Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Not so quick! You listen to me now — I know you voted to expel him.’

‘That is neither here nor there, Your Highness — I saved him from trouble once before, but—’

‘It is very much here and there. When my temple is completed — do you know that it will be my son, my son whom you are trying to martyr, who will lead the ceremonies — and that the wrath of Shiva—’

Pran put down the phone. He sat down at the dining table for a minute or two, staring at it and shaking his head.

‘Who was that?’ asked Savita when he returned to bed.

‘Oh, no one, some lunatic who wanted to get his son admitted to the university,’ said Pran.

The Congress Party was hard at work selecting its candidates. Throughout October and November the State Election Committees worked on, while festivals came and went, and disturbances erupted and subsided, and white-and-orange blossoms floated down from their twigs at dawn.

District by district they selected those they believed should be given Congress tickets for the Legislative Assemblies and for Parliament. In Purva Pradesh the well-packed committee guided by L.N. Agarwal did its best to keep the so-called seceders out of the running. They used every ploy imaginable — procedural, technical, and personal — in order to do so. With an average of six applicants for every ticket, there were grounds enough to tilt a decision towards candidates of one’s own political persuasion without creating obvious evidence of bias. The board worked hard, and to good effect. It sat for ten hours a day for weeks on end. It balanced caste and local standing, money power and years spent in British jails. Most of all it considered whose faction a particular applicant belonged to and the chances of his (or, rarely, her) electoral success. L.N. Agarwal was well satisfied with the list. So was S.S. Sharma, who was happy to see the popular Mahesh Kapoor back but keen that he should not rejoin with too long a tail of followers.

Finally, with an eye towards the approval of the Prime Minister and the committees in Delhi which would screen their list, the P.P. Election Committee made a token gesture towards the seceders by inviting three of their representatives (among them Mahesh Kapoor) to the last two days of their meetings. When the seceders saw the list prepared by the committee, they were appalled. It contained almost no one from their group. Even sitting MLAs had been dropped as candidates if they belonged to the minority faction. Mahesh Kapoor himself had been deprived of his urban constituency and told that he could not have Rudhia either — it had been promised to a Member of Parliament who was returning to the state to rejoin the Legislative Assembly. If Mahesh Kapoor had not left the Congress (so the committee said) they would not have given his seat away; but by the time he rejoined the party it was too late, and they could do nothing. But instead of forcing him to accept a seat of their choosing, they would be accommodating and allow him a choice of the few seats still unsettled.

The three representatives of the seceders walked out of the meeting in disgust on the morning of the second day. They said that these meetings at the tail-end of the selection process, held in a hostile and partisan spirit when the list was almost complete, had been a waste of time — a farce aimed at duping Delhi into believing that they had been consulted. The election board for its part issued its own statement to the press, stating that it had sought the seceders’ opinions earnestly and in a spirit of reconciliation. The board had ‘given them every opportunity for cooperation and advice’.

It was not merely the seceders who were disgruntled. For every man or woman selected, there were five others who had had to be rejected, and many of them made haste to smear the names of their rivals before the scrutiny committees that met in Delhi to examine the lists.

The seceders too took their case to Delhi; there the bitterness continued. Nehru, among others, was almost sickened by the naked desire for power, the willingness to injure, and the unconcern for the effect on the party itself, that characterized the process of scrutiny and appeal. The Congress offices in Delhi were besieged by all manner of applicants and supporters who thrust petitions into influential hands and flung mud promiscuously about them. Even old and trusted Congress workers, who had spent years in jail, and had sacrificed everything for their country, now grovelled before junior clerks in the election office in an attempt to get a seat.

Nehru was on the side of the seceders, but the entire business had grown to be so filthy with ego, greed and ambition that his fastidiousness prevented him from championing them properly, from entering the gutter to wrestle with the entrenched powers in the state machines. The seceders grew alarmed and optimistic by turns. Sometimes it appeared to them that Nehru, exhausted by his earlier battle, would be happy to leave politics altogether and retire into his roses and reading. At other times Nehru tilted furiously at the state lists. At one point it appeared that an alternative list presented by the seceders from Purva Pradesh would actually displace the official list submitted by the State Election Committee. But after a talk with S.S. Sharma, Nehru changed his mind once again. Sharma, that wise psychologist, had offered to accept the unwelcome list and even to campaign for it if that was what Nehru wanted, but he begged in that case to be relieved of the office of Chief Minister or any other office in Government. This, as Nehru realized, would never do. Without S.S. Sharma’s personal following and his adroitness at coalition-building and campaigning, the Congress Party in Purva Pradesh would be in deep trouble.

So factious and prolonged had been the selection of candidates at every stage that the Congress Party lists were finalized in Delhi just two days before the deadline for the filing of nominations in Purva Pradesh. Jeeps rushed around the countryside, telegraph wires hummed frantically, candidates rushed about in a panic from Delhi to Brahmpur or from Brahmpur to their allotted constituencies. Two of them even missed the deadline, one because his supporters were so keen to smother him with marigold garlands along his route to the station that he missed his train. The other entered the wrong government offices twice before he finally found the correct one and rushed inside, waving his nomination papers. It was two minutes past the deadline of three o’clock. He burst into tears.

But these were merely two constituencies. There were nearly four thousand in the country as a whole. The candidates for these had now been selected, the nominations had been filed, the party symbols chosen, the teeth bared. Already the Prime Minister had paid a few flying visits here and there to speak on behalf of the Congress Party; and soon electioneering in Purva Pradesh too would begin in earnest.

And then finally it would be the voters who mattered, the great washed and unwashed public, sceptical and gullible, endowed with universal adult suffrage, six times as numerous as those permitted to vote in 1946. It was in fact to be the largest election ever held anywhere on earth. It would involve a sixth of its people.

Mahesh Kapoor, having been denied Misri Mandi and Rudhia (West), had managed at least to be selected as the Congress candidate from Salimpur-cum-Baitar. He would never have imagined such an outcome a few months earlier. Now, because of Maan and L.N. Agarwal and the Nawab Sahib and Nehru and Bhaskar and S.S. Sharma and Jha and probably a hundred other known and unknown agents, he was about to fight for his political life and ideals from a constituency where he was a virtual stranger. To say that he was anxious was to put it mildly.