The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  The scale of aspiration in the houses of Mahipal and Anand made it easy to see the scale of the destruction. But there were, as always, smaller dreams also being destroyed. Devaram took me to a nearby tea shack, no more than a bench, a kerosene stove and a bag of supplies set amid the rubble of brick. The owner was a Dalit, who pumped his stove and conversationally said that he had had a proper shed until recently, when it was demolished by thugs hired by a man who owned a large building nearby.

  ‘He’s going to construct flats on the upper floors and shops on the ground floor, and he didn’t like the fact that my tea stall was so near to his building.’

  I asked him who owned the land on which the tea stall was located.

  ‘It’s government land,’ he said. ‘But I have a permit from the government to have a stall here.’ His manner was calm and unsurprised, used to such arbitrary blows from the powerful. He wouldn’t take any money for the tea.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ Devaram said, by which he meant a brother in Dalit identity and in class struggle. ‘How can he take money from you?’

  3

  Soon after I arrived in Hyderabad, and before I knew anything about Armoor and red sorghum, I had met Vijay, a lecturer in economics at Hyderabad University. One Sunday, Vijay took me on a drive to a village called Qazipally. We travelled northwards out of Hyderabad, moving along a highway lined with restaurants and shops. Eventually, the urban sprawl gave way to a more ambiguous space where open stretches of land alternated with the walled and manicured complexes of pharmaceutical laboratories – segregated plots that consisted of little more than a brick wall, an iron gate and a security guard – and large construction sites where cement mixers and ashen-grey workers laboured to fill in the skeletal outlines of apartment buildings. Vijay’s small, battered Maruti car bounced furiously as we went uphill along a dirt track and then descended into a valley with clusters of huts lining the road, the land opening out behind the huts to rise towards a low hill.

  The farmer Vijay was looking for was not at home, but Vijay knew his way around and led me behind the houses to a stretch of uneven, rocky land. He stopped when we came to a stream, a shallow strip of fluorescent green water. This had been a canal carrying fresh water, Vijay said, just as the land scattered with weeds and rocks had once been farming land. There was a shepherd grazing goats nearby, and he came closer when he heard Vijay. He had grown rice here, he said, until the land stopped being fertile and he had to resort to rearing goats. We walked parallel to the stream towards the hill I had seen earlier. The stench hit me when I climbed to the top. My nose and eyes started to burn. There was a lake of sorts below us, bubbling and brown, its surface indented with rocks, and although we were well away from the lake, the fumes coming from it were so strong that it was like standing over a vat of sulphuric acid. Vijay pointed to the horizon on the other side of the lake, where the factories releasing the effluents were located.

  Afterwards, Vijay and I stood on the road talking to the villagers, who converged on foot and on motorcycles. They were very fond of Vijay because he had been with them from the beginning of their struggle, when they had tried to resist being encircled by the factories. The villagers had taken the polluting companies to court and had lost. They had held protests and been beaten up by hired thugs. They had seized trucks coming to the area to dump pollutants and had been arrested by the police while the truckers were released. They had asked the government to stop the pollution, but the state pollution control board had said that the land was clean. They had come together – across religion, caste and varying levels of affluence – to present a united front, but their village chief had been bought off by the companies and subsequently murdered by a rival. In fifteen years, the men around me had gone from growing rice to not being able to grow anything. Some had taken to grazing livestock, while others had sold portions of their land and built concrete houses on the remainder of their holdings, where they sat and waited for the city to expand and for tenants to show up.

  But most of the men gathered there did not want to become landlords or move somewhere else to continue farming. Their families had been in Qazipally for nearly five centuries, and the polluted lake, called Qazi Talab, was 400 years old. It had once occupied forty acres. There were still the ruins of a hunting cabin near the lake where the feudal lords of the kingdom of Hyderabad had come to hunt deer. Blasts rippled through the air as the villagers spoke, shaking the ground we were standing on. They originated from stone quarries that had been set up five or six years earlier, unlicensed operations working with impunity on government land. From time to time, yellow trucks loaded with the quarried stone passed us, teenage boys covered with dust sitting next to the drivers.

  As dusk came down on the land, Vijay and I left the chemical village of Qazipally behind and began making our way back along the unlit, unpaved roads. There was a bus coming towards us, empty apart from the driver. I read the logo on the bus as it passed us. It said: ‘Maytas Hill County SEZ’. The name seemed familiar, and when we reached Hyderabad, I saw it plastered on a series of billboards offering luxury housing: ‘Maytas Hill County SEZ: Less concrete, more chlorophyll’.

  Qazipally offered a picture of the changes that have been wrought in Andhra Pradesh since the nineties. That was the time when a certain kind of urban growth, centred around Hyderabad, began to be promoted even as rural Andhra Pradesh was subjected to new approaches to agriculture. Both came from the brain of Chandrababu Naidu, the investor-friendly chief minister who held office from 1995 to 2004, and who was much loved throughout his tenure by the press and by officials at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Britain’s Department for International Development. Naidu was the consummate technocrat politician, periodically announcing various ‘e-governance’ schemes, so futuristic in his approach that he hired the American consulting firm McKinsey to prepare a report called ‘Andhra Vision 2020’.

  The McKinsey report, which cited the structural reforms carried out in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet as a model for Andhra Pradesh, recommended a smaller role for the government and generous incentives for private businesses. It strongly recommended the winding down of support services for farmers, including the agricultural offices dispensing advice and seeds, the loans given through public banks and the programme of buying back produce at a minimum guaranteed price through the state-owned Andhra Pradesh Seed Development Corporation. The McKinsey report suggested that the state let market forces take over, even as it focused on encouraging service-oriented business in Hyderabad – an approach that would guarantee that, by the year 2020, ‘poverty will have been eradicated and current inequalities will have disappeared’.

  The success of the McKinsey method can be measured both by the resounding defeat of Naidu’s party in the state elections in 2004 and by the fact that the report, once easily available on the Internet, has since disappeared from cyberspace (although McKinsey continues to do business as usual, last year producing a report for Nasscom, an Indian consortium of software and outsourcing companies, that was titled ‘Perspective 2020’). The Congress government that succeeded Naidu has been careful not to mouth the free-market rhetoric quite so openly. Yet while portraying itself as a friend of the farmers and posting signs on the backs of rural buses with a helpline number for farmers feeling suicidal, the new government hasn’t substantially changed any of Naidu’s policies.

  The rural crisis was continuing unabated when I arrived in Andhra Pradesh. It was concentrated especially strongly in a region that is known as Telangana, and that includes the city of Hyderabad as well as the districts of Warangal, Adilabad, Khammam, Mahabubnagar, Nalgonda, Ranga Reddy, Karimnagar, Medak and Nizamabad. Spread over an area of some 155,400 square kilometres, Telangana is an arid region, dominated by gneiss rocks that are billions of years old. It possesses an identity distinct from the rest of Andhra Pradesh, in part because it belonged to an area ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad until the formation of independent India, a
nd in part because it is impoverished, with all its districts, apart from Hyderabad, classified by the Indian government as ‘backward’ or extremely poor.

  Telangana is also a region known for peasant revolts, the most famous of these being the Communist rebellion from 1946 to 1951, an uprising that began as a movement against the Nizam – the very person Ved Mehta had profiled as the richest man in India – and that continued against the independent Indian state that seized the Nizam’s territories in 1948. From the seventies onwards, Telangana was home to a number of left-wing armed groups referred to as Naxalites or Maoists, which by 2004 had combined into one political party known as the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The McKinsey-Naidu government alternated between initiating talks and carrying out paramilitary operations against the Maoists, and as the police carried out a series of encounter killings, the Maoists began moving into neighbouring states like Chhattisgarh and Orissa. The leadership of the Maoists continued, however, to consist of people from Telangana, and its chief, Mupalla Laxman Rao or Comrade Ganapathy, comes from Karimnagar district, where he had worked in the seventies as a schoolteacher.

  The Maoists were still around in Telangana, but they had toned down their operations in the region. The discontent of the area had been channelled instead into the demand for a separate Telangana state, and one afternoon I travelled to Nizamabad district, just outside Armoor, to attend a meeting in favour of statehood. It was taking place at the ‘Garden City Function Hall’, across from a stretch of empty fields, the vegetation everywhere blasted dull yellow by months without rain. As waiters dressed in jeans, waistcoats and shoes without socks circulated with glasses of water, a man with a splendidly oiled moustache and long, curly hair climbed on to a stage and began singing, his right hand theatrically pressed to his heart at times, and at times swept out to raise the audience from their midday torpor. A chorus line of young boys, bare-chested and in white dhotis, danced behind the singer, breaking out periodically in a sheepish refrain of ‘Jai Telangana’, or ‘Victory to Telangana’.

  They didn’t sound very convincing, and the gathering itself seemed unfocused except in its air of Sunday leisure. Behind the hall where the singer was performing, a large tent had been put up over a lawn crowded with plastic chairs. The entire complex was enclosed by walls and palm trees, with swans in a small enclosure in one corner. It represented someone’s idea of a resort, and the people milling around looked like they were taking the day off. There were a few farmers, distinguishable by their hardened hands and feet and simple clothes, but the gathering otherwise spanned a middle class ranging from minor clerks to lawyers holding video cameras. Children played around the chairs and smoke billowed up from the kitchen where giants pots of rice were being made for the free lunch that would highlight the day’s events.

  It was in this gathering that I was introduced to Prabhakar and Devaram, men who brought a coiled energy into the holiday atmosphere. They worked for a small left-wing party with a big name. It was called the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist New Democracy (CPIML-ND), a group that had been one of the numerous Naxalite underground factions but since the nineties had surfaced to work through more traditional methods of organizing and electoral politics while also maintaining a few armed squads.

  Prabhakar, who was in charge of the agricultural workers’ union of the party in Nizamabad district, was a burly man. His hands were large and callused, and only his eyes, small pinpricks of brightness, seemed out of proportion to his body. He was carrying a yellow notepad that said ‘Infosys’, and when I pointed at the incongruity of a Maoist union organizer carrying a notepad branded with the name of one of India’s biggest IT corporations, he guffawed loudly. His daughter worked for the company, he said, and she had given him the notepad as a gift.

  As I talked with Prabhakar and Devaram, it became apparent that while they had some sympathy for those struggling for a separate Telangana state, they didn’t feel too strongly about the issue. Their own activities, which they had been engaged in for the past three decades, were unlikely to change even in a new state. They tried to ‘redistribute’ land and check atrocities by upper-caste people in the rural areas, for which purpose they maintained an armed squad. ‘We have to protect ourselves,’ Prabhakar said. ‘Otherwise, the thugs of the upper-caste landlords will finish us off.’ They organized women who rolled the handmade Indian cigarettes known as ‘beedis’ and tried to protect farmers who got trapped in debt after taking loans from private moneylenders. ‘These moneylenders are typically in the gold and jewellery business,’ Prabhakar said. ‘If you borrow one thousand rupees, you have to pay back two thousand to them after twelve months. We try to negotiate that interest rate. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes not.’

  They were polite and confident, although obviously playing up the strength of their party. Prabhakar asked me to come to Armoor if I wanted to see how farmers were faring these days. When the government stopped the lending programmes of the public banks, the moneylenders had moved in, while the disbanding of the state agricultural offices had led to the rise of middlemen seed dealers. The state-run seed development corporation, which in the past had given farmers reasonable prices for their produce, had become virtually defunct, its warehouses abandoned and its offices empty.

  4

  After Devaram had shown me around Armoor, we went to the neighbouring village of Padgal to meet Sekhar, the 25-year-old farmer who had been shot during the rampage around Mahipal Reddy’s house. The village appeared sleepy in the afternoon heat, smelling sharply of cow dung, while Devaram hammered insistently on a wooden door set into a stone wall. We were let into the courtyard of the house. Three women gathered around Devaram – Sekhar’s grandmother, mother and wife – speaking in hushed voices and looking worried. Sekhar was in a Hyderabad hospital and it would be a couple of weeks before he was well enough to come home.

  We went back up National Highway 16, cutting through Armoor and emerging on the other side of the town. There was a massive heap of black rocks on the edge of the town, old volcanic formations. ‘It’s called Navnath,’ Devaram said. There was a temple on top of the rocks, but as a Dalit and as a Maoist, he felt no particular attachment to the temple. We left Navnath behind, the road opening on to fields of green. It was a pastoral scene, picturesque and hard to connect with the strife of red sorghum or the distress of farmer suicides. Poultry farms began to appear amid the agricultural plots, low-slung buildings with netting in place of walls, and then came the warehouses belonging to the seed dealers, at least twenty of them spread along a three-kilometre stretch. The warehouses were flat-roofed structures protected by high boundary walls. Most of them had the word ‘Ganga’ worked into their names, perhaps in part to evoke the protection granted by that faraway sacred river and perhaps partly out of a herd mentality. The warehouses were new, painted in pleasant shades of orange and green, unusual in a region where houses and buildings had not much more than a coat of whitewash, and the paint made the warehouses seem alien structures, seemingly disconnected from the land.

  I asked Devaram if there was a way to meet Mahipal Reddy.

  ‘Of course. His warehouse is just a little bit further on,’ he said.

  I wondered if Mahipal’s men would recognize him.

  ‘Only too well,’ he said, speaking belligerently. ‘I gave them a lot of trouble during the red sorghum agitation. How could they forget me?’

  I said that it might not be a good idea for me to try and see Mahipal in his company – perhaps the seed dealer would speak more freely if I went with someone else.

  Devaram became even more aggressive. ‘Let’s just go. Let’s see how they stop us from meeting him, or how he doesn’t talk to us,’ he said.

  It was with difficulty that I convinced him to hold off from visiting Mahipal and instead give me just a drive-by of the warehouse.

  Devaram slowed his scooter down as we passed Mahipal’s den. There was little I could see at first because of the canopy of trees and
the boundary wall surrounding the warehouse. His business was called Godavari Seeds Company, and I found it interesting that he had chosen a local river for the name of his business instead of using ‘Ganga’, as most dealers in the area seemed to have done. There was a touch of confidence in this display of individualism, a sign of the brashness that had led him to become the biggest seed dealer in the area, and it made me even more curious about him. Devaram stopped in front of the gate, caught between the temptation to go in and start a fight and his promise to me that he wouldn’t create any trouble. I could make out the long, horizontal shape of the main warehouse, with a couple of tarpaulin-covered trucks parked in front. To the right, there was a house, a white, two-storey concrete building that was as functional as the Armoor mansion had been ostentatious. There were a few people inside, but the atmosphere was low-key, with no indication that all this belonged to the biggest seed dealer in the area. According to people I spoke to later, Mahipal had offered farmers 15.4 rupees for a kilo of red sorghum when the market rate had been only 9 rupees a kilo. In fact, he had actually paid some of the farmers, I discovered later, clearing 34 crore rupees of the outstanding amount, although he owed an even greater sum of 44 crore rupees to the remaining farmers.

  We drove back down the highway and stopped at a farmers’ market in a village called Ankapur. There were vegetables and cobs of maize being weighed on large scales in an open shed, while bagged produce, the green leaves sticking out of the loosely tied sacks, was being loaded into tractors and trucks. On one side of the road, stunted, sunburned women with cropped hair (they had probably consecrated their hair to a local deity) sold roasted maize to people driving by, swishing bamboo hand fans over piles of coal and dabbing lime juice and salt on the cobs.