India's Divisive, Dark Ages Politics

A small independent film was banned from Mumbai theatres this week. Unremarkable in another place and time, “Deshdrohi” just happened to hit on the incendiary issue of Mumbai society today: migrant workers. Thus the release of this tale of a north Indian laborer trying to make it in the big city has been delayed for 60 days. “Some of the scenes in the film are such that they can provoke a law-and-order situation,” a police spokesperson said.

A roiling wave of xenophobia first welled here in February, when rising right-wing politician Raj Thackeray bashed workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh – two poor, north Indian states – for taking all of Mumbai's taxi and auto-rickshaw driver jobs. Such work is for “sons of the soil,” he said, referring to speakers of Marathi, the local tongue. In the days that followed, local youths attacked immigrant drivers viciously, injuring dozens and killing two.

Thackeray continued his anti-outsider campaign and the wave swelled, cresting in late October when goons from his political party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS, attacked north Indians as they were taking exams for local positions with the Indian railways. The next day police arrested Thackeray for inciting violence, which touched off widespread riots and acts of arson by MNS members and brought Mumbai to a near standstill.

By the time he was released the following day on bail, Thackeray had struck fear into outsiders and captured the hearts of millions of dissatisfied locals. When a week later Bihari immigrant Rahul Raj was shot dead by police after commandeering a bus with a pistol and threatening to kill Thackeray, few were surprised.

Mumbai is India's commercial heart and most cosmopolitan city, and immigrants have long been integral to its evolution. Indo-Iranians first settled this stretch of Arabian Sea coast in the third century BC. Marathi speakers arrived en masse only after the collapse of the Maratha empire in the early 19^th century. In recent decades, as the Indian economy has boomed, skilled and unskilled workers have poured into the city to seek their fortune. Today, Marathi speakers represent less than 50 percent of Mumbai's 17 million population, and migrant workers – the majority from north Indian states – snatch up the low-paying jobs disdained by suddenly middle class Maharashtrians. They keep banks and businesses secure, build homes and office buildings, clean streets and pick up trash, drive locals from place and place and deliver Hinduism's most revered consumable – milk. Without them, the city would grind to halt.

To combat their progress, Raj has followed in the anti-outsider footsteps of his uncle Bal Thackeray, who founded the Shiv Sena in 1966 with the stated goal of securing jobs for Maharashtrians in the face of steady north Indian immigration. A local political icon partially retired at 82 years old, Bal claims to admire Adolf Hitler and hates without prejudice: outsiders, foreigners, Muslims, Christians, you name it. He is alleged to have coordinated the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims during Mumbai's religious riots in 1993 and, a few months ago, called for Hindu suicide bombers in response to a recent rash of bomb attacks in Indian cities.

Following that line, Raj's aggressively hate-filled, pro-Marathi stance has touched a vein of disenchantment and stirred an angry young army of committed indoctrinates. With each unchecked incident, each arrest, his power has grown. “Far too much latitude had been shown to Raj Thackeray and the MNS,” Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wrote in a recent letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. “We need to dispel any impression that people from one part of the country are not welcome in another, and cannot live in peace anywhere they choose.”

In its inherent ignorance and incitement to violence, Thackeray's stance brings to mind a darker age, in which fearful citizens of fortified city-states were protected from the mysterious, dangerous other by warlords who unleashed their minions on invaders. Such divisive, Dark Ages politics remain effective in India partially because they offer such great spectacle. Images of desperate, blood-splattered outsiders, flaming taxis and carnage in the streets, marauding gangs of angry young defenders and inflammatory remarks are played repeatedly on dozens of news channels and displayed prominently in local, regional and national newspapers. For ratcheting up the fear and subtly validating defense of the homeland in its sensationalist, non-stop coverage, the media must accept a portion of the blame for Thackeray's rise.

And he is not alone. Taking its lead from the Raj era British policy of divide and rule, politicians across India – in Andhra Pradesh and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam – have begun to exploit the uneducated lower classes, appealing to local fears and highlighting regional divides in order to blame the other for the sad state of the majority – when in fact it is the politicians themselves who have failed to serve the people.

The trend is particularly worrisome as India has long been both strung together and pushed apart by its astonishing diversity. One of the Upanishads, a series of ancient and influential Hindu scriptures, claimed “the whole world is my family,” more than 2500 years ago.“The roots of this culture go back to ancient times and it has developed through contact with many races and peoples,” south Indian intellectual Kota Shivarama Karanth wrote more recently. “Hence, among its many ingredients, it is impossible to say surely what is native and what is alien, what is borrowed out of love and what has been imposed by force.” And sixty years after his death Gandhi remains the world's defining symbol of non-violence.

Yet even he was assassinated, and the country he fathered was born in one of the last century's great orgies of violence, Partition, which has been followed by lesser if also horrifying spasms: against Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 and during a recent anti-Christian pogrom in Orissa, to name a few. Historically, such disputes have hinged on religion, but politicians have shown few qualms with shifting their focus to linguistic and regional divisions. Now the hate that dare speak its name threatens, according to Singh, to “undermine the unity and integrity of the country.”

A world away, another, almost equally diverse democracy recently made history by electing a dark-skinned minority to its highest office. Around the time Barack Obama began his campaign on a message of unity and change, an upstart Maharashtrian politician began his own political career with a call for inclusiveness.“I am seeking a chance, with a clean slate, to show you that change is possible,” Raj Thackeray told a Mumbai crowd in January 2007.

That Thackeray's embrace of Dark Ages divisiveness over the past year has garnered him much greater support is a sad commentary on the state of Indian politics. One that suggests it may have been unreasonable to hope that “Deshdrohi,” with its simple depiction of a migrant laborer tossed about and finally killed by an unwelcoming metropolis, might spark a little understanding.

-- an edited version ran in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 16.

In new India, age-old festival losing ground

Sonepur, India // Krishna Kanhai Singh sat on his front porch in this rural Bihar village last weekend watching the kick-off of the Sonepur Mela, an age-old religious festival and animal market that suddenly seemed unfamiliar.

“It’s sad, our festival is shrinking and changing,” said Mr Singh, 53, whose family has lived for a century in a rickety wooden house on the grounds of the event, long known as Asia’s largest cattle fair. “The government is not funding the animal market and the people don’t care.”

A series of conditions – new federal laws on animal trade, shifting societal and governmental interests, rampant lawlessness and the impact of a summer flood – have conspired to stifle the animal market and transform a revered, centuries-old festival into something more foreign to locals.

As lowing cows, bathing elephants and straggly bearded holy men have in recent years given way to sleek advertisements, tractor display rooms and high-end gadgets, Mr Singh’s stoop has served as a front-row seat to the changing face of India.

“All these changes are bad for the fair and bad for Biharis,” said Mr Singh, surrounded by a dozen children and grandchildren. “I don’t know if it will die, but I almost wish it would.”

For aeons, Hindu pilgrims have gravitated to Sonepur on the first full moon of November for a visit to the Vishnu temple and an auspicious bath at the confluence of the Gandak and the Ganges, Hinduism’s holiest river. Animal traders, meanwhile, trace the festival’s market back to the ancient king Chandragupta Maurya, who is said to have bought horses and elephants here.

Historically the festival stretched across more than a dozen villages, but by the mid-20th century it had settled into a grassy expanse at the meeting of the two rivers.

Earlier this week barkers droned into microphones as Hindi tunes blared across muddy, meandering bazaars lined with kitchenware, noodle stands, sweetmeats and a dizzying selection of knick-knacks, like a shrivelled plant, dubbed “the one that brings dead to life”, that blossomed in water.

A family of gypsy musicians roamed the animal stalls, plopping down in the dirt to play traditional songs amid gathering crowds. And a warren of caged parrots and parakeets, white rabbits, Dobermans, dachshunds and a lone Rhesus monkey watched the passing human circus.

Yet from the millions-strong crowds in the mid-1990s, the fair, which continues into December, will welcome an estimated 150,000 visitors this year, most of whom arrived early and departed quickly. Two decades ago a visitor could contemplate the spectacle of 50,000 cattle, up to a thousand elephants and the same number of horses. This year there were less than 1,000 cattle, about 500 ponies and horses and no more than 50 elephants.

“Success is not in how many cattle came, that’s just one component, there are other things like markets, jeeps, and the religious aspect,” said Ashok Kumar Chouhan, the festival organiser and local government commissioner. He said the festival budget, at six million rupees (Dh442,700), had risen in recent years.

Ramjanam Diwari, 58, an elephant seller, had a different perspective. He swept his arm across a stretch of recently built homes and explained how the festival had in the past 20 years lost three-fourths of its acreage.

“The government has failed us,” said Mr Diwari. “They used to fix up the roads, add street lights, construct temporary roadside inns, but now there’s nothing, maybe five per cent of the facilities that were here. They are gradually and systematically killing the mela.”

Death may not be imminent, but the contraction of the animal market is likely to continue. Fewer animals are arriving from other states because of increasing transport costs and a recent law banning transport of for-sale cattle across state lines. Corrupt officials ask for increasingly large bribes, according to traders, both during transport and to secure a stall at the fair. And as the state government pushes development and industrialisation, Bihar’s younger generation seems more interested in iPod’s and Levis than traditional pastoral pursuits.

Hetukar Jha, a retired Patna University sociology professor who has studied regional animal husbandry, pointed out a few more reasons.

“Because of increased lawlessness in rural areas, people find it less safe to move around with lots of money or with valuable goods, like livestock,” he said. “Horses are not used for transport anymore, nor elephants or camels. And because so many people are moving to urban areas, they don’t have room to keep these big animals.”

The Indian government banned the sale of elephants in 2003 because of a rise in unauthorised sales that led to mistreatment and illegal ivory procurement.

But a loophole was quickly found: sellers now hand over the elephant as a “gift” and receive a large “donation” in return. Thus B B Singh, a wealthy landowner, donated nearly 2.5m rupees in return for the gift of two elephants.

“We have had an elephant in our family for 150 years,” said Mr Singh, as his mahout, chief negotiator, assistant and bodyguard looked on. “Other people have jeeps and SUV’s, I have an elephant; in Bihar it’s still a status symbol.”

It might not be for long. According to the fair organiser, the shift away from animals is by design.

“Last year I had to learn a few things,” said Mr Chouhan, the organising committee chairman for the past two years. “Now, instead of putting the focus on cattle we are trying to convert the mela, to rebrand it as a rural auto-expo and create a modern, industrialised fair.”

The latest edition presented more than a whiff of modernity, with ads for mobile phones and powdered cappuccino. Locals peered into shops hawking major appliances and large vehicles like John Deere tractors and Tata conversion vans but few stepped inside.

“I’m not sure how effective government implemented change can be,” said Mr Jha, the sociologist. “It was always the people’s mela, and that’s the way it will stay.”

For many people the outlook was grim. With declining attendance, merchant revenues have drooped. One samosa seller tried to charge two Dutch tourists 10,000 rupees (Dh 739) for four of the snacks, which typically cost three rupees each.

The cow dealer Mundrika Prasad Yadav, a 72-year-old from the state capital Patna, had been coming to the fair for 30 years and said the steep decline began around 2000. “My business is 10 per cent of what it was a decade ago,” he said.

Mr Diwari, the veteran elephant seller, was keeping close watch on his prized animals, which were co-operatively owned by members of his village. “Whatever I get in donations from these two will be distributed to all the villagers,” said Mr Diwari, from Taribara village in Uttar Pradesh. “But there’s not much interest this year.”

Jimhi Lal Rai, a 48-year-old cattle trader from nearby Hajipur, sold 20 cows last year, but this year had sold only two.

“Right now I’ve lost about 70,000 rupees on this festival,” he said. “If I don’t sell the rest of my cows I will have to start working as a labourer.”

Mr. Jha, however, sounded a hopeful note.

“Melas will change with the times, the items on offer will shift. But because the religious aspect will always be there, the festival will never die.”

-- published in The National, www.thenational.ae, on Nov 20.