Mogambo in the Sacred City

The wait is over. The Congress Party has found a man to fight Modi from Benares.

The wait is over. The Congress Party has found a man to fight Modi from Benares. I was in interior Mirzapur, with Congress people, when I heard.

It was a hot desolate morning. The countryside was very poor and arid, and past a sloping expanse of fields, solid gold with ripened wheat, an ancient and arresting vision:

the white sands and distant glitter of the Ganges. The road rose and we came upon the Congress campaign. There was something almost quaint about the sight of the Congress tricolour in the little village of Kamarian. It was like one of those flags, which when ubiquitous and powerful had offended the eye, but now, absent long enough to be robbed of its associations, brought up—as with the hammer-and-sickle— a feeling almost akin to nostalgia. The candidate was a political heir and the son of a family friend. A handsome man, he sat on the floor among a smallish crowd of people with a Congress cloth, lined saffron and green, tied like a turban round his head. He was soft spoken and listened attentively to all that was said. Later, in the car, on the way to another meeting, he said, in reply to a question about why he wanted to be in politics: “A while ago, I had an accident and broke my femur. I was in bed for three months and began to think about what I would really like to do. And I realised that I wanted to do something for the people here. I know I can’t change India, but I would like, on a personal level, at least, to do politics in a different way.”

A general observation: this is the kind of man—sincere, hardworking, with a certain fineness of sensibility—that the Congress, much more than the BJP, is able to attract. The tragedy is that it is never able to do anything with this talent. Dynasty is to blame. Every Congress leader, as with certain bonsai, comes with, or will cultivate, a self-dwarfing mechanism. He can grow, he knows, but never too big. He must be careful not to put the heir in shadow; and, when the heir is something of a bonsai himself, this is not always easy. It takes a real invertebrate like Manmohan Singh to meet the party’s idea of what the stature of the extra-familial leader should be. In such an atmosphere, where illusions must be kept alive, and where great lies have routinely to be told, there are always men to tell them.

It was from one such man—obscenely fat, and dressed in a white kurta with jewelled buttons—that I first heard the Congress had found a man to put up against Modi. The Congress supporter described the new candidate as really someone to put the heat on Modi. Ajai Rai, he said, was a five-time MLA and a local hero—so loved and admired that, at the age of 26, he had defeated the nine-time sitting CPI MLA Udal. “He might not win against Modi,” he said, “but Modi will have to work very hard now.” I listened with one ear, I confess, because this large man’s credibility was in doubt. Some minutes before, egged on by a couple of flunkies, he had been saying there was no Modi wave; the BJP would get somewhere between 160 and 180 seats; and, most outlandishly of all, even if the BJP were to win, Modi would not be Prime Minister, but someone like Manohar Parrikar. What does one say in the face of such madness! I hoped only that his lies were for my benefit, that he did not believe them himself. And leaving him there, in the shade of those mango trees, from whose knotted branches, some moments before, a blue loudspeaker had blared a folk panegyric in praise of Sonia and Rahul, I returned to Benares.

A couple of days later, he called. The Congress was inaugurating its central election office, he said. Ajai Rai would be there. Would I like to meet him? I agreed, but, in truth, I was now a little reluctant. I had done some research of my own, and the name of Ajai Rai in Benares, though it came with qualifications— such as ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘champion of the poor’— never failed to bring up one word: ‘criminal’. So much so that the good people of Pappu’s chai shop, who had spoken so boldly against the tallest leaders in the land, begged anonymity when it came to Ajai Rai.

The next day, the Congress supporter came to pick me up from Assi Ghat. In the car, on the way to the opening of the election office, he told me his fears about Modi, fears of authoritarianism and creeping fascism. What did he have in mind? Well, he said, every time he criticised Modi on Twitter, he was immediately shot down. An unpleasant experience, no doubt, one with which many, including myself, are familiar, but did this qualify as fascism? I didn’t understand, he stressed: in a group of some dozen or so people, he was now the only one left with anything negative to say about Modi. But, surely, the reverse was true too. I myself had been at dinner parties in Delhi, with TV anchors and famous lyricists, where not one word of nuance was possible when it came to Modi. In fact, the word drawing room Delhi used most often to describe Modi was ‘evil’. My large friend, now frustrated by my objections, expanded on his fears. He said it was not Modi that was the problem, but his supporters. They would be emboldened by his election. He gave, as an example, a cultural festival he organised in Benares. He wanted this year to invite Wendy Doniger… But now he feared that would not be possible. Wendy Doniger in Benares! Would that have been possible even under a Congress government?! What about Vikram Seth, he said, on same-sex love?

I had no answer for him. But I felt instinctively that it was not Modi or his supporters that were preventing him from holding these events; it was the reality of small town India, of Benares, where Vicky Seth talking about gay love would always have felt like a provocation. Still, these fears did constitute another of the great silences this election— the silence of the silent majority!—and no one seemed exactly to know what kind of India Modi, if he came to power, would bring into being. Would it be a very different India from the one we knew? Would it be one in which a voice like Vicky Seth’s would be silenced? That would certainly be sad. And did Muslims or homosexuals or liberals have anything to fear from Modi? Or did Modi’s opponents use this fear to demonise him? It was impossible to say. But I, for my part, was not willing to take the Congress’ word on the matter. And the BJP, either from unwillingness or incompetence, had done too little to allay these fears. As far as the voter went, he spoke mainly of vikaas. But there were others—like Ghanshyama, the boatman—who said: “Jab Modi aayega toh angrezon ki sarkar ko bhagaa denge hum. Sab kuchh Hindi ho jayega.”

This fault line between the drawing room classes, of which the fat man was a representative, and the rest of the country, was one line of tension. Another, far more tense, was the line between majority and minority. And, at the opening of the election office, which had something of the air of a mushaira, the Congress worked hard along this line. The cemented area where we sat, open to the floodlit evening sky, was a sea of white skullcaps, dotted now and then, as in a pointillist painting, with the odd red turban. On the stage, Muslim leaders recited Urdu poetry; and the mahant of the Kashi Vishwanath mandir swore that he would never let Modi—“that ahamkari Ravana”—destroy the secular fabric of Kashi. Toofani Nishada of Machli Shehar—you can’t make this stuff up!—said: “They tell us there is a wave. Waves are things of seas and rivers. They say there is a wave on the street. No matter. I am the son of a fisherman, I know how to navigate a boat through a wave!”

In the middle of this great love-in, some important news broke: the brother of Mukhtar Ansari—a powerful Muslim leader, who was in jail—had just announced that Ansari would not stand against Rai. Which meant his share of the Muslim vote was now floating. My fat friend was beside himself with excitement. “Where’s my PA?” he said. “I need my phone. I need to call Delhi. This is big. This means three lakh votes go straight to him.”

Him? Ajai Rai, of course. He had appeared now on the stage in a shiny yellow kurta. And he made a startling impression. But it was reassuring to know that Rahul Gandhi’s naïve and well-meaning influence on the Congress Party’s selection of candidates had not resulted in someone too effete or faint-hearted for the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh. For, truth be told, the Congress candidate, with his shaven head beaded with perspiration, his hard snakish eyes and handle-bar moustache, was the kind of man you could use to frighten children with at night. I mean, a full-scale Hindi-movie villain straight out of Central Casting. And appearances were not the half of it; he had seen some bad things in his time. His brother, when he was only 22, was rumoured to have been killed by the very same Mukhtar Ansari who had just withdrawn from the race. Nor was the Congress under any illusion as to why they had picked him. When I asked my new friend about Rai’s reputation for criminality, he said, “I will say this much: to take on gundas like Modi and Amit Shah, Ajai Rai is enough.” Mogambo khush hua…

And then, very shortly afterwards, I was seated next to Mogambo, in a convoy of black SUVs, speeding through the Benares night. In between aides handing him phones from news networks, I said: What a big contest you’ve found yourself in Ajai saab? “No big contest,” he said gruffly, “we’ll defeat him and send him home. That’s all.” I tried another line. How does it feel to have the support of a man who killed your brother? Is it an emotional moment for you? “Emotion! What emotion! It doesn’t feel like anything. Anyone with the national interest at heart is free to join us.” And what about you? You were once a BJP man. Have you had to make ideological adjustments in moving over to the Congress? “Ideology,” he said, almost laughing out loud. “What ideology do they have? To divide the country. That is their ideology.” End of conversation.

When I looked up, I saw that the cavalcade of SUVs had driven into the compound of a vast and magnificent house. A palace, with a large porch of trefoiled arches and Corinthian columns. We were, I soon learned, in Raman Niwas. The house of Radha Raman, a Benares grandee and a lifelong Congress supporter, with memories of Gandhi and Nehru. Here, in this genteel setting, with the ghosts of those great men gazing benevolently down upon us, our candidate, a local thug in the construction mafia, was to receive the blessings of this great figure of Benares society. We found him, the old man, slightly batty and full of laughter, in a vast room, sparsely furnished, with a single portrait hanging from the wall.

Mogambo, looking at me, then down at the frail old man, said: “He is a pillar of Benares.” If all this was not surreal enough, some junior members of the Raman family began distributing a box of radioactively green mithai, which, my fat friend, though he did not touch any, identified, with an ache of longing, as parval ki mithai. Then Mogambo, with all the formality of an investiture, was introduced to the grandee by a senior Congressman as ‘aap ka candidate.’ No sooner had the words left the Congressman’s mouth than, thinking perhaps of Arvind Kejriwal’s imminent arrival in the city, he made a joke. “Can’t even bloody say that anymore,” he said, laughing. “AAP ka candidate!”

And, with the completion of this little ritual, my time with the Congress in Benares came also to an end. She was a stylish cynical old bitch, the Congress Party! One was almost sorry to see her go. But the entropy I witnessed in Benares was everywhere, tied too intimately to the decay of a defunct elite. Every successive generation did not just lack the talent and intelligence of the one that had come before; they seemed even to lack the charm.

Ajai RaiNarendra ModiVaranasi