Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Someone tried to hustle her off the pavement. She moved to the middle of the wide, empty road, enjoying herself now as she pirouetted on the zebra crossing under the street lights. From the opposite side of the road someone began beating out a rhythm on a dafli. People joined the singing. She was right. Everybody knew the song:

That courtesan’s song, or at least that one line, could have been the anthem for almost everybody in Jantar Mantar that day. All those who were there were there because they believed that somebody cared, that somebody was listening. That somebody would grant them a hearing.

A fight broke out. Perhaps someone said something lewd. Perhaps Saddam Hussain hit him. It’s not clear exactly what happened.

The policemen on duty at the pavement snapped out of their sleep and swung their lathis at anybody who was within their reach. Police patrol jeeps ( With You, For You, Always ) arrived with flashing lights and the Delhi Police special— maader chod behen chod maa ki choot behen ka lauda. [1] Motherfucker sisterfucker your mother’s cunt your sister’s cock.

The TV cameras crowded in. The activist on her nineteenth fast saw her chance. She waded into the crowd and turned to the cameras with her trademark, clenched-fist call and, with unerring political acumen, she appropriated the lathi charge for her people.

It didn’t take the police long to restore order. Among those arrested and driven away in police vans were Mr. Aggarwal, Anjum, a quaking Ustad Hameed and the live art installation in his scatological suit. (The Lime Man had made himself scarce.) They were released the following morning with no charges.

By the time someone remembered how it had all begun, the baby was gone.

The last person to see the baby was Dr. Azad Bhartiya, who had just entered, according to his own calculations, the eleventh year, third month and seventeenth day of his hunger strike. Dr. Bhartiya was so thin as to be almost two-dimensional. His temples were hollow, his dark, sunbaked skin slunk over the bones of his face and the prominent cartilage of his long, reedy neck and collarbone. Searching, fevered eyes stared out at the world from deep shadow bowls. One of his arms, from shoulder to wrist, was encased in a filthy white plaster cast supported by a sling looped around his neck. The empty sleeve of his grimy striped shirt flapped at his side like the desolate flag of a defeated country. He sat behind an old cardboard sign covered with a dim, scratched, plastic sheet. It said:

My Full Name:

Dr. Azad Bhartiya. (Translation: The Free Indian)

My Home Address:

Dr. Azad Bhartiya

Near Lucky Sarai Railway Station

Lucky Sarai Basti

Kokar

Bihar

My Current Address:

Dr. Azad Bhartiya

Jantar Mantar

New Delhi

My Qualifications: MA Hindi, MA Urdu (First Class First), BA History, BEd, Basic Elementary Course in Punjabi, MA Punjabi ABF (Appeared But Failed), PhD (pending), Delhi University (Comparative Religions and Buddhist Studies), Lecturer, Inter College, Ghaziabad, Research Associate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Founder Member Vishwa Samajwadi Sthapana (World People’s Forum) and Indian Socialist Democratic Party (Against Price-rise).

I am fasting against the following issues: I am against the Capitalist Empire, plus against US Capitalism, Indian and American State Terrorism/ All Kinds of Nuclear Weapons and Crime, plus against the Bad Education System/ Corruption/ Violence/ Environmental Degradation and All Other Evils. Also I am against Unemployment. I am also fasting for the complete obliteration of the entire Bourgeois class. Each day I remember the poor of the world, Workers/ Peasants/ Tribals/ Dalits/ Abandoned Ladies and Gents/ including Children and Handicapped People.

The yellow plastic Jaycees Sari Palace shopping bag that sat next to him upright, like a small yellow person, contained papers, typed as well as handwritten, in English and Hindi. Several copies of a document — a newsletter or a transcript of some sort — were laid out on the pavement, weighed down by stones. Dr. Azad Bhartiya said it was available for sale at cost price for normal people and at a discount for students: “MY NEWS & VIEWS.” (UPDATE)

My original name as given to me by my parents is Inder Y. Kumar. Dr. Azad Bhartiya is the name I have given myself. It was registered in court on October 13th 1997 along with the English translation i.e.: Free/Liberated Indian. My affidavit is attached. It is not the original; it is a copy attested by a Patiala House magistrate.

If you accept this name for me, then you have the right to think that this is no place for an Azad Bhartiya to be found, here in this public prison on the public footpath — see, it even has bars. You may think a real Azad Bhartiya should be a modern person living in a modern house with a car and a computer, or maybe in that tall building there, that five-star hotel. That one is called Hotel Meridian. If you look up at the twelfth floor you will be able to see the AC room with attached breakfast and bathroom where the US President’s five dogs stayed when he came to India. Actually we are not supposed to call them dogs because they are officers of the American Army, of the rank of Corporal. Some people say those dogs can smell hidden bombs and that they know how to eat with knives and forks sitting at a table. They say the hotel manager has to salute them when they come out of the lift. I don’t know if this information is true or false, I have not been able to verify it. You might have heard that the dogs went to visit Gandhi’s memorial in Rajghat? That is confirmed, it was in the newspaper. But I don’t care. I don’t admire Gandhi. He was a reactionary. He should be happy about the dogs. They are better than all those World Killers who regularly place flowers at his memorial.

But why is this Dr. Azad Bhartiya here on the footpath while the American dogs are in the Five Star hotel? This must be the question uppermost on your mind.

The answer for that is that I am here because I’m a revolutionary. I have been on hunger strike for more than eleven years. This is my twelfth year running. How can a man survive for twelve years on hunger strike? The answer is that I have developed a scientific technique of fasting. I eat one meal (light, vegetarian) either every 48 or 58 hours. That is more than sufficient for me. You may wonder how an Azad Bhartiya with no job and no salary manages a meal every 48 or 58 hours. Let me tell you, here on the footpath, no day goes without somebody who has nothing offering to share it with me. If I wanted, just sitting here I could become a fat man like the Maharaja of Mysore. By God. That would be easy. But my weight is forty-two kilos. I eat only to live and I live only to struggle.

I try my best to tell the truth, so I should clarify that the Doctor part of my name is actually pending, like my PhD. I’m using that title a little bit in advance only in order to make people listen to me and believe what I say. If there were no urgency in our political situation, I would not do this because, technically speaking, it is dishonest. But sometimes, in politics, one has to cut poison with poison.

I have been sitting here in Jantar Mantar for eleven years. I only leave this place sometimes to attend seminars or meetings on subjects of my interest in Constitution Club or Gandhi Peace Foundation. Otherwise I am permanently here. All these people from every corner of India come here with their dreams and demands. There is nobody to listen. No one listens. The police beats them, the government ignores them. They cannot stay here these poor people, as they are mostly from villages and slums and they have to earn a living. They have to go back to their land, or to their landlords, to their moneylenders, to their cows and buffaloes who are more expensive than humans, or to their jhuggis. But I stay here on those people’s behalf. I fast for their progress, for the acceptance of all their demands, for the realization of their dreams and for the hope that some day they will have their own government.