India (16 page)

Mayawati’s response to the caste system has been extreme assertion, copying the methods of earlier rulers. After she took over the state of Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s, she built around 15,000 statues of her hero, Dr. Ambedkar, at the government’s expense; for, without his ideas, she might never have gained the throne. To understand the extreme democracy of Uttar Pradesh, you ideally need a qualification in both statistics and chaos theory, and Mayawati knew how to play a game of numbers. The old elite hated her. “She should be given a broom,” said one man, meaning she was a sweeper who should get back in her place. “How can she just take taxes from these poor people to build palaces and monuments?” asked a retired Rajput princess, whose ancestors had done much the same for generations. A rich lady in Delhi said, “Mayawati doesn’t work, she just wakes up and
dismisses some IAS officers. I’ve heard at midday she puts wax on, does manicure-pedicure, has massage and at six—like all the middle classes—she watches Hindi soaps.” Stories circulated of her unexplained wealth, which included properties in some of the most expensive streets in Delhi. Despite having had no occupation but being a schoolteacher and a politician, Mayawati’s declared assets when she ran for office in 2010 totalled 87 crores or more than $18.5m.
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Around half of the BSP’s votes came from the Dalit community, and she wanted to widen the party’s appeal and gain more MPs. If Congress and the BJP drew level at the 2009 general election, her hope was she could step in as kingmaker, and possibly become India’s prime minister herself. She was picking her candidates from a variety of communities (for the seven Delhi seats, she had chosen three Muslims, two Brahmins, one Dalit and one Gujjar). The richer ones were probably running for office as an investment: if they gained power, they would have greater opportunities. And some were very rich indeed. Deepak Bhardwaj, who was standing for Parliament for west Delhi in 2009, was officially worth $134m—he described himself as “philanthropist, patriot, educationist, builder” and was to be seen driving around on a mini-tractor topped with a blue stuffed elephant, the party symbol. Haji Mohammed Mustaqeem was the candidate for Chandni Chowk in the heart of old Delhi. He was a meat exporter and a Muslim—the kind of person Murli Manohar Joshi of the BJP did not favour—and had declared personal assets of $4.5m.
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I went to see Haji Mustaqeem. His election office was in a run-down building extending over four floors, in a Muslim part of the old city of Delhi opposite Filmistan Cinema. The Bahujan Samaj operation was unlike that of other parties. In Lucknow, I had noticed the same thing: it was run by the firm edict of its leader, rather than in the usual haphazard way. Big posters of Mayawati, Ambedkar and the party’s founder, Kanshi Ram, were on show by the entrance. The workers there were looking poor and edgy as they prepared to go campaigning, but they had a disciplined attitude which seemed to say, we might change things, our way.

Haji Mustaqeem had a canny face, with the sides of his head squashed in as if by forceps, and brown patches lay under his eyes. He was forty-seven years old. Guarded by BSP minders, he was sitting on a bed and looked as if he was not used to speaking to foreigners. “I have entered politics to help the poor and the downtrodden,” he said in Urdu. One of his secretaries from the meat packing company was translating for me. “I am a good businessman. Congress and the BJP do nothing for these poor people.” A
minder who was visiting from Uttar Pradesh—UP—cut in: “He is very successful in business, he comes from a very reputed family and has no criminal record.” I sensed that the party officials and Haji Mustaqeem did not make an easy fit. It seemed as if he was used to issuing commands, not taking them. He began again.

“The chief minister of UP, Miss Mayawati, said to me, ‘You have earned a lot, now go out and serve your community.’ My father was pro-Congress for fifty years, but in fifty years they have done nothing for Muslims in India. My father was a butcher before me. We don’t have jobs in the defence services, in the bureaucracy, in the police. We are talking about people who have been neglected since years. The educational prospects are not good. The BJP is a communal party—so for me they are zero. My family used to be 100 percent Congress supporters. I have worked very hard, doing food export.” This was true: under “education” on his election affidavit, Haji Mustaqeem had written only “Primary schooling from Rahima Madarsa.” His was the sort of success story that was rarely mentioned in India or beyond: not being a software tycoon, he slipped under the net. Judging by his surroundings and appearance, he had little interest in displaying his wealth.

What sort of meat did he export? He looked surprised to be asked. “Lamb, goat and buffalo—fresh and frozen—to the Gulf, to Malaysia, to Egypt and South Africa. We are completely mechanized and automated, using equipment from Germany. We have one factory in Ghaziabad district in UP, one in Haryana and a government slaughter house on lease in Goa. We export 400 to 500 crores of meat per annum.” That was about $100m a year, an impressive business. Was he bothered about some Hindus not wanting to vote for him? Earlier in the campaign there had been a story, quite possibly invented, about buffalo carcasses tipping off one of his lorries in front of a Hanuman mandir. The question did not interest him. He did not see the world in this way. The Haji was a businessman, not a politician. “My vote bank is in the walled city area. I have not approached any local leader to deliver my votes.” Did he think the Bahujan Samaj Party could break into a constituency like this? “When we started, at the local election, our vote went up from zero to 16 percent—so we can win.”
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As it turned out, Haji Mustaqeem did little campaigning, just tramped through the narrow lanes of the old city with an entourage who wore blue scarves, choosing days when he knew other butchers would be off work, counting on the votes of the Muslim sub-caste to which he belonged, the Qureshis. His essential purpose in this election was to put down a marker
for himself and the party. He waved as he walked and rarely spoke or smiled. Haji Mustaqeem was the local man who had done exceptionally well. Elections were part of his journey.

Chandni Chowk was the number one constituency in India, the first on the electoral lists. In the 2009 general election, its size increased: delimitation gave it four times as many voters, with the proportion of Muslims reducing from one third to one fifth. In the 1990s the seat had been held by the BJP, but in 2004 it was won for Congress by Kapil Sibal, a Harvard Law School graduate who had joined politics after a successful career as a lawyer.
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Now, with the redrawn boundaries, no one was quite sure where the result might be heading.

The main street of Chandni Chowk had once been a principal avenue of the Mughal empire, home to traders, poets, pilgrims and courtesans, and after the anti-British rebellion of 1857 the corpses of rebellious nawabs and rajas were displayed along the length of it. Now, it was a confusion of utensil shops, old havelis, flower sellers and street stalls trading currency notes. Every faith was catered for: a mosque, a Baptist church, a Sikh gurdwara, a Shiv temple and a Jain temple, beside a hospital for sick birds. A branch of McDonald’s stood nearby, the steps thronged not with fans of the Maharaja Mac but with lean, squatting men in red turbans. Some had cotton buds stuck in the band of their turban, and each had a grubby towel draped over his shoulder. Others wielded sticks and wires, and were at work on their customers, crouching on their haunches, poking and twiddling, tutting and squinting: kaan saaf karne wallahs, the ear-cleaners of old Delhi. I asked one of them why he had chosen this spot to ply his trade. Drawing on a bidi, a leaf cigarette, he pointed out that McDonald’s had chosen the location: these steps were where the ear-cleaners had assembled for generations, in sight of the Red Fort, and they had no intention of going elsewhere.

I went to visit another candidate, Dr. Sita Ram Sharma, whose office was nearby. He was seventy-seven, and his party, the Rashtrawadi Sena, was concerned with the salvation of traditional values. Although the election campaign in Chandni Chowk was a three-way race between the BJP, Congress and the BSP, in democratic style no fewer than forty-one candidates were contesting, for the excitement and to get their point of view across. Some were said to be standing as dummy candidates on behalf of larger parties, to enable more election agents to get into polling stations. One of the independent candidates seemed to be staking a third of his fortune: named Beer Singh, he had declared assets of $600, and was likely to lose his deposit of Rs10,000 ($220). Another candidate with an outside chance, a
gentleman’s tailor called Prem Narain, told a reporter he had no manifesto and when pressed as to why he was running answered sadly: “Hum bhi kuchh kar sakte hain”—“I too can do something.”
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Dr. Sita Ram Sharma barked as I came up the steps to his office, “Open your shoes. Open them.” I took them off and sat across from him on a mattress covered with a white sheet. A sign said: “
PUNJABI SUITS AND SARIS
.” We were in a small enclave of Chandni Chowk run by Hindu cloth merchants. He started by complaining that Muslims were given money by the government to go on the Haj and permitted to have four wives under their separate civil code, but his real concern was about the values of the day.

“Our joint family, it was a sort of insurance against illness and old age, but it is disappearing because of Western culture,” he said in English. Wasn’t the joint family still strong in India, compared to most countries? “No, the social norms are relaxing. There are fads. The government sells liquor, and intoxication can make people murder and rape. Punjabi bhangra [a lively hybrid of music and dance] is now an influence in Delhi and people are dancing on the streets—which they shouldn’t do. Modernization means Christian values. People used to honour the girls from other villages, and we would marry in neighbouring villages in the north-west of Delhi. We would say, ‘Every girl is my sister, I won’t look at her.’ That is all gone.” This was probably true. In Delhi, relationships between men and women were now possible in a way they would not have been when he was young in the 1940s. “It seems to be a conspiracy of some rich people to create an environment where boys and girls can engage in such activity. Some of these people import ideas from America and Britain. They are romantic in bus stands and parks, and they go to nightclubs. This is a hot country, and they should not be eating meat and drinking liquor. Men from this place are meant to eat nuts, fruit, berries and vegetables—and not chicken.”

Dr. Sita Ram Sharma disliked social change, and his particular anger was reserved for the local press in Delhi. “I am a vegetarian, I don’t take wine. They will not publish anything about my campaign because I do not bribe the journalists with liquor.”
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Part of the difficulty for him was that Hinduism offered no clear religious sanction against many of the things he was describing. A hair-stylist in Mumbai who prepared beauty queens for shows, Bharat Godambe, had summed up the conservative difficulty to me: “In India, you can do things that you can’t do in our neighbouring countries. Here, it’s an open culture. You can wear a two-piece swimsuit. Hindu culture doesn’t say to people, ‘You can’t do it.’ ”
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The BJP candidate, Vijender Gupta, was a prominent councillor in the municipal corporation of Delhi. I felt as if I knew him already after seeing his Facebook fan page, with its elaborately mustachioed photo: “He is rendered with a pleasing personality, charming mannerisms, vibrant vitality and forceful and convincing oratory skills.” We were going out on the road, and as I waited for his convoy to pick me up I received a phone call “on behalf of Mr. Gupta” to apologize that they were running fifteen minutes late. This was quite something in Indian politics, where leaders will happily keep people waiting for hours on end. (In one notorious instance in Bihar in 2008, a state politician kept flood victims waiting for thirty hours before arriving to inaugurate a relief camp. Until “minister saheb” got there, nobody could be assisted.)
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Vijender Gupta arrived in a large cream pick-up covered from bumper to bumper with a carapace of party stickers, with a loudspeaker on the roof. He was in white socks, box-fresh slip-on trainers, a tight pyjama outfit and a gold waistcoat; his wrists were wound with red strings from the temple. First we visited a newspaper office, where he complained he was being given insufficient coverage and waved his index finger at the editor, a grey-haired woman with a sceptical face. Next we headed for a rally being held in his honour by Gujjars. Their ancestors were cattle-herders in Wazirpur village, but now the village was part of Delhi and the Gujjars were classed as OBCs. They were looking for assistance, and ideally for classification as a Scheduled Tribe, which would bring them the benefit of job reservations. “After the Gujjars,” said a worker as we bounced down the road towards Wazirpur, “we are going to meet some members of a particular community.” This was BJP code for Muslims. I asked which community he meant. He looked at the other workers with a grin. “The Mohammedan community.”

About 200 Gujjars were waiting under a large green tree in a courtyard. They had a long red turban to present to Vijender Gupta. All the senior male Gujjars had to feel or touch the turban to be sure it was of fine enough quality to be wrapped around the candidate’s head. It was about 40°C. Flies were everywhere. Vijender Gupta made a vigorous speech, attacking Congress for not supporting the Gujjars. With a lot of cheering, we set off for Ajmeri Gate with a siren going on the roof of the vehicle and the driver announcing “make way” and “pull over” while shooting along the crowded lanes. Vijender Gupta settled on the front seat to have a sleep. “This is my bed. I spend nineteen hours a day here,” he said to me.
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“What is the name
of Sanjay Gandhi’s son?” asked one of his workers. Varun Gandhi had recently given his tirade about cutting off the hand of anyone who challenged Hindus, and they were trying to work up a press release.