Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  Accordingly, Mr. Patel also turned out to be the owner of a large agricultural estate outside Allahabad. He also was a very recent member of the Dalit party whose strategy for instability he had explained to me, the party whose leaders in their few months in power in the state of Uttar Pradesh had emptied the state exchequer and had created little empires for themselves in addition to building grandiose monuments to Dalits leaders.

  Mr. Patel had joined the party just a few weeks before the elections. It was Sandip, himself a Kurmi, who told me this, a trifle sheepishly. We were driving south of Allahabad, into the poor districts of Meja and Karchana, where there was a large Dalit population. Mr. Patel sat in the front seat and was unusually quiet. Party flags fluttered from on top of houses and shops. Few of them were of Mr. Patel’s party. At places where meetings had been arranged, and microphones and platform set up, hardly anyone, apart from a couple of party workers, waited to greet him, and Mr. Patel had to move on without giving his speech.

  It was in the embarrassing silences that descended inside the Jeep after every aborted meeting that Sandip started talking about his own family. Proudly, he told me about the number of relatives he had in the state and central Civil Services. “Why did you join politics then?” I asked. He immediately said, “I wanted to explore other options.” There was no irony; he spoke in earnest. Later, attempting clarification, he added: “It is not enough for Dalits to join the Civil Service. They have to enter the arena of politics and take on the Brahmanical forces there. It is Dalit assertion that will expose the BJP’s self-serving rhetoric about the terrorism and the threats to India’s integrity.”

  Brahmanical forces, Dalit assertion, India’s integrity—the words stood for certain recognizable realities. But it was possible to see too much in them and to forget the simple intentions of the politicians using them, people who weren’t always sure what they meant and who, despite the difference in rhetoric, spoke for themselves alone and in the end were fighting for the same things. Misused by politicians, the words had acquired the neutrality of mathematical figures; you could fit them anywhere in the hectic accounting of electoral politics, which in a socially and economically restricted society had become an increasingly attractive means for upward mobility.

  To the mass of peasantry and workers, and the middle class of lawyers, doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, teachers, and businessmen, a new class of professional politicians was steadily added since 1947. Thousands of men have emerged from amongst the general mass of deprived people and taken important positions within central and state legislatures. These are men with no special training or skills, sometimes not even those of basic literacy and oratory. A large number of them are criminals. Few of them offer anything apart from their caste and religious identity. Most of them are content to plunder the state’s resources and sometimes share the loot with members of their family or caste group. They all seek the power that in societies degraded by colonialism often comes without a redeeming idea of what it is to be used for, the kind of power that, in most cases, amounts to little more than an opportunity to rise above the rest of the population and savor the richness of the world: junkets to New York for Mrs. Bahuguna, helicopter rides for Mr. Patel, free railway passes and gas connections and “commando” bodyguards and chauffeur-driven cars and crowds of supplicants outside one’s door.

  Behind the rhetoric of caste and religious redemption, the defections and betrayals, the collapse of governments and fresh elections, the constant intrigues in Delhi and state capitals, behind all the endless drama of politics in India, there lies the fear these men exalted above their station feel: that at any moment the richness of the world might be withdrawn and they might be returned to the small house in the dingy lane, the meanness and insignificance from which the profession of politics had rescued them.

  With this fear often comes a contempt for the electorate, an impatience with the process of appeasing and wooing people you have left behind. The people, in turn, aren’t slow in developing their own contempt for the upstarts among them. A lot of people in Allahabad claimed to have known Mr. Joshi, the incumbent MP for Allahabad, during the time when he lived in a two-room house, dressed in khaki shorts, and hitched rides on scooter pillions to the university where he taught—unmemorably, people said—physics. But Mr. Joshi, living now in a well-marbled house, traveling in a bulletproof Ambassador with tinted windows, and accompanied by ferocious-looking commandos in black and with carbines and AK-47 guns framing his small white dhoti-clad figure, the commandos not really required except as badges of status—there was no danger to Mr. Joshi’s life, at least in his own town—Mr. Joshi, beginning to appear now in the society columns of the Delhi papers, had managed to place himself well above small-town envy and resentment.

  The reference to Mr. Joshi’s humble past was usually followed by some example of his newfound arrogance, which was in fact the irritable manner of a man prevented from rising even higher. For over a decade he had been considered the third most important leader of the BJP, and during his tenure as minister for human resources and development, he had tried but failed to improve that seemingly perennial third-placeness. He had sought to impose a new educational curriculum that drastically revised Indian history as a continuous battle against idol-breaking Muslims but was stopped by his own prime minister. He had come up with a new slogan for the economic nationalists within the BJP: “Computer Chips, Not Potato Chips.” He had played up his reputation as a man of science among the urban middle classes. Among rural Brahmins, he did not fail to mention his campaign against cow slaughter. “Hindu civilization,” he lectured me, “couldn’t have existed without cows, without their milk, curd, manure. They are at the basis of our national identity.”

  But it was a different basis for national identity, nuclear bombs, that he spoke of to the small crowd of peasants and menial workers outside a small technical institute in Allahabad three days before polling day. He had arrived four hours late, and until then most people, many of whom had been paid to attend, had just stood there, wearing bright orange BJP visors, punished by the harsh sun, among mounds of garbage and black rain-dried filth from overflowing gutters and piles of junked rusty machinery. The tone was set by the first speakers, local politicians, who scrambled to touch his feet, tore garlands out of the full arms of a boy wearing a grimy sleeveless singlet and draped them around Mr. Joshi’s neck, before applying a few more layers to the vermilion caste marks on his forehead. In a long, rambling speech, one reported a conversation with a visiting “lady” from Paris; she had exclaimed at the mention of Allahabad: “Isn’t that where the great son of India Mr. Joshi lives?” Mr. Joshi, sitting hunched on the floor, marigold petals sticking to his well-oiled hair, his legs dangling from the stage, looked impatient as speaker after speaker went on in this vein. When his turn came, he started by mentioning the great boost given to India’s prestige by the nuclear tests and added that the disapproval of the international community could not deter India. “How many bombs should we build?” he asked the audience in the interactive style I was told he had developed after being criticized for his uninspiring oratory. A few feeble voices went up. “Twenty!” “Fifty!” “A thousand!” Mr. Joshi nodded at the last figure. He mentioned the battles in Kashmir. He said he had told Pakistan, “If you provoke us one more time, we’ll smash you to pieces.” There was a smattering of applause from among the harried perspiring faces in the crowd. He mentioned the water sports complex he was planning to build on the Ganges. He boasted of how he had got rid of all the “Communists” working in the government-funded Indian Council for Historical Research.

  And then he was through, and quick to leave, a small, brisk figure walking in the narrow corridor the commandos created for him by pushing and shoving blindly at the pressing crowds, back to the white Ambassador, where he was once again inscrutable behind tinted glass windows as the cars raced off, sirens blaring hysterically, past the auto repair shops and tea shacks and the bewildered men in rags squatti
ng on ground turned into black paste by diesel oil and rainwater.

  Mr. Joshi’s next stop that day was a new mansion of gray marble and fake Spanish tiles in a high-walled compound several miles out of Allahabad. It was where the Jaiswals, a merchant caste, had arranged an election meeting. Paunchy men in baseball caps, dark glasses, broad-band gold watches and rings and chains sat on plastic chairs before a stage where the banner proclaimed: ALL FELLOW CASTE-BROTHERS ARE WELCOME. This was Mr. Joshi’s constituency, upper-caste men with money, part of the strong network of Hindu nationalist sympathizers and volunteers, whose complaints about his aloofness and arrogance had grown louder as the elections approached. He had no choice but to sit through the banal comedy of speeches and introductions and garlandings that began all over again.

  Almost all of the speakers spoke of how the Jaiswals through their success as shopkeepers had forced the rest of Hindu society to treat them with respect. But they had been deprived of affirmative action in government jobs, a great injustice, which they expected Mr. Joshi to rectify as “honorable minister” in the new government. Mr. Joshi sat on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling, as they had at the previous meeting, looking impatient. In his speech he dealt with this request in the same way he had dealt with a similar request a few days earlier at another upper-caste conclave, where speaker after speaker had spoken of their exploitation by the Brahmins as well as, astoundingly, by the Dalits; he promised to give the matter his “most sympathetic consideration.”

  There was a swimming pool lunch afterward. Mr. Joshi sat in the middle of the table and ate fast from his leaf plate. One of the more persistent speakers, a plump safari-suited man, the owner of the mansion, sat next to him and kept shouting at the serving boys to refill Mr. Joshi’s plate. Mr. Joshi had to keep waving the boys dressed in red livery and rubber flip-flops away as they hovered over his shoulders with glinting steel bowls of dal and kheer.

  His lunch finished, Mr. Joshi looked ready to leave. But various people approached him and whispered in his ear; he nodded and nodded. The commandos ate in another corner of the pool; they looked surprisingly relaxed. One rinsed his oily fingers in the swimming pool. There were others who had done so, but it was the commando the safari-suited owner saw, and he wrenched away from Mr. Joshi’s conversation, his face suddenly filled with horror.

  It rained early in the morning on polling day. But the voting booths in the city, set up in schools and colleges and small parks, remained empty long into the afternoon. An unusually low 30 percent of the electorate had bothered to show up until four in the afternoon, an hour before voting officially ended. Bored policemen played cards, their truncheons and rifles resting on the ground, and polling agents from the contesting parties sat looking morose behind small children’s desks as a thin trickle of voters shuffled through the voting procedures, past the polling officials stern behind rough wooden tables piled with voting lists. The streets in the old quarter were deserted, and in the strangely unrestricted vistas, the old houses of the rich merchants and traders—often built adventurously, with art deco and Mughal and Rajput motifs—looked worn down by time, heat, rain, as well as the constant friction of passing tongas, scooters, rickshaws, cars, and motorcycles, of the yells of the fruit-vegetable vendors and haggling housewives and the music blaring from tiny electronic shops.

  Shutters covered all the one-room shops. I went to see the brothel standing on the site of the oldest ancestral home of the Nehrus. Young girls from Nepal, wearing white saris, fresh jasmine in their hair and thick lipstick on their small mouths, sat gossiping in small cool dark rooms facing an empty lane.

  The only noticeable crowd was in the Muslim quarters. The vote here was going in the Congress’s favor. It was what Mr. Ahmed had asked of his fellow Muslims, and the burka-clad women walked silently to the booths in small, determined groups. But they weren’t the only reason that the polling agents of the BJP looked nervous. Most of the Hindu middle class on which the BJP had depended in past elections had decided to stay away, and this was a setback to Mr. Joshi’s chances. There weren’t even enough people to cast fake votes, an easier process this time because of the introduction of electronic machines.

  Early expectations of Mr. Joshi’s defeat after the low turnout were canceled later on polling day when the fabled network of the Hindu nationalists went into action, and the voting percentages rose abruptly to 45 and sometimes 50 percent. An election agent for the BJP, a headmaster of a local school, told Piyush, the journalist from The Times of India, with anxious satisfaction how he had to bring in students from his own school and persuade the local polling official to let them cast fifteen to twenty votes each in Mr. Joshi’s favor. (The Socialist Party candidate, Reoti Raman Singh, organized a sit-down protest outside the district collectorate against the rigging, which was allegedly widespread, but it was too late.)

  At a polling booth a few miles out of Allahabad, there had been a fight among party workers from the BJP and Samajwadi (Socialist) Party. A new Tata Sumo jeep stood on the road, its windshield and windows broken, its tires slashed. A small crowd of local villagers stood still around it, as though wondering at the swift destruction of something so apparently solid and expensive. A few miles away, in a shantytown, one of the victims, beaten with iron rods, was in a half-built hospital. His bed had no sheets, only a torn mattress with its straw stuffing exposed, and he lay, moaning softly, not in one of the empty rooms but in the dusty corridor, blood-soaked bandages around his head and ribs, blood transfusion tubes attached to his thin arm, surrounded by white-clad BJP men busily summoning press photographers on their mobile phones.

  But away from the main roads, and deeper into the countryside, the polling was uneventful, and the turnout was up to 60 and 70 percent. There were no surprises. Most people affirmed their caste solidarities, and the undecided or the weak and ignorant followed decrees issued by the local chieftains. An old man walking to the polling booth, his peasant face creased and wrinkled, said he had been ordered by the government to vote for the BJP. There were others who weren’t quite sure whom they were voting for; most recognized the parties only by their symbols: bicycle, lotus, the palm of hand. But there were crowds everywhere—even at a primary school where you had to wade through kneedeep rainwater in the front yard to get to the voting booth—and they brought a holiday atmosphere to the proceedings.

  The huts looked freshly cleaned and paved with dung. The women had put on their most colorful saris; the men had well-oiled mustaches and turbans and starched kurtas. At village after village that afternoon, people waited patiently in long queues, under the harsh monsoon sun, the normally impassive faces brimming with excitement—these images stereotypical of Indian elections and democracy, which ignored so much of what was not seen, the caste consolidations, the regimented votes, the feudal decrees, the ignorance and brutality. And yet it was hard not to feel the strength of the hopes and desires of the people lining up to vote, hard not to see poignance in the care and devotion they brought to their only and very limited intervention in the unknown outside world, hard not to be moved by the eagerness with which they embraced their chance to alter the world that wielded such arbitrary power over their lives.

  The monsoons had retreated by the time the votes were counted, almost three weeks after polling day. The counting took place in a sprawling Mandi, a local trade center, six miles outside Allahabad. Police Jeeps and trucks choked the broken lanes between large halls beneath corrugated iron roofs where thousands of men sat before a chaos of paper and big gray metal trunks, while echoing loudspeakers announced the results after each round of counting.

  Mr. Joshi was expectedly well ahead of the rest. Mr. Singh, solidly supported by the rural poor, was coming in at second place, and Mrs. Bahuguna, despite the Muslim and liberal votes in her favor, was placed third.

  Mr. Patel of the Dalit party was a distant fourth. I ran into him at one of the counting sites. He had reasons for his poor performance—the Brahmanical) parties had bribed vo
ters with cheap country liquor, and Brahmanical forces in the district administration had subverted democracy—and he was serene in his expectation of defeat. His party was doing well in the rest of the state; it would have enough seats in the Parliament to play its desired role of destabilizer. Mr. Patel himself had done his share of destabilizing in Allahabad: He had taken away Backward caste and Dalit votes from the Congress and Socialist Parties, thus making it easier for the BJP, with just 34 percent of the votes, to win.

  But didn’t that help the Brahmanical BJP? I asked. Yes, he said, but it was important for the BJP to be in power; it was the political force most likely to cause instability and disorder in the country, which was the long-term plan of his party and Dalits in general.

  There were other long-term plans being put into action in the hall where Mr. Joshi sat watching the national results come in on TV, the air thick with the excited voices of the analysts and pundits in Delhi studios. The BJP and its allies were going to win a safe majority in the Parliament. The district officials, who sat at a formal distance from Mr. Joshi, and who had previously appeared to me to be under some slight pressure because of the rigging accusations, now looked more relieved with every passing moment. They were solicitous toward Mr. Joshi, who was certain to be a minister again in the new government; they were quick to leave their sofas and red-sashed attendants as he summoned them with the crook of his fingers; standing half bent before him, they gave him the latest news about the increasing margin of his victory.