The Hydra and the Anthill: Two Faces of a Troubled India

December 8, 2007

Sonia Ben cries, “The merchant of death! The merchant of death!” spreading the highly infectious virus in the communal badlands of Gujarat.

Overall politics being the game of self-righteousness and self-justification at all costs and whatever the consequences, the sari-clad iron woman of Italian origin, the new version of the Iron Lady, could well be politically justified in continuously raking up the cremation dirt to bring to life the Godhra ghosts. All is well in love and war, they say. And her love is politics. On top of it, it's electoral war. 

So the high-voltage campaign in Gujarat for the State Assembly flares ahead. But she and her funny state leader can't beat Mr. Modi in his chosen field of expert polarization, and in an effort to beat him with his own stick, they too get many bruises themselves.

Mr. Modi might be justifiably or unjustifiably reviled by the liberals, media and intellectuals—that is not the question—but we can't take away his USP under the all-swiping broom of any literary criticism.

Unlike the so-called pseudo-secularists, Mr. Modi makes almost no pretensions. Unlike them, he makes no bones about his reservations about the minority. Unlike them, he flares his religious identity directly, matter-of-factly.

So I find him very true, inside out, unlike the Congress people who stink with schemes and always pretend, and would always do so many things in a different way from what they say on the surface.

And this unambiguity, this sincerity of purpose, is liked by the masses in Gujarat.

But while the sari-clad woman of Italian cast and mould frets and fumes, does she ever give a thought to 1984?

Mr. Modi, the powerful man of Hindutva, marches ahead with his anti-Muslim juggernaut. This is his strength, and he is entitled to take it for his advantage. Just like the Congress tries to take advantage through Muslim appeasement. Fair and square. 

*****

Elsewhere, the Supreme Court judges are still laying eggs over the judgment.

I wish them a large flock of chicks on the hot seats of power and privileges.

The judiciary has to lay eggs and hatch chickens for the system, which in turn brought them into that seat after that incubation period of favouritism, reference and recommendation.

I don't find too many faults with the poor fellows, for the feeling of obligedness is just too natural. Expecting them to fulfill all the roles and responsibilities chartered out in the constitutional papers would be too much and most impractical thing during these times of pleasant reciprocities.

So let them lay eggs and hatch chickens in the coop of corruption, nepotism and cronyism.

God bless them in their productivity.

*****

After all, the system is a hydra-headed monster. It has so many glutinous mouths and bellies with mammoth appetites. In order to sustain the life in its innards, it has to eat its own refuse.

It eats what it throws out—the excreta.

Doing something for the solace, succour and justice of a few hundred odd job seekers would be in a hugely losing disproportion to the pampering of some souls in the high seat.

After all, this recycled excreta will oil so many machineries at the higher levels.

They have to oil their apparatus; let them do it.

The ineffective curses of our innocuous souls are mere ignorable mini-storms in some teacups. Even the rectum burps of politicians are more effective in raising some issues.

Even if, in future, shackled by some unavoidable constitutionality, they do read out the verdict of justice, that would be doubly ironical.

For by doing that, they would lay bare the hypocrisy of the judicial dictum: justice delayed is justice denied.

The damage has been done irremediably.

Any judgment can't undo it.

God bless the esteemed judges.

*****

December 9

Bania is a short, black, bad-skinned guy, a typical representative of the labourer class, most of whom have got nice constitutions to begin with but which degenerate over the malnutritioned and semi-starved days over the years to give them the look of a semi-filled, wrinkled bag.

He is a third- or fourth-generation scion of migrants from the East.

This coming from the East entitles them to a new identity, almost a caste name—the Purbiyas. In the villages around here, you find a few families of these Purbiyas. In the caste hierarchy, officially they are Lodhi Rajputs.

During their earlier days, they showed a definite fruity proclivity, for there were enough mango and berry plantations. But now they have adapted to fruitless agriculture, a cropy monoculture—almost entirely wheat and rice, with a smattering of vegetables.

They take land on yearly lease from the landowners and sweat it out across the season to defy hunger through their tiny plots of vegetables and marigold flowers. In between, they take up jobs as manual labourers.

Across the oft-repeated rut, the similar path, Bania's widowed mother found herself a storehouse for a lot of troubles during her old age. Her daughters had gone away in marriage, while her two elder sons had taken up separate, relatively well-off ways with their own families.

The widow was given one lakh rupees by the obliged two elder sons to ward off hunger with the money's interest. Being the youngest one, Bania Purbiya also got 50,000 rupees as his entitlement.

They married him off, made a little house for him, and after seeing the old matron plus one lakh rupees, the young bride with her few pickings as dowry, and Bania plus 50,000 rupees, they started etching out separate destinies on the new path.

A glossy black boy was born to the young wife, who showed all the signs of not reconciling herself to her fate with the perennially opium-smoking husband.

He did work, but only enough to get his little bit of cannabis and local wine, nothing to save for her pouch.

Thus the domestic crisis skyrocketed. Her family filed a case with the police alleging dowry harassment and domestic violence.

Under pressure, Bania's kith and kin were forced to go for an out-of-court settlement, which took away half the amount he had received from his brothers, much of the rest having been lost in the opium-drawn chariot of hallucinations.

He could be seen with his infant boy in his arms.

To run a household, you need more than the nominal monthly interest on one lakh rupees, so the diabetic mother started withdrawing money from her account to keep the rats of hunger at bay.

Meanwhile, the search for his second bride was opened.

But as an assetless and landless devotee of intoxication, and a divorcee, the second wife meant spending half of his remaining money in purchasing a bride from a poor family somewhere in the East.

He purchased a wife, which of late was becoming a business of sorts in Haryana, where the sex ratio had taken such a nosedive that many eligible bachelors were left in a lurch.

But then, in India, one tale of sorrow and misery most often loses its heartrending poignancy under the shriller gleam of the hot sun of another tragedy.

So, as per the mathematical law of ever-aggravating misery, Bania was found to emerge as an eligible bachelor to some starving family having many daughters in a slum in Delhi.

The middlemen, the matrimonial sharks who bring about the consummation of relatively high-end and relatively low miseries, found a Muslim bride for him at a price.

Crowded in a shanty, it was a family on the brink of starvation—a large troupe of siblings and their widowed mother.

When the gods of your religion have abandoned you to such a terrible fate, you quite deliberately—or perhaps you are simply left with no choice—cling to any sinew of any type and any hue.

So the eldest Muslim girl became a Hindu bride without much hassle. Her husband had at least a brick house, and that too in the uncongested countryside in a village in Haryana.

The half-Hindu bride thus found herself lucky to spend her days under a pucca roof.

What Bania did in his drunken and opiated state appeared tolerable in comparison to the terrible dramas of that shanty environment in a Delhi slum.

As a young girl, she was supposed to be married. Getting married to a Hindu was less embarrassing than not getting married at all.

Moreover, in the ever-bulging swathes of misery in which millions wallow like gutter worms, where the black sewage mud of misery paints them into casteless, classless, religionless masses, who cares about the fine dress codes of religion, ritual, pride and all?

So this poor worm came out of the nalla, and the wretched husband appeared tolerable.

Her little siblings came to stay for extended periods, as though they were on vacations and tours, even though their errant brother-in-law never spoke to them a single word in a normal tone.

He swore filthily at their sister in their presence.

The tiny troupe wandered through the uncrowded village streets as though they were on a tourist sortie.

Then a girl was born to the Muslim bride of the Hindu miser, who continued to work merely to get his intake of cannabis and alcohol, his mother withdrawing her money to meet the family's ends.

Then a triumphant tragedy struck the impoverished household.

A few weeks before her daughter-in-law was to deliver her first son, the old matron, a diabetic, got her thumb injured on the rusty edge of a hand axe.

Infection started.

Poverty most often makes you unaware of the perils born of a happening like this.

So, within days of the child's delivery—a triumphant arrival—the diabetic old matron got her hand amputated from the elbow.

Her old-age stock, invested by her two elder sons, was now worth only 8,000 rupees.

Her younger son's family now numbered three, and a few more might come unless there was some godly intervention.

A stump where a fully working arm used to be.

A meagre 8,000 rupees where there was once a soul-satisfying sum of one lakh (a financial landmark in poor households).

A few more mouths to feed.

The worms of addiction, fatter and stronger than ever in the family patriarch's heart.

A story of plain misery.

But think of the fact—even this tale of sorrow might sound like a tale of calm and boon if put in juxtaposition against a still poorer one.

And there are bound to be many such stories, for this is poor India, where every misery is being robbed of its sympathy-arousing aura by the dint of a still larger pool of suffering.

And in these swarming anthills of pain and deprivation, what it all must be looking like, I just fear to imagine.

I shudder.

And this shudder brings me out of my sulk and makes me feel like a pampered king.