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 co-operation 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.
Part Sixteen
16.1
KABIR’S face lit up when he saw Malati enter the Blue Danube. He had drunk two cups of coffee already and had ordered a third. Outside the frosted glass the streetlights of Nabiganj glowed brightly but indistinctly, and the shadowy forms of pedestrians wandered past.