‘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.
17.7
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 Pradesh 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 everythree 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 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.