A Suitable Boy(610)
When Maan and his father arrived at Baitar Fort, Waris reassured them: ‘Now, Minister Sahib, Maan Sahib, leave everything in the Baitar area to me. I’ll arrange everything – transport, meetings, drums, singers, everything. Just tell the Congress people to send us lots of those Nehru posters, and also a lot of Congress flags. We’ll see that they are put up everywhere. And we won’t let anyone go to sleep for a month,’ he continued happily. ‘They won’t even be able to hear the azaan for the slogans. Yes. And I’ve made sure that the water for your bath is hot. Tomorrow morning I’ve arranged for a tour of some of the villages, and in the evening we return to the town for a meeting. And if Maan Sahib wants to hunt – but I fear there will be no time for that. Votes before nilgai. But first I have to make sure that a good many of our supporters attend the Socialist Party meeting this evening to heckle them properly. Those haramzadas don’t even think our Nawab Sahib should get compensation for the land that is going to be snatched from him – just imagine! What an injustice it is already. And now they want to add insult to injury –’ Waris suddenly stopped, the realization striking him that he was addressing the very author of the black act. ‘What I mean is –’ He finished with a grin, and shook his head vigorously, as if shaking the very thought out of his brain. They were, of course, allies now.
‘Now I must see to things,’ he said, and disappeared for a while.
Maan had a slow and relaxed bath, and came down to find his father waiting for him impatiently. They began to discuss the candidates, the support they could expect from people of different areas or religions or castes, their strategy with regard to women and other particular groups, election expenses and how to cover them, and the faint possibility that Nehru might be induced to give a speech in the constituency during his brief tour of Purva Pradesh in mid-January. What gave Maan a real sense of warmth was the fact that his father was far less dismissive of him than usual. Unlike Maan, he had not lived in this constituency, but Maan had expected that he might simply extrapolate his experiences of the Rudhia farm to this northern subdivision. But Mahesh Kapoor, though he did not believe in caste, and thought little of religion, was more than alive to their electoral implications, and listened with care to Maan’s description of the demographic contours of this tricky terrain.
Among the Independent candidates – quite apart from Waris, who was a supporter – there was no one who presented much of a challenge to Mahesh Kapoor. And among the party candidates, because he happened to be the candidate of the Congress Party – anxious though he was about fighting from an unfamiliar constituency – he started out with an immense advantage. The Congress was the party of Independence and the party of Nehru, and it was far better funded, far more widely organized, and far more quickly recognized than the others. Its very flag – saffron, white and green, with a spinning wheel in the middle – resembled the national flag. The Congress Party had a worker or two in almost every village – workers who had been somewhat active in social service during the last few years, and would be very active indeed in electioneering in the coming couple of months.
The other five parties presented a mixed bag.
The Jan Sangh promised to ‘advocate the spread and extension of the highest traditions of Bharatiya Sanskriti’: a thinly veiled term for Hindu, rather than Indian, culture. It was more than willing to go to war with Pakistan over the issue of Kashmir. It demanded compensation from Pakistan for the property of Hindus who had been forced to migrate to India. And it stood for a United India which included the territory of Pakistan; presumably, it meant a forcibly re-united one.
The Ram Rajya Parishad appeared more peaceable if further removed from reality. It declared that its object was to bring about a state of affairs in the country similar to that of the idyllic age of Rama. Every citizen would be expected to be ‘righteous and religious-minded’; artificial foodstuffs such as vanaspati ghee – a kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil – would be banned, as would obscene and vulgar films and the slaughter of cows. The ancient Hindu system of medicine would be ‘recognized officially as the national system’. And the Hindu Code Bill would never be passed.
The three parties to the left of the Congress who were fighting from this constituency were the KMPP, the party that Mahesh Kapoor had joined and then left (and whose symbol was a hut); the Socialist Party (whose symbol was a banyan tree); and the Communist Party (whose symbol was a sickle and a few ears of corn). The Scheduled Castes Federation, the party of Dr Ambedkar (who had recently resigned from Nehru’s Cabinet on the grounds of irreconcilable differences and the collapse of the Hindu Code Bill), had forged an electoral alliance with the socialists; they had no candidate of their own for this seat. They concentrated mainly on double-member constituencies where at least one member from the scheduled castes was bound by law to be elected to the legislature.