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The udder state
of my home
Part lament, part
provocation, in the first of a three-part series, Sonia biographer and
GenNext politician from UP, Yusuf Ansari grapples with
the riddle of the Hindi heartland and his presence in it
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I was born a little
too late to judge whether the Emergency was indeed independent India’s
darkest period and just early enough for the it ‘revolution’
to have skipped my infant years. Yet the timing of my birth made me a
perfect victim for the diabolical political movements which tore through
India in the early 1990s. Like precision-guided bombs, both the Mandal
agitation and the Ayodhya movement converged to explode smack at the start
of what psychologists would perhaps call my ‘most impressionable
years’. I was a marked man long before Islamophobia became fashionable
in the global political lexicon. In fact, I can even remember the moment
of my first confrontation with political realities — it was 1990,
the day that Laloo Prasad Yadav stopped LK Advani’s rath yatra and
arrested him at Samastipur. I was 12 years old, in boarding school at
the Welham Boys’ School. Uttaranchal had not yet been created and
Dehra Dun was still a part of UP. Groups of boys, many barely older than
me, some even, until that time, friends went around saying, “Mandir
vahin banayenge.” I had no idea what they were talking about, was
not even sure where Ayodhya lay and certainly remember someone asking
me, “Babri Masjid kis chidiya ka naam hai?” I had no idea.
But I did know that my generation, hardly into its teens, had already
been politicised. The next year I was sent to boarding school in England
and it was here, on 6 December, 1992, just over a month before my fourteenth
birthday, that I learned exactly where Ayodhya was and what the Babri
Masjid signified.
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Yusuf Ansari |
Up until that time,
the spirit of Uttar Pradesh was manifested to me through the looking
glass of a genteel childhood. I was born in Allahabad in 1978, and the
inherent civility of the kayastha was transmitted to me by the doctor
who delivered me at the Kamala Nehru Hospital. In ancient Benaras, as
I faced death after a severe accident, I gratefully witnessed the charity
of a Brahmin who saved me by a transfusion of his Hindu blood into my
Muslim veins. The first Muharram processions that I saw as a child were
atop the shoulders of my Dalit guardians, Narsinh and Bijaiyya, at our
ancestral home of Yusufpur, in Ghazipur district. Once a feudal seat,
Yusufpur is a political bastion with at least one member of my family
in Parliament or the Assembly at one time or another. My great-grandfather
had been a Congress president and my grandfather’s own commitment
to the party was absolute. I visited him at Naini jail near Allahabad,
a proud two-year-old in my mother’s arms waving a Congress flag,
when he had voluntarily gone to jail, to protest Mrs Indira Gandhi’s
arrest. It was nothing heartbreaking. The heartbreak did happen, but
much later.
In 1992, our home
in Yusufpur, founded in the late 1480s by my ancestor Ghazi Mohammad
Yusuf Ansari, was raided by companies of the pac. Furniture was smashed,
portraits broken, trophies torn down. The atmosphere in the surrounding
villages and kasbas was poisoned, invocations to caste and community
were raised, Pakistan was mentioned. Political realities had finally,
literally come home. By the time I turned 17, in 1995, my baptism was
already complete. I could not continue living in up if I was not a part
of its politics; for myself, I could not live outside of up. As soon
as my education was complete I returned home, to Uttar Pradesh.
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All its enrichment
has made Purvanchal a
museum, for there’s little of a viable future
reflected in its everyday life. Today, it’s
synonymous with lawlessness, entrenched
poverty and terrible violence |
The largest proportion
of India’s Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits reside in Uttar Pradesh,
making its society the most complex social construct in the country.
Yet, what happens to a society caught between the crush of poverty and
the curse of stagnation? What happens to a society without social consciousness,
one whose leaders have lost all sensitivity and are guided only by personal/political
compulsions? Does such a society descend into anarchy? Does it give
rise to revolution? In all probability, no, not in up. There will be
no social upheaval, no mass agitations, no demonstrations of the loss
of patience and hope by the people of India’s most populous province.
The people of up will not rise up in anger because there is no one to
rise up against, no single specific regime towards which to direct our
outrage, no individual who is responsible for the mass misery. The people
of up have been failed not by individuals but by that greatest hope
of the 20th century: democracy. How does a populace protest against
the system which itself is the guarantor of its rights and liberties?
The people of up have themselves to blame for lending themselves to
the national experiments carried out in the name of Indian democracy,
for allowing rhetoric to replace reality as the guiding compass of our
social and political engagements.
UTTAR PRADESH paid the price
for being a very complex, sophisticated society when its diverse social
mileu became the test-site for the left wing ‘atom-bomb’
of caste politics which, having exploded here, carried its vapours to
other parts of the country. Similarly, because it was a cultural cradle
for Hinduism and a secular beacon through its ‘Ganga-Jamuni tehzib’,
the right wing selected it as the test tube for its own communal experiments.
Consequently, all that is left of up now is its direct and singular
identification with politics, political volatility and the complete
politicisation of every aspect of its life. Today, one will run out
of numbers before one can finish counting the names of up’s political
‘activists’, their vulgarity displayed on bill-boards and
posters in every corner of every city, kasba and village of the state.
In the last year, up has witnessed the murder of two mlas; sectarian
riots that claimed the lives of a dozen people; intense Naxal/Maoist
violence in at least three districts; spiralling crimes against women;
bomb explosions in Benaras; and a huge spurt in gun culture of the kind
previously associated with Bihar.
As I have said, my roots
lie in the land Mark Tully memorably described as ‘the heart of
India’: Purvanchal, literally meaning ‘the eastern edge’.
Of the 13 prime ministers of India, six belonged to and/or represented
eastern up. Culturally and historically too, Purvanchal is a national
repository — the Buddha preached his first sermon here, Tulsi
Das penned his version of the Ramayana on the banks of the Ganga in
Varanasi, Humayun lost his empire to Sher Shah Suri near Chandauli.
In modern times, Purvanchal produced not just a string of political
heavyweights but litterateurs and intellectuals such as Munshi Premchand,
Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Kaifi Azmi. Most of Purvanchalis a vast,
flat block with some of the richest soil in the country. The Mirzapur-Bhadohi
belt is the epicentre of India’s weaving and carpet manufacturing
industry. The power looms of Mau and Azamgarh produce some of the finest
cloth woven anywhere. Mughalserai has historically been and still is
a massive transport junction. The geographical location of Amethi and
Sultanpur make the area a potential hub for the energy sector. Allahabad
is one of the holiest spots on earth for a Hindu. The Benaras Hindu
University has an ancient tradition of learning. So much enrichment
has inevitably made Purvanchal a museum, for there is little of a viable
future reflected in its everyday life. Synonymous with lawlessness,
terrible violence, entrenched poverty and an apathetic and ineffective
administrative infrastructure, Purvanchal is now not just on the geographical
edge of up but on the furthest edges of an otherwise, largely progressive
India.
Yet, if you speak to some
of the administrative pawns (it is difficult to dignify them by terms
such as ‘officer’), they insist that up is one of the best
governed states in India! Question their assertion and before you can
say Uttar Pradesh they will tell you, “Because the Mau and Aligarh
riots were controlled within 24 hours.” And sadly it is this clique
of abbreviations — the dm’s, sdm’s, sho’s, co’s,
cdo’s, adm’s and other such alphabetical personae —
that is responsible for the running of our lives. If you ever have the
misfortune of watching the local cable networks in up’s cities,
you will notice that the majority of advertisements on these telecasts
are from private enterprises devoted to the mass production of ias and
pcs officers. Their syllabus: a perverse pastiche ‘taught’
by mediocre minds that never developed their own intellect. Horror being
bred for servitude, to serve illiterate masters who will perpetuate
and further this horror. Why, we have to ask ourselves, is there such
a rush for pcs vacancies and no corresponding desire or urge to join
the private sphere in Uttar Pradesh? Are we not also members of that
same national community which is one of the world’s fastest growing
economies?
Throughout its rural and
semi-urban landscape the mass production of poverty is underway. What
is being engineered is not just material poverty but a regression in
thought and a large-scale murder of vision. The horrors of Gujarat are
at least veiled behind an illusion of progress in that state; in up,
human tragedies are naked, in-your-face and self-evident. up and its
people have been cornered and comprehensively defeated by the system
and the political culture which that system breeds. Each of India’s
other states demonstrates against the system (if it has to) as a singular,
regional unit. The Gujaratis speak of Gujrati gaurav and asmita; the
Marathis talk of Maratha shakti; Bengalis are staunchly and singularly
Bengali about their identity and Punjabis have their own means to address
appeals to the national consciousness. Has anyone ever heard a single
voice from up demanding rights for the state and its people on the basis
of our regional identity? No, because up has always been congruous and
seen to be indivisible from the Indian whole. up will continue to be
India and vice versa. That is why the problems of Uttar Pradesh are
naturally reflective of a national crisis. The truth is: the state of
up is, unfortunately for the moment, the condition of India.
The writer
is a member of the up Congress Committee and
has also authored Triumph of Will: Sonia Gandhi
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Jun
03 , 2006
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