No Full Stops in India

by Mark Tully

  Many of those who were to play important roles in Digvijay's political career were among the 3,000 guests in the bridal party. S. K. Sinha, the chief minister of Bihar, was there with almost his entire cabinet. He was Digvijay's political godfather. Shamnandan Mishra, an up-and-coming young parliamentary secretary, strutted among the guests with a liveried attendant in train. Mishra was to be one of the conspirators who brought down the only government Digvijay was directly involved in. L. P. Shahi, another aspiring young politician, cut a less glamorous figure at the wedding: according to the bridegroom, ‘He served spinach to the less important guests.’ Shahi was to be the man who eventually ended Digvijay's political career.

  The bridegroom's party stayed for three days and the bride's for four. Elaborate arrangements were made to entertain them. Bismillah Khan, one of India's best-known musicians, played the shehnai, an oboe-like reed instrument, from the top of the arch over the entrance to the family mansion. The arch had been specially built for the wedding and it had no stairs, so the ustad or maestro had to scramble in an undignified manner up a ladder to get to his perch. The bride's and the bridegroom's parties each brought their own nautch or dancing girls. The bridegroom said, ‘Most of the politicians were afraid it would damage their reputations if it was learnt that they had gone to watch the nautch girls, but I know of one minister in the Bihar government who could not resist the temptation.’ There was a tradition that, on the third day of the celebrations, the nautch girls danced and sang songs insulting the guests from the other side. Apparently that tradition was faithfully followed.

  The mansion at Dharhara had been built by Digvijay's grandfather, Babu Langat Singh. He had started life as a railway worker, losing one of his legs when he was crushed between two goods wagons in a marshalling yard. It was a British railway official, short of funds to pay his debts before he went on home leave, who changed Babu Langat Singh's life. Babu Langat Singh lent him all his savings, and when the official returned he repaid the debt by helping the railway worker to become a contractor. In those days the railways were spreading fast, and Langat Singh made a fortune out of construction works. He spent much of his money on establishing himself as a landed gentleman, buying some of his land from a British indigo planter, George Toomey, who, according to Digvijay, ‘was forced to sell it because of his wild habits’. Langat Singh also took an interest in politics and became a friend of some of the leaders of the Congress Party. He himself was illiterate but realizing the disadvantage that he had suffered by not being educated, he founded the first university college in northern Bihar. Langat Singh died from the plague which swept through northern Bihar in 1908 – he had been working among the plague victims. He left behind a reputation for philanthropy which was to stand his grandson in good stead during his political career.

  Digvijay's father, Shyamanand Kishore Singh, didn't take much interest in the estate, although he was a kindly landlord. Digvijay remembers his father inviting the villagers to come and sit round the fires lit in the garden of Dharhara mansion on winter mornings and evenings. By that time Mahatma Gandhi had started his movement against the landlords of Bihar, urging farmers not to accept their serfdom as their fate. According to Digvijay, the villagers used to say of his father, ‘The system is bad, but he is a good man.’ Digvijay remembers his father as quick to anger but also quick to repent. ‘He was a highly volatile man. He would beat someone, but then he would say I have done wrong and then give him some land; so people wanted to be beaten by my father.’ The violent streak led Shyamanand Kishore Singh to support the terrorists in the independence struggle, rather than Mahatma Gandhi's ‘non-violence’. Nevertheless, he died a peaceful death, having lost interest in life when he lost his beloved eldest daughter three weeks after her marriage. Digvijay was then only thirteen.

  Digvijay was educated at the school his grandfather founded in Dharhara and then went on to his grandfather's college in Muzaffarpur, the largest town of northern Bihar. From there he moved to Patna to study law, but he got caught up in the independence movement. Digvijay distributed leaflets and talked to small groups, working quietly and unostentatiously as he was to do throughout his political career. He could easily have sought the badge of honour of being arrested, which became almost a sine qua non for a political career in independent India, but that was not his style. In spite of his low profile, however, he made a deep impression on S. K. Sinha, then the leader of the Bihar Congress Party, who later launched his political career.

  I gained much of my understanding of Indian politics from long evenings spent with Digvijay when he was a member of parliament living in a government house in the centre of Delhi. He was trusted by members on both sides of the house. Because of his honesty and lack of ambition, no one saw Digvijay as a potential rival. That meant he was one of the best-informed sources any journalist could have. Parliament was his life, and he brought an acute intelligence to bear on interpreting Indian politics. Policies count for little in Delhi: personalities are what matter, and so politics are a continual battle between individuals vying for the prime minister's favour or the leadership of a small opposition group. Commitment to an ideology is rare, except among the communists on the left and the Hindu BJP on the right. Digvijay was always in touch with the fluctuating fortunes of all the parties and parliamentarians, and I missed him sorely when he left. He was cheated out of the one thing he coveted – his seat in parliament – by colleagues who owed everything to him.

  Digvijay left parliament in 1980. I hardly saw him after that until I made a special journey to Patna nine years later. In Bihar the sun does seem to be setting on India's Westminster-style democracy; the darkness of chaos is almost at hand. Cynicism has eaten into the administration, leaving it without the will to act. A senior official in Bihar said to me, ‘This is the first place to prove the truth of Karl Marx – the government has withered away.’ The police no longer attempt to hold the ring between farmers and landless labourers fighting for just the paltry minimum wage which should be theirs by right. The government blames the frequent bloody clashes between the two on Naxalites, or left-wing revolutionaries, and the police are told to crush them. The police, of course, crush the activists working for the landless labourers, not the private armies of the farmers. Industrial development is stagnant, and there are areas of the state where agricultural production is lower than it was before independence. Land reforms may have removed the zamindars or landowners, but they have not helped the landless.

  Every day I was in Patna, symptoms of the wasting disease which has afflicted the administration of Bihar were reported in the press: passengers travelling in a train between Patna and the town of Gaya attacked and robbed by dacoits or bandits; four people shot in one day in different parts of Patna; the police threatening to strike; a six-month strike in one hospital still deadlocked, and medical students in another hospital boycotting classes because the government would not or could not throw out hoodlums with political connections who were occupying their hostel; irregularities in the examination for employment in the nationalized electricity board; the chief minister making yet another promise to bust the mafia which has controlled the nationalized coal mines for years.

  A few months earlier, 500 people had drowned when a ferry capsized on the Ganges. The influential Times of India, which is no enemy of the Congress Party that was in power in Bihar as well as in Delhi, wrote, in the pseudo-biblical style it adopts when pontificating:

  Once more tragedy has struck Bihar. The ample bosom of the Ganges has opened up to take hundreds of passengers travelling by a privately owned steamer to a watery grave. It is a measure of the depths of inefficiency and even inhumanity to which the State has sunk that after the overloaded steamer capsized it took a long time before even the pretence of a rescue operation was launched by the State Government and the steamer's owners… Not only are these antiquated craft unsafe, especially in the monsoon swollen, swift current Ganga, they are rendered more so by the overloading of passengers like
cattle by lathi-wielding henchmen of the owners, substantial landlords, who in addition to controlling vast estates have diversified into other profitable ventures. Such is their stranglehold over the state…

  India has been described as a functioning anarchy. In Patna, that anarchy comes near to chaos. It is a violent and angry city, where I am frightened by my own temper. When I arrived at Patna Junction, I was surrounded by cycle-rickshaw pullers and scooter- and taxi-drivers pushing and pulling me towards their vehicles. I forced my way into a rickshaw and shouted the name of my hotel. The rickshaw puller started to climb on to his saddle, but was pulled off by angry rivals who told me to get out. They banged their saddles, rang their bells and shouted, ‘It's not his turn’, ‘He can't take you’, ‘You can't get into any rickshaw you want.’ I shouted back, ‘I'll go in this bloody rickshaw or no bloody rickshaw,’ and sat where I was. I knew that I would regret my arrogance and rudeness, but I could not control myself. Unfortunately, all too often shouting does achieve results in India, and sure enough the other rickshawmen fell back when they realized that I was not going to budge. After a few minutes, my rickshawman judged that the storm had blown over and climbed back into the saddle.

  He pedalled slowly out of the station forecourt and I found myself bumping down a narrow lane, hemmed in on both sides by tin shacks and stinking drains. We swerved to avoid a head-on collision and lurched into a pothole. The rickshaw puller stood on the pedals, and the muscles in his thin legs tightened as he strained to get out of the pothole. There was a crash and he fell forward – we had been rammed up the backside by another rickshaw. A fight ensued again but I did not take part this time. When that was over, I got down so that we could remove ourselves from the pothole. After several more narrow misses, I asked nervously whether this really was the best way to the Patliputra Hotel. The rickshaw puller looked over his shoulder and said angrily, ‘This is the road I am taking you.’ I didn't feel like arguing – at least we were spared the murderous motor traffic of the main road.

  Later that day I went to Patna's famous museum. An enterprising farmer had stabled his cattle outside it, turning the road into a quagmire. The garden was littered with paper and plastic bags. At the door, an official told me with glee that the museum was closing, although the time was only four o'clock in the afternoon. I lost my temper and shouted inanely, ‘You are typical of the lazy and dishonest officials in Bihar. What a way to welcome foreign tourists! Don't you know you have some very valuable exhibits here that people all round the world would like to see?’

  The official pointed to a scruffy guard preparing his charpai for the night and said, ‘Security.’

  ‘Some security he'll provide,’ I shouted back.

  ‘What are you shouting about?’ the official replied. ‘It's on the board – the museum has been closed at this time for sixty years.’

  I realized I was making a fool of myself. As I walked away with what little dignity I could muster, I heard the official saying to his colleagues, ‘These foreigners have no right to talk to us. We are only doing our duty.’

  It is a phenomenon of India that the feebler the local administration the more officious and self-righteous are its petty bureaucrats. Earlier in the day, the tourist officer in my hotel made me fill up a register giving full details of my passport, visa and registration certificate before he would give me a free map of Patna. When I suggested that this was perhaps a somewhat unnecessary formality, he replied smugly, ‘We can't waste government money. That would not be right.’

  Kipling described Calcutta as the ‘city of dreadful night’; I can think of no better description of Patna. Calcutta has grandeur; Patna has none. That night I walked past the vast modern Hindu temple outside the station. Its garish lights symbolized the vulgar, covetous form of Hinduism which is spreading so fast among the Indian middle class. The clanging bells and the loudspeakers broadcasting what apparently passed for religious music clashed with the prayers broadcast from the mosque a few yards down the road – a cacophony which only the bigots of both faiths could rejoice in. For them it meant more hatred, more violence and more power. The shops surrounding the temple were small and mean. Most of them should not have been there at all, but the administration did not have the will to do anything about these ‘illegal encroachments’ as they are known in bureaucratese. New public latrines had been built into the wall which runs along the railway yards but they had no doors, so the sight of men urinating added to the squalor of central Patna. Outside my hotel, cycle-rickshawmen argued with each other as they waited for the proprietor of a small kerosene stove and a few saucepans to serve them chapattis and dal. Others were playing cards, and one young boy was asleep in a rickshaw. Further down the dimly lit street I watched a mother trying to quieten her baby and at the same time persuade three other children to get under a blanket spread on the pavement.

  When faced with the poverty of India, the temptation is to despair. I have always tried to guard against that: it is futile and does not help the poor. Despair is also frightening when you love the person or the country you despair of. Nevertheless, I did despair that night. I despaired of those children, I despaired of Bihar and I despaired of India. I thought then that there did not seem to be any hope for the system, and that must mean bloodshed. But post-colonial history has shown that bloodshed is no answer to a nation's problems. The strength of India lies in the resilience of the poor. That night I, like so many outsiders, had forgotten that the pavement-dwellers of Patna do manage to make lives for themselves, they have families and friends, they have their hopes and their fears. They are to be admired, not pitied. The poor may be fatalists, but that does not mean they have despaired.

  The next day the streets were even more congested than usual, and I had the greatest difficulty in getting to the small house with the cramped garden where Digvijay was living. Policemen were holding up the traffic at every crossroads to allow convoys of buses and trucks into the city centre. The buses and lorries were full of men shouting ‘Long live Rajiv Gandhi!’ and ‘Chief minister Bhagwat Jha Azad is Bihar's leader!’ Every bus and lorry had a notice pasted to its windscreen with the name of the Congressman who had collected that particular platoon to swell the army summoned to demonstrate support for the chief minister. It was only a few months earlier that Bhagwat Jha Azad had been nominated by Rajiv Gandhi to rule the turbulent state of Bihar, but he was already facing a revolt within his own party. In another part of the city a former chief minster was addressing a rally of his supporters. He threatened to form his own party if his claim to the throne was not recognized by Rajiv Gandhi. Power was all that the rallies were about: there was absolutely no concern about how that power should be exercised.

  When I eventually reached the modest house where Digvijay was living with his younger son, I found him small and frail. He had never been big, but his large head and bulky body had given an impression of size. Sitting hunched up on a chair on the verandah, he seemed to have shrunk. There was no obvious trace of the cerebral stroke he had suffered while being treated for depression after the collapse of his political career, but he had lost weight, his face had sagged and two of his front teeth were missing. He looked like a myopic, toothless old bloodhound. Never a man of sartorial elegance, Digvijay was wearing a flowing dhoti and a vest partly covered by a shawl. The stick he now needed to help him walk lay against the side of his chair. Although only sixty-five, Digvijay had become an old man. He greeted me in a soft voice, saying, ‘Well, at least you haven't forgotten me.’

  We pottered slowly over to a corner of the cramped garden and Digvijay let himself down gingerly on to a swinging sofa. I sat in a chair opposite him. His wife came out to greet me and then retired discreetly to the house. I had never met Digvijay's wife before; his was a very orthodox marriage, and his wife played no role in his political life. In fact I had never discussed Digvijay's family with him – he had felt that family life and politics did not go together. Now he was reliant on his family and seemed to
be living only for them.

  ‘My wife is looking after me. She gets very angry because she thinks that I am not making any attempt to take care of myself. She tells me, “You might at least make sure you don't die for my sake, even if you don't care about yourself.” I am very lucky with this son of mine too. He works very hard, going to his first surgery at eight o'clock in the morning. He is the best radiologist in Patna and is in great demand, but he still finds time to treat some cancer patients free. If it hadn't been for him I would have died when I had that stroke.’

  I asked Digvijay whether he still took any interest in politics. He replied, ‘My family want me to. They think it will take me out of myself, give me a renewed interest in life; but I am very depressed about everything. I think the whole system is collapsing. The way lawlessness is spreading, there is no hope for this system.’

  ‘How can the system be changed?’ I asked.

  ‘Only by bloodshed. The way lawlessness is growing it is bloodshed already. Now it's not a question of violation of the law but of a breakdown of law and order. It's the collapse of a system like the end of the Mughal Empire. That was followed by the Pindaris. This violence will lead to chaos for some time, but after that I hope things will improve. In India, periods of integration are always followed by periods of disintegration and then integration takes place again. We are now seeing the end of the integration the British brought about.’

  Digvijay's brother-in-law, Dr Rudrashawar Prasad Singh, was sitting with him. The young medical student on whose wedding Digvijay had spent a not-so-small fortune was now acknowledged to be one of India's leading psychiatrists. He was professor of psychiatry at Patna Medical College and had a flourishing practice. A more amusing man to sort out your problems it would be hard to find. He was small, with a rounded belly which told of the gluttony he freely confessed to. The betel-leaf he had been chewing since the early hours of the morning had blackened his teeth. He had a round moon face, with twinkling humorous eyes, and a bald pate. Doctor Sahib was getting a little bored with Digvijay's prognostications and said, ‘Come on, Digvijay, Mark has come to hear about your life story. Tell him that, and don't miss out the best bits.’