THE NEWSPAPERS were being gloomy about Mrs. Gandhi’s chances, and the success of Udaipur’s tour disheartened many people on Mr. Bishweshwar’s side. They had no comparable glamour figure. The visit of Mr. Chavan, one of Mrs. Gandhi’s most able ministers, had been a failure; Mrs. Gandhi herself wasn’t coming. All that Mr. Bishweshwar’s people could look forward to was the visit, on Tuesday, of Mr. Bishweshwar’s political patron, the Rajasthan Chief Minister. He was hardly glamorous. He was very much the local party boss, and he was coming less to make speeches than to settle certain internal party disputes which had begun to threaten Mr. Bishweshwar’s campaign.
The Ajmer Congress was famous for its faction fights. In 1954, when Mrs. Bishweshwar’s father was politically active, the administration had virtually stalled; and Mr. Nehru had written a long and impatient “note” about the local party: “… giving us continuous headaches … The government cannot be considered to be an efficient government … The Community Project Scheme in Ajmer was one of the least successful. In fact, for a long time practically nothing was done there.” That was the tradition. And after all its further years in power the local party was full of people who thought they had been badly treated and were taking advantage of the election to sulk. Mr. Bishweshwar, aiming at independence, and trying to free himself of old intrigues by “creating” new men of his own, had made matters worse. One aggrieved man said, “Mr. Bishweshwar is in the position of a man who has stopped believing in the loyalty of his honest wife and has begun to believe the protestations of loose girls.”
So now I heard that Mrs. Gandhi hadn’t come to Ajmer because she disapproved of Mr. Bishweshwar, that she remembered how he had hesitated at the time of the party split, and that she was now letting him sweat it out. Other people, with memories of Mrs. Bishweshwar’s father, said that Mr. Bishweshwar’s heart wasn’t in the election and that he had only been pushed into it by his wife. Everybody agreed that Mr. Mukut’s workers were more selfless and less mercenary and less given to sabotage. There was a lot of talk of sabotage. One man high in the party told me that of all Mr. Bishweshwar’s workers, paid and unpaid, 30 per cent were saboteurs.
And it was only then that I heard about the Rawats. The Rawats were originally a caste of animal-skinners. They had been advancing for some time into agriculture, the army and the police. In Jodhpur the Maharaja had decreed twenty-five years before that they were to be considered a Rajput caste. But in Ajmer the Rawats were still low, almost untouchable. They should therefore have been solidly behind the Indira Congress and Mr. Bishweshwar. But there had been a crisis. Some weeks before a young Rawat wife in the Nasirabad area had been enticed away by a Rawat Christian convert. The community had been doubly dishonoured, by the adultery (in India an offence punishable with rigorous imprisonment), and by the fact that the enticer was a Christian. There had been complaints to the police, but nothing had been done; and some Rawats felt that Mr. Bishweshwar and some of his Christian supporters had connived at the inactivity of the police. A leaflet had been distributed in Rawat areas:
RAWATS, BROTHERS! THE INDIRA CONGRESS CANDIDATE
BISHWESHWAR NATH BHARGAVA TRIFLES WITH THE HONOUR OF
OUR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS. BEWARE OF HIM!
There were fifty thousand Rawat voters. Kishangarh, Udaipur, Rajputs, Rawats, and sabotage: Mr. Bishweshwar seemed to be in trouble all round that Monday. And this, very roughly, was the assessment of the Ajmer situation that appeared in the Times of India. A day or two later a large “human-interest” photograph of Mr. Mukut—a blind candidate—made the front page of the New Delhi Hindustan Times.
• • •
IT WAS FROM MR. KUDAL that I heard about the Rawats. Mr. Kudal was a Congressman of fifty and he had a modest ambition: he wanted to be Mr. Bishweshwar’s Election Agent. The appointment was to be made on Tuesday, when the Chief Minister came; but when I saw Mr. Kudal, late on Monday evening, he had heard nothing at all and was in a state of some nerves. He said, “I very much fear that the intelligentsia is being cleverly weeded out all over India from political life.”
Mr. Kudal was a lawyer. He lived in a lavatorial lane off Highway 8, in a large three-storeyed house built in the Rajasthani style with galleries around a central court-yard, and with an iron grille at the top to keep out intruders. Narrow enclosed concrete steps took you up past his law offices and his servants’ rooms to the flat roof and his pink-and-red sitting-room. Upholstered chairs were pushed against three walls and there was a glass case with figures made from shells, plastic models of Hindu deities, and other knick-knacks. It was a little like a waiting-room, with all the chairs, but Mr. Kudal had many visitors. He kept in touch with the constituency; he had prepared himself for the job of Election Agent.
He was worried about the Rawats. He was less worried by Udaipur’s tour. “These public meetings are just tamashas, excitements. Nothing.” Elections were won with votes, and vote-getting required work. “By work I mean the direct approach to the voters. Taking them out of the houses and sending them to the booths. I will tell you as a zealous worker that all will depend on the work we put in in the last two or three days.” And in that lay Mr. Kudal’s promise and his threat.
He said, “I could swing the election in certain districts without leaving this room. It would take me a week. If I went out on the road it would take me two or three days.”
I asked him how.
“I am a man of the masses.” It was something he had worked at. He was a brahmin and a townsman and he said he had wasted a lot of time on bridge and chess before he had thought of service to the poor. He had gone out then “among the lowest sections of the community—the Harijans and the serpent-charmers.” Not many people had done that; and it was well known in Ajmer that Mr. Kudal had a lot of influence in certain low quarters. “That is why people get worried when they hear that Kudal has joined the fray.”
So on this last evening Mr. Kudal rehearsed his case, and his slightly desperate attitude was that, ready as he was to serve, he was also perfectly prepared to let Mr. Bishweshwar stew in his own juice, that if the Chief Minister and Mr. Bishweshwar wanted his services, if they cared at all about things like the snake-charmer vote, they would have to seek him out the next day. Mr. Kudal himself intended to do absolutely nothing the next day. It was the festival of Shivratri; he was a devotee of Shiva; for him it was to be a day of temple, prayer and meditation.
EARLY in the morning, too early, Mr. Bishweshwar came to the Circuit House to look for the Chief Minister. He looked even more harassed than I remembered. He was with a gang of rustics in dusty dhotis, brown waistcoats and Gandhi-caps. Pointlessly, like a swarm of midges, they bustled back and forth about the spacious lounge, following Mr. Bishweshwar’s nervous lead. When Mr. Bishweshwar stood still, they all settled down on the carpet, the way the Circuit House servants did when they thought no one was about. After some fearful jabbering, four or five people speaking at once, the same things said again and again, they decided that the Chief Minister wasn’t in the Circuit House and was probably somewhere else. And suddenly they all swarmed out again.
But the Chief Minister did come. And he must have had a hard day. He was still at the Circuit House at 7:30 that evening, when he should have been down in the city addressing a meeting at Kesarganj. It was just as well. Shivratri, the weekly service at the Hanuman temple, the Flower Show and the illuminations in Shah Jehan’s lakeside gardens had drawn the holiday crowds; and there were only three or four hundred people—government officers, Muslims, people proving their loyalty—at Kesarganj. For an hour we were deafened by music, songs and election jingles. The crowd grew. And when at last the Chief Minister arrived, with all his party notables, I was glad to see that Mr. Kudal had been called out of his retreat and was with them.
After a day spent on personality squabbles the Chief Minister now dealt only in principles. Garibi Hatao: nothing about Rajputs and Rawats; not a word against Mr. Mukut; hardly anything about Mr. Bishweshwar. Mr. Bishweshwar d
idn’t speak. Like the figure of the wife in some Egyptian sculpture, small at the feet of her lord, like Mr. Mukut at the feet of Udaipur, Mr. Bishweshwar sat still and modest at the feet of the Chief Minister. He leaned back on his arms; his paunch showed to advantage; and I thought I had never seen him so relaxed.
“HE HAS EVERY reason to look relaxed,” Mr. Kudal said, as we drove to Nasirabad with some of his workers the following afternoon. “Yesterday at 9:30 a.m., after he saw the Chief Minister he came and surrendered before me. He and his wife and his sister, his wife with tears in her eyes. I told him, ‘But you, Bishweshwar, must know that I was always helping you, because I believe in the principles of Mrs. Gandhi, and not because of any affection I bear to you.’” So, indirectly, Mr. Kudal announced that he was the Election Agent. Then he added, “Now is the time for onslaught.”
But first we stopped at the new Shiva temple, and Mr. Kudal, grateful devotee of Shiva, paid his respects to the lingam, which was set in the ground in the centre of a concrete lotus with a serrated rim. The yellow clothes of the images were damp with a sweet substance and black with sated, drugged flies.
“Here at Nasirabad,” Mr. Kudal said, when we were on the road again, “I will introduce you to Mr. Mukut’s and Mr. Bishweshwar’s staunchest supporters. They are both my closest friends and they will both offer you a cup of tea. Sometimes I contest these elections like sports.”
“Like a hobby,” a worker in the back of the jeep said.
And at Nasirabad the news was as bad as Mr. Kudal could have wished. Mr. Jain, the plump little jeweller (“High Class Military Novelties and Gold Ornaments”) who was also the Treasurer of the Ajmer Rural District Congress Committee, seated us against bolsters on his porch, in the cosy little space—at once his office and his day-bed—between the showcase and the front wall, gave us tea and cachoree, and told us that the way things were going Mr. Bishweshwar would be lucky to get 35 per cent of the town vote and 50 per cent of the village vote. “They are neglecting the old workers. The new workers they’ve brought in drink and go to hotels and abuse the opposition and they think they’re winning votes.”
The lawyer who was Mr. Mukut’s Nasirabad man—his office was just across the road—gave the same figures. “Oh yes,” the lawyer said in his booming voice. “Things are going right for Mr. Mukut. Because of somebody. You can say it is because of me. And the Jan Sangh. And Mr. Mukut—he’s a great asset. And the poor personality of the opponent. All these things have combined.”
We left Nasirabad and drove off into the desert.
“Depressed?” Mr. Kudal said. “I’m a warrior who knows no defeat.”
A worker in the jeep said, “Mr. Kudal can turn the tables.”
“I’m a man of the masses,” Mr. Kudal said. “I will take you now to a village where very few people go. The Harijans there have built a Shiva temple and dedicated it to me. When I went to work among them they were an alcoholic community. I made them take the pledge. It wasn’t easy. It took months.”
Sunset in the desert: neem trees and Australian dogwood black against the ochre sky. And then, on an eminence, a walled village, a high gateway, a dusty road, a temple, and a crowd around the jeep shouting, “Indira Gandhi ki jai! Long live Indira Gandhi!” It was as Mr. Kudal had said: he was known here. Babies were shown to him, children reintroduced; boys read out the inscription on the temple gateway to show how well they could read now. And Mr. Kudal, tall, bald, one of his legs shorter than the other, walked among the Harijans with his awkward gait, blinking fast behind his glasses. Without any Gandhian trappings, he was a dedicated man; and it was moving.
We went on in the dark to a village where Mr. Kudal said he wanted to do “some CID work.” I recognized the village as Saradhna. I had been there with Mr. Bishweshwar and I remembered that he had been promised “unanimous” support. But Mr. Kudal doubted whether Mr. Bishweshwar would get 40 per cent of the vote. Saradhna was a village of Jats; a Jat political party had recently emerged, hostile to Mrs. Gandhi; and the previous evening Mr. Mukut and some of the leaders of the Jat party had held a meeting at Saradhna.
“CID, CID,” Mr. Kudal said to his workers when we stopped. They went to the tea-stalls and we sat silent in the jeep. Our presence couldn’t have been all that secret, though. Cups of tea were brought out to us. A villager came and whispered that only 75 per cent of the village was for Mr. Bishweshwar. “He is only giving me butter,” Mr. Kudal said in Hindi. But another villager came and whispered that Mr. Bishweshwar couldn’t expect more than 90 per cent; and the workers, coming back from the tea-stalls, said 80 per cent.
So it seemed that the caste-appeal hadn’t worked at Saradhna. And I began to wonder whether Mrs. Gandhi hadn’t simplified Mr. Kudal’s labours; whether she hadn’t lifted this mid-term election high above the local politics Mr. Kudal understood and enjoyed; whether in Ajmer the choice wasn’t between Mrs. Gandhi and the Jan Sangh in some areas, between Mrs. Gandhi and Udaipur in other areas, and between Mrs. Gandhi and poor old Mr. Mukut everywhere else.
No drama on the road, then, for Mr. Kudal. But when we got back to Ajmer we found that someone had been distributing leaflets accusing Mr. Kudal of sabotage.
MR. KUDAL had said that Friday was going to be a hard day. But by the time all our workers had come and we had ordered food from the bazaar it was half past eleven; and when we got to our first village it was time to eat. We sat in the rough little council-hall in the middle of a million furious flies. The workers ate off newspaper, Mr. Kudal and myself off dry peepul-leaves; and the kulaks, the local vote-catchers, who had been waiting for us, waited on us. Their manner was penitential, and Mr. Kudal hinted that he had come to rebuke them. They received their rebukes in private, after we had lunched.
The lunch had been heavy; the new famine road—part of the network built during the famine—was smooth. Mr. Kudal fell asleep. We passed a village. Mr. Kudal woke up and said he was sorry he had missed it, but he would send some of his workers there by bus that evening. We came to another village. A water-channel, freshly dug in the sand, barred our path; and Mr. Kudal decided to leave that village as well to his night workers.
“Well,” he said later, “you’re seeing the Nasirabad district. You’ve heard the assessments of both sides. So when the results come out you will know it is entirely the result of this”—he waved at the road and the boundless desert—“this movement. The result of this onslaught.”
At the next village—more like a little town: a low-caste wedding procession in the dusty main street, a brass band in spectacularly tattered uniforms—we had cardamom tea in a cloth-seller’s shop and Mr. Kudal talked to the Muslim village headman. Nothing more was needed, Mr. Kudal said; by evening everyone would know that Kudal was out campaigning for Indira and Mr. Bishweshwar. “They know that after the election they will still have to come to me.” The statement worried him, and some time later he said, “I have helped these people. I have handled their cases for them without fee.”
At the village after that we didn’t leave the jeep. People saw us arrive, but the only man who came to us was a quarry-owner in a jacket and pullover. He said to Mr. Kudal in English, “The people need guidance.”
“He is not for us,” Mr. Kudal said afterwards. “He employs a lot of labour and he is going to spoil thirty per cent of the vote. But I don’t argue with people three days before an election.”
PUBLIC MEETINGS were to end in Ajmer at five on Saturday afternoon. But canvassing and private meetings could continue; and I heard from Mr. Mukut’s son, who was also Mr. Mukut’s election agent, that Mr. Mukut and Mr. Bishweshwar were to debate that evening before the Rotary Club of Beawar. A Rotary Club seemed an unlikely thing for a place like Beawar to have. But Beawar also had a Communist group. And it also, as I now learned, had one of India’s most famous astrologers, Professor B. C. Mehta. Professor Mehta was a “commercial” astrologer: he specialized in market fluctuations. His cable address was MEHTA.
I heard all this from Pro
fessor Mehta’s thirty-year-old lawyer son while we were waiting that afternoon for Mr. Mukut at his campaign headquarters. Professor Mehta, being only a commercial astrologer, hadn’t issued any statement about the Ajmer election. But young Mr. Mehta was so confident of Mr. Mukut’s victory and was so obviously welcome at campaign headquarters—“His father’s an astrologer,” Mr. Mukut’s son said, introducing him—I felt there could have been no astrological discouragement. And Mr. Mukut, when he appeared in spotless white dhoti and koortah, with a black woollen waistcoat, was like a man touched with glory. The gentleness which he imposed on all who approached him now also held a little awe.
It was a long drive to Beawar. We got there at nightfall and found that nobody knew anything about a Rotary Club debate. Somebody said that Mr. Bishweshwar had got cold feet; but sabotage was sabotage, and all we could do was sit in the front room of the local hotel and drink coffee. I asked about Professor Mehta. The young hotel-owner said the Professor was not only his adviser but also a personal friend. He went out to telephone and came back with the news that the Professor was coming over as soon as he had finished his supper.
“From the beginning I’ve had faith in astrology,” Mr. Mukut said. “Every year I have a reading on my birthday. On the 30th of January I entered my sixty-ninth year and I had a reading then.”
He wouldn’t say what he had been promised. And when I asked whether Professor Mehta was his astrologer he gave his crooked long-lipped smile and didn’t reply.
He became reflective. “An election has three stages. There’s the excitement of the campaign. Then there’s the tension. Then the reaction, whatever the result.”
“What are you prepared for?”
He opened his sightless eyes. “Anything.”
But then he was restless; he wanted to leave; and he was led out to his car.