Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

As he ticked off his points on his fingers, he winched up his voice in tandem: ‘No peasant family will be allowed to possess land more than three times the size of an economic holding. No one who does not personally participate in cultivation will be allowed to possess land. The land will belong to the tiller. No one — not a Nawab, not a Maharaja, not a waqf or a temple trust — will be compensated for more than a hundred acres of appropriated land. The Right to Property in the Constitution will have to go: it is a barrier to just distribution of wealth. To the workers we promise Social Security which will include protection against disability, sickness, unemployment, and old age. To women we guarantee equal pay for equal work, effective universal education, and a civil code that will grant them equal rights.’

‘Do you want to take our women out of purdah?’ demanded an indignant voice.

‘Let me finish; don’t shoot your cannon before it’s loaded. Listen to what I have to say, then I will happily answer any and all of your questions. To the minorities, let me say: we guarantee full protection, I repeat, full protection for your language, your script and your culture. And we must break our last ties with the British. We cannot remain in the anglophile Nehru’s beloved colonialist and imperialist Commonwealth, in the name of whose head, King George, he himself was so often arrested, and whose boots he now desires to lick. Let us finish off with the old ways once and for all. Let us burn to ash once and for all the party of greed and favouritism, the Congress, that has brought the country to the edge of disaster. Take your ghee and sandalwood, my friends, if you can still afford it, or just bring yourselves and your families, and come to the cremation ground on the 30th of January, the day of the poll in this constituency, and let the corpse of the demon party be cremated there once and for all. Jai Hind.’

‘Jai Hind!’ roared the crowd.

‘Baitar ka MLA kaisa ho?’ cried someone from the podium.

‘Ramlal Sinha jaisa ho!’ shouted the crowd.

This antiphonal chant went on for a couple of minutes while the candidate folded his hands respectfully and bowed to the audience.

Maan looked at Waris, but Waris was laughing, and did not appear in the least worried.

‘The town is one thing,’ said Waris. ‘It’s in the villages that we will knock them out. Tomorrow our work begins. I will make sure you get a good dinner.’

He slapped Maan on the back.

Before going to bed, Maan looked at the picture that Firoz kept on his table: the picture of the Nawab Sahib, his wife, and their three children, with Firoz in particular looking very intently at the camera with his head tilted. The owl called out, reminding Maan of the speech he had just heard. He realized with a mild sense of shock that he had forgotten to bring any whisky with him. But nevertheless, in a few minutes, he was fast asleep.

The next day was long and dusty and exhausting. They travelled by jeep along pitted and petering tracks to an endless succession of villages, where Waris introduced them to an endless number of headmen, Congress Party village-level workers, heads of caste ‘biradaris’ or communities, imams, pandits, and local bigwigs. Mahesh Kapoor’s style of speech, in contrast to the political oiliness he detested, was clipped, abrupt, even somewhat arrogant, but quite straightforward; it was not taken amiss by most of those who met him. He gave short talks on various issues, and answered the questions of the villagers who had gathered to hear him. He asked very simply for their vote. Maan, Waris, and he drank innumerable cups of tea and sherbet. Sometimes the women came out, sometimes they stayed in and peeped out from behind the door. But wherever they went, the party was a superb spectacle for the village children. They tailed them in every village, and were even given rides on the jeep to the outskirts of the village when it departed for the next one.

Men of the kurmi caste in particular were very worried about the fact that women would inherit property under Nehru’s threatened Hindu Code Bill. These careful agriculturalists did not want their lands to be divided into smaller, entirely uneconomic, holdings. Mahesh Kapoor admitted that he was in favour of the bill, but explained, as well as he could, why he thought it necessary.

Many of the Muslims were worried about the status of their local schools, their language, their religious freedom; they asked about the recent troubles in Brahmpur and, further afield, in Ayodhya. Waris reassured them that in Mahesh Kapoor they had a friend who could both read and write Urdu, who was a personal friend of the Nawab Sahib, and whose son — and here he pointed to Maan with great affection and pride — had actually saved the life of the younger Nawabzada in a religious riot at Moharram.

Some tenant farmers asked about the abolition of zamindari, but very tentatively, since Waris, the Nawab Sahib’s man, was present. This caused a great deal of awkwardness all around, but Mahesh Kapoor grasped the nettle and explained people’s rights under the new act. ‘But this should not be seen as an excuse not to pay rent now,’ he said. ‘Four separate cases — from Uttar Pradesh, Purva Pradesh, Madhya Bharat and Bihar — are at present before the Supreme Court, and it will decide quite soon whether the new zamindari laws are valid and can be put into effect. Meanwhile, no one is to be evicted forcibly from his land. And there are strict penalties for tampering with land records in order to benefit anyone — landlord or tenant. The Congress government has plans to move the village patwaris around every three years, so that they cannot form deep and profitable roots in one place. Every patwari must know that he will be most severely punished if he allows himself to be bribed into wrongdoing.’

To the totally landless labourers, most of whom were so cowed that they hardly dared to be present, let alone speak, Mahesh Kapoor promised the distribution of surplus unused land where it was possible. But to these most unfortunate people he knew that he could be of little direct assistance — for his Zamindari Abolition Act did not even touch them.

In some places the people were so poor and underfed and ill that they looked like savages in rags. Their huts were in disrepair, their livestock half-dead. In others they were better off and could even afford to hire a schoolteacher and construct a room or two for a small private school.

In a couple of places Mahesh Kapoor was surprised to be asked if it was true that S.S. Sharma was going to be called to Delhi and that he himself was going to be elected the next Chief Minister of Purva Pradesh. He denied the first rumour, and said that even if it were true, the second would not necessarily follow. They could rest assured that he would almost certainly be a Minister, but he was not asking them to vote him in because of that. He wanted them to vote for him simply as their MLA. In this he was entirely sincere, and it went down very well.

By and large, even those villagers who stood to benefit from the abolition of landlordism maintained an attitude of respect for the Nawab Sahib and his wishes. ‘Remember,’ said Waris, wherever they went, ‘the Nawab Sahib is asking for your vote not in my name but in the Minister Sahib’s. So put your ballot paper in the box marked with the two bullocks, not in the one marked with a bicycle. And remember to put it inside the box, through the hole in the top. Don’t just put it on the top of the box, or the next person who enters the booth will be able to put your ballot paper into any box he chooses. Understand?’

The Congress volunteers and village-level workers, who were very pleased and honoured to see Mahesh Kapoor, and who garlanded him repeatedly, told him which villages they were going to canvass support in and where and when he should try to appear, either with or — and they implied that this was preferable — without Waris. They, being unfettered by a retainer of the Nawab Sahib, were able to play the powerful anti-zamindari card in a much more fiery manner than the author of the Zamindari Abolition Act himself. They walked about in groups of four or five from village to village, with nothing more than a stick, a water bottle, and a handful of dried cereal, gathering potential voters together, singing party, patriotic, or even devotional songs, and dinning into any ears that were willing to listen the great achievements of the Congress Party since its inception. They spent the night in the villages, so that no money was spent out of Mahesh Kapoor’s accountable funds. The one thing that disappointed them was that his jeep had not come laden with Congress posters and flags, and they made Mahesh Kapoor promise to provide these in large numbers. They also filled him in on events and issues that were important to particular villages, specific caste structures in various areas, and — as important as anything else — local jokes and references that would go down well.