5/10/2014 The Light of Benares | OPEN Magazine

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SATURDAY, 10 MAY 2014
Why Indi an Pol i ti cs Is Anti -Weal th
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17 May 2014
The Light of Benares
Modi, if he is to bring profound change, must not go the Erdogan or Rajapaksa
route. Because the conditions for the emergence of that kind of leader do exist in
India
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A BEND I N T HE GANGES
Aatish Taseers new novel , The Way
Thi ngs Were, wi l l be publ i shed at the
end of thi s year. Hi s weekl y despatch
from Benares wi l l appear through the
el ecti ons
EMAI L AUTHOR ( mai l t o: edi t or @openmedi anet wor k . i n)
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This is the last despatch. On Monday, Benares goes to the polls. The
next issue of this magazine will appear with the 14th Prime Minister of
India on its cover. And then when there are only certainties, only
known knowns, there will be little for me to add.
It will be a relief. This election has gone on too long. There is, in
Benares at least, a great feeling of fatigue. We peaked early. This last
week has been unendurable. The white heat is here; the afternoons
burn; in the evening, the river is still and swampy. The climate
combined with stray incidents of electoral violence and the heavy
presence of commandoes, sniffer Alsatians and intelligence men has
given this temple town the air of a Latin American country under
curfew. The other night, returning from Yelchiko Bar with some
friends, we encountered a street full of policemen and journalists. The
electricity had gone and the street was in total darkness, but for the
halogen of a TV camera and the revolving blue light of a police jeep,
flashing its beam into the smoky night. An AAP worker had been
beaten up a few hours before, his face bloodied; he was there to lodge
an FIR. The city was tense. And, as Open goes to press, Modi was
preparing for a confrontation with an Election Commission that had,
for security reasons, denied him permission to hold rallies. There was
talk of protests and the muted fear of pre-poll violence.
It was time to go. I felt I had seen about as much of this election as I
wanted to, and now it was time to go. Time to finish up my real work
and find a flight out.
+++
This election began for me with a Modi rally in Delhi last September. I
was struck at the time by a number of things. These are my
impressions from that day:
So, yesterday, P and I went to the Modi rally in Delhi. A hot
unpleasant day of barsaat vaali dhoop. We got there far too early. To
the Japanese Park in Rohini, a dengue-infested wasteland in West
Delhi. We had to sit there for a long time in the press enclosure among
mainly cub reporters and Hindi language journalists; there were no
senior journalists present and almost no one from the foreign press.

search OPEN
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And, in the beginning, the crowd felt small too. In fact, it all felt pretty
lacklustre: the packaged breakfasts, the oppressive heat, the endless
slogansBharat Mata ki Jai!the campaign videos playing on a loop
and the young woman with the screechy voice who kept trying to
enthuse the crowd. At one point, we even considered leaving. (Not a
loo for miles, by the way!)
And then, just as P and I were getting pretty restless, the strangest
thing happened. The sky darkened. A cool wind began to blow, and the
temperature seemed to drop by several degrees. A long narrow poster
of Modi tied to the metal frame of the tent came free and began to blow
in the wind. But in such a way that it seemedbecause of the little
ripple that [ran] through the posterthat Modi was waving at us. In
fact, many people from the press corpsyou know how India loves a
bit of magic!got up and began to photograph this strange
phenomenon. Not just because on this day of chamchamati dhoop it
was suddenly cooler, and the glare from the sky was gone, but because
this apparition of the leader seeming to wave at the press enclosure
coincided exactly with Modis arrival on stage! And when I stood up
on my chair to see the reaction of the crowd, it was not so small. Not
small at all, in fact. They had been arriving all the while, and for as far
as I could see, down the full length of the long tent and spilling out on
all sides, were hundreds and thousands of people. All of a type, by the
way. No longer the people who attended the rallies of my childhood,
no longer people with leathery skin and yellowing eyes and bad teeth.
But all young people, mainly menall slightly built, but very energetic
in jeans and sneakers, with fashionable haircuts. Dont get me wrong:
they were not, by any means, all middle-class. But it was clear, from
their restlessness more than anything else, that they were all certainly
planning to be. And when Modi began to speak, after the interminable
bugling of a conch and cries of Bharat Mata ki, what he seemed
really to catch was this feeling, at once full of sorrow and rage, of
hopes betrayed, of a kind of wasted promise. It was as if he spoke
directly to the crowds restlessness, and rather than making them feel
ashamed of it, he endowed it with a kind of nobility. He made their
restlessness and hunger and wish to make something of their lives
seem like the noblest impulse a man could possess. He showed them
their anger in the light of a government that held their talent and
energy and potential in contempt. It was amazing: his belief in that
vast crowds ability to empower itself was absolute.
He began in humour. And this is [rare]. This is not a funny country:
there are very few political leaders who can really make people laugh.
The Prime Minister is in America at the moment, he said, embarking
on a cruel impression of the PM. He is grovelling before Obama. He is
telling him that we are a poor country, and that America should help
us. We are, he went on, in a weak plaintive voice, a nation of 125
crore, but we are poor. Please help us!
Then, referring to Rahul Gandhis comment the other dayand he
only ever refers to him as shahzadathat poverty is a state of
mind, he said: Now what I want to know is: Is this poverty that the
Prime Minister is asking Obama to alleviate real? Is it the poverty of
our streets and neighbourboods? Is it real poverty? Or is this also that
state-of-mind poverty?
And for many minutes, this was all that he did. He just made us laugh,
at the expense of the discredited PM, and The Madonna with Child.
But thenand one could almost not tell when it happened all the
humour fell away. And he was angry. Full of this emotion that I now
think of as distinctly his: this mixture of pain and sadness edged with
great anger. It is also in these moments, when he is most rousing
imploring the crowd to tell him how the Prime Minister of Pakistan
would dare insult the Prime Minister of India (Nawaz Sharif had
likened Manmohan Singh to a dehaati aurat in New York)that Modi
is also most frightening. Not Hitler, but there is definitely something of
a leader like Erdogan in Turkey or Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka about him.
His victory will decimate the opposition. Not just in terms of
numbers, but philosophically too. It will be a long time before the
Congress finds its way again. The [pundits in Delhi] will say Im wrong.
How will he find the numbers? they ask. But the numbers will come.
This is going to be one of those elections when all the old calculations
cease to apply.
+++
That was September. Much of what was relevant then is, if anything,
more relevant now. At the time I could not have known if the crowd I
had seen in Delhi was representative of the electorate at large, or
specific to the big cities. It is my feeling nowafter many weeks of
travel, and seeing Modi in other more rural placesthat this is the new
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electorate. And, if I have sympathy for Modi, if I wish to see him
succeed, it is because of my sympathy for the people who support him.
It is this Indiaclear-headed, restless, hungrythat has energised this
election. It is the India that some of us have been waiting to see come
into being.
It is also my concern for this India that has prejudiced my view of this
election. The reason is that I grew up among a class of Indians
privileged, exclusively English-speaking, intimately connected to
power and politicswho loathed this other India. They turned their
nose up at their bad English; they complained of their body odour;
they described them, while doing an impression before a hooting
drawing room of people (Im thinking now of a large mondaine of Delhi
society) as ball-scratchers. They hated their beliefs and practices;
they held their religion in contempt; they lived in open terror of their
rise.
Only the Poor were beautiful. The people I grew up among had great
reserves of feeling for the rural poor. And through their many schemes
and yojanas, their fraudulent plans for empowerment, their concern
for tribal art and religion, this crowd of ethnistas and Oxbridge Lefties
worked hard to make sure that the Poor never lost the thing that gave
them their great charm, namely their poverty. Now while it would be
unfair to say that the members of this class supplied leaders
exclusively to the Congress partymany of them went on to join other
parties, some even to lead large statesit would not be an
exaggeration to say that if one party were to be singled out as sharing
the beliefs and prejudices of this class, it would be the Congress Party
under the leadership of the Gandhi family.
But the class the Family represented was a class in decay. That decay,
though they were an embodiment of it, was not specific to the Family.
The same conditions that had produced them had produced others.
Their experience of rootlessness and isolation, the devastating impact
of convent and public school educationsome wasted time spent in
the West was a general feature of this class. And the decline that was
to be observed between Jawaharlal Nehrus generation and Rajiv
Gandhis was visible everywhere. No one perhaps expected that it
would have brought us so soon to Rahul Gandhi; one might be forgiven
for thinking an intervening stage was needed; but decline itself was
inescapable. It is not possible for a class to remain vital if it cannot
draw cultural nourishment from the place it inhabits. That class then
will produce people without the means to deal with India; it will
produce Coomaraswamys intellectual pariah, the nondescript
superficial being who is neither of the East nor the West. A few among
this class, I should say, did try to make a journey back; they tried to
undo the effects of their education; but most were content to remain as
they were. And why not! It was not so bad a place to be. India did not
punish them for the remove at which they stood from her; she
rewarded them with her awe.
Well, that is, till just the other day.
Because the sense I had at that rally in Rohinithen subsequently, in
Kanpur, and then again, here, in Benares was of a country unbound.
A country coming free of its historical obeisance to the class the
Gandhi family represented. The change was happening not because the
new middle classes sensed the danger the elite posed to their own
growth. No: it was much more basic than that. It was that the cultural
gap had finally grown too wide. And if they turned away from Rahul
Gandhi, it was not because they saw him as a threat to their own
interests, it was because they couldnt understand a word he was
saying. In the past, this might have produced a feeling of apology in
them; it now produced an equal and corresponding feeling of
contempt.
It was there in the voice of a young priest who came to see me the
other day. He was of a grand line of priests belonging to the Kashi
Vishwanath Mandir. He wore jeans and a kurta, pink-stemmed rimless
glasses; his ringtone was: Yada yada hi dharmasya There were
broad streaks of yellow on his forehead, pierced red at the centre, and
he wore a ring of Hessonite, for his Rahu was bad. We had not met to
discuss politics. But the young priest, after making apologies for being
apolitical, as men of God frequently do, could talk of nothing else. Of
Modi, he said: Rahul Gandhi se toh zyaada sincere hain. Kam se kam
unko bataana toh nahi padhha ke yeh Vishwanath hain. Rahul Gandhi
ko bataana padhha ke yeh Vishwanath hain. Then, as if coming to the
heart of the difference between the two men, he said Modi knew how to
perform all the rites at the temple. Rahul Gandhi, the priest added
cruelly, toh sona-chaandi dekh rahe thhe. Unko toh Vishwanath se
koi matlab hi nahi thha.
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This was what was new this election. In another time, Rahul Gandhi
would not only have been forgiven his deracination; he would have
been admired for it.
But cultural rootedness came with problems of its own; in fact, it came
with the problems of that culture. And, likeable as the priest was, he
was an effortless bigot. He lamented the fact that all of Indias Muslims
had not been sent to Pakistan in 1947 ; he spoke of the need, when
Modi came to power, for one decisive riot that would show Muslims
their place. To hear him speak was to be reminded of how dangerous it
was to romanticise one India over another. It was also to be reminded
of the man the priest supported this election, the man from whom such
a wide range of things were expected.
Modi, that day in Rohini, when I first heard him speak, had said a few
things that worried me very much. He said that at that same breakfast
in New York where our Prime Minister had been insulted, some Indian
journalists had been present. Would they, he thundered, those
journalists, be answerable to the people of India for why they had
been eating Nawaz Sharifs breakfast while their Prime Minister was
being insulted?
What he said was worrying not just because no one wants to live in a
country where a journalist should ever be answerable to anything as
vague as the people of India. But, more than this: had a journalist, on
returning to India, been attacked because of what Modi said, it would
have done a lot to change the mood in this country. I had been in
places where such a change of mood had occurred, and it was a very
ugly thing. No press freedoms would need to be reeled in; the change
of air was often threat enough. But, more than all this, what really
worried me about what Modi said that day was that it suggested a
certain kind of man. Whose principal crime, in my eyes, is not so much
that he is a bigot, but a provincial.
The provincial is a problem not because you cant have a glass of wine
with him, though that would be nice too. Nor is it simply that he is not
a man of the intellectnot a reader, not someone of subtle mind. The
provincial is a problem because his plan for Development, on which
his entire fame rests, often ends up being too shallow a plan. Too
limited in its scope. The provincial invariably fails to recognise that in
the great countrieslet us take Japan as an examplethe development
of infrastructure and the economy must, if the country is to rise in a
meaningful way, and not stumble a few years down the line, be
accompanied by an atmosphere in which the human spirit is given free
rein. There is no external developmentand India, more than any
country, should know thiswithout a parallel development in the
internal life of a country. And for this to happen, for a country to find
her voice, a sense of her destiny, as it were, there must exist an
environment of complete freedom. Not simply in legal terms, but in
mood, in atmosphere. It cannot be impinged upon by a leader
speaking the language of treason, or leading witch- hunts against
journalists and intellectuals.
Modi, if he is to bring profound change, must not go the Erdogan or
Rajapaksa route. Because the conditions for the emergence of that kind
of leader do exist in India. There is the malaise left behind by the
previous government; there is a loud majoritarian feeling; there is
disgust with the elite; and there are people baying for a strong leader.
It is very easy to imagine an India in which Modi, if he delivers on
Development, will be forgiven everything else. And anyone with a
harsh word to say about him will be driven out of town. It would be
terrible if that atmosphere were allowed to grow in India. The trouble
would not come in the first five years, when, after the stultifying
experience of UPA II, there is nothing but euphoria. It need not even
come in the second term. The trouble comes only when that limited
kind of Development, restricted only to infrastructure, runs, as it
must, into the sands. It is then that the provincial leader, if he has not
grown into a statesman, asserts himself in cruder ways, waging
cultural or class wars, stifling freedoms.
+++
It is an illusion of our age that Development no longer requires an
intellectual component. True, one kind of Development will come
easilythere are companies to do it; people are pleased; they think
their work is done. They are wrong. The world can be divided along the
blade of a knife into those countries where Development has come in
shallow waysin many, it is possible already to see the ruins of partial
modernityand those in which it has been accompanied by
achievements in the Life of the Mind. And Development that is not
profound can play dangerous havoc in countries like ours.
Modi, if he wins this election, stands not just to be the Prime Minister
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of India, but the MP from Benares. It is a configuration full of
suggestiveness; there is no grander place on earth to be the MP from.
All around him, if he looks well, he will see the remains of tremendous
intellectual achievement in need of new vitality. Modi must not look
away from the spirit of enquiry and freedom that was at the heart of
that achievement. He must take as his maxim what one very wise
Brahmin here told me it had been his lifes ambition to be: A Hindu
without vengeance, and without apology.
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Ravi 3 hours ago
Aatish did try, he tried learning Sanskrit, he camped in small towns
(lets forget where in Benaras, courtesy family connections), but
finally succumbs to the cognitive biases of growing up among the
"drawing room" people of Delhi. Sadly, something beautiful writing
cannot camouflage.

2
Reply
irregularexpression 7 hours ago
So Modi thundering that 'a journalist should not laugh at jokes at
the expense of the constitutional head of their own country' is a
worrying sign, and seen as a call to a mob to attack the reporter.
But it is okay when journalists indulged in fear mongering and
whipping up angry frenzy amongst minorities for a decade, even
after the courts have cleared him of all (baseless) charges, so
much so that today there is a clear a present threat to his life from
terrorists, and a massive feeling of paranoia amongst the
minorities.
And also thank you for underestimating the intelligence of people,
especially the majority educated middle class, who support Modi --
for they will obviously take to violence against anybody who speaks
ill of Modi.
Shows you haven't lost your elitist contempt -- must be that
convent education.

4
Reply
No Mist 8 hours ago
Don't worry mr taseer ... modi will not go down the path of
rajapakse ... he will go the path of Bismarck


Subodh 11 hours ago
Aatish's concern about Barkha Dutt being attacked by a mob
because of Modi's statement leads him to wonder if he is a
provincial leader, a quality he contrasts by providing example of a
"great country" like Japan where according to him there exists an
atmosphere of complete freedom for intellectuals and journalists (a
freedom which has been misused and abused repeatedly by Indian
intellectuals and journalists)
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