights: one set of virtues had been absorbed into another, into a concept of
dharma
, the Hindu right way; and the distortion that resulted could sometimes be startling.

K
ISHANGARH
was murdered on Tuesday evening. On Friday evening All-India Radio announced that the police had “worked out” the case and arrested a student. On Saturday the details of the arrested man’s “confession” were all over Ajmer, and in the afternoon there were Hindi leaflets in the streets:

Other versions of the story were no less sad. Bhim Jat’s sister had left her husband to become Kishangarh’s mistress; and Bhim Jat had been ostracized by his caste for the dishonour his complaisance had brought on them all. Kishangarh had given Bhim a house on the farm; he was paying for Bhim’s education; he had promised Bhim the farm itself. But then a well on the farm gushed water. In the desert water was money; and Kishangarh, worried about his “de-recognition” and the possible loss of his privy purse, had sought to go back on his promise.

Kishangarh was the name of an eighteenth-century school of painting. Now it was linked with a peasant woman, a farm, a well: a peasant drama, far removed from the princely pageantry of the prize-giving at Mayo College that afternoon. Kishangarh was remembered there, in the obituary section of the headmaster’s speech, as a distinguished and popular old boy, like the late Maharaja of Jaipur, “who died in the U.K., where he had gone to play polo, his favourite sport.”

The boys were exquisite in tight white trousers, long black coats and pink long-tailed Rajput turbans. They sat on the steps of the Mogul-style Bikaner Pavilion, with a view of the cricket field, the blank score-board, the college grounds and, in the distance, the sunlit brown hills of Ajmer. The guest of honour was the Canadian High Commissioner. Prominent among the visitors on the lower steps of the pavilion were some of the princes of Rajasthan: the Maharaja of Kotah, a couple from the house of
Jodhpur, and the Maharana of Udaipur, whose ancestor had been the first to respond to an appeal of the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, for funds for a princely public school and had, a hundred years ago, almost to the day, given a lakh of rupees, then worth about £10,000.